Tangibility of the Word

The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the "life work" in progress and of which The Alphabet is a part, that promises when complete to be gargantuan in size and scope. And to a significant extent Silliman does want readers to be intimidated before a work like The Alphabet, uncertain enough about how to proceed to abandon preconceptions about both books and poetry and willing to learn how to read differently.

I think readers who are so willing will ultimately find their fortitude and patience is rewarded, but one of the first lessons to be learned is that The Alphabet can't really be read discreetly as a book, a process we usually consider as self-enclosed and sequential, a task to be completed before moving on to the next book. Indeed, I found it better to read the poems separately, over a few days or even a few weeks (some of the poems are a few pages long, but most are 20 pages long or more, and one, "VOG" is over 100), and then perhaps putting the book aside for a while. Such a reading strategy acknowledges the occasional and highly fragmented nature of these poems, and even more time could be allowed to some of the poems--"Skies," for example, in which each section of the poem corresponds to the calendar day on which it was written over the course of a year. To really experience the full effect of the poem, we might duplicate the process, reading a section a day for a year.

Certainly the poet doesn't quite expect we will approach such a poem in this way, but The Alphabet in its very excess persistently challenges us to ask just why a poem shouldn't be read like that, or be written like this, or why a book can't be held together, to the extent that it is, by the fact that each of its poems corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, presented in, well, alphabetical order. Those already long familiar with Silliman's work, both through his poetry and his critical writing, will of course not find it surprising that this book poses these questions, although now that the individual poems included have finally been gathered to form the book, the latter does provide a new setting for and potentially a new experience of the poems. The challenge will be most acute for readers encountering Silliman's poetry for the first time or who have had only a casual acquaintance with it, but arguably The Alphabet could provide the most enlightening reading experience for precisely such readers.

Silliman's most significant contribution to the aesthetics of poetry, however, is to be found not at the global level of the book, but at the most fundamental level of the poem's existence as "verse." While the equation of "poetry" and "verse" was questioned prior to Silliman in the development of "prose poetry," Silliman has further undermined the association of "verse," whether free or metrical, with poetry as such in his focus on the "sentence" as the fundamental unit of poetry. While on the one hand Silliman substitute sentences for "lines" in his poems, the "sentence" is reconceived so that it no longer fulfills the function it is assigned in ordinary discourse. This allows it to remain an aesthetically plausible basis for "poetry," but it also forces the reader to read sentences in a new way, the failure to do so causing probably the most serious impediment to engaging with Silliman's work, finding it instead "difficult" or unsatisfying.

Silliman wants us to consider his sentences not as instances of "hypotaxis," the discursive process in which elements of the sentence, and sentences themselves, maintain a subordinate relationship as parts of a developing thought, the connected parts of a larger rhetorical whole, but as self-sufficient "parataxis," by which the sentence stands autonomously as a unit of sense, connected to previous and following sentences only by the thinnest, implicit "and." It is essentially Silliman's poetry, or perhaps most importantly, his critical writing about it and the work of other like-minded poets, that gave rise to the concept of "Language Poetry" to designate the practice among American poets of using parataxis to minimize connections among images and statements and calling attention to those images and statements, the sentences, as language, free of the obligation to cohere into transparent "meaning."

Silliman's initial formulation of the hypotaxis/parataxis distinction as applied to poetry was essentially part of a Marxist critique, by which poetry demonstrates that hypotaxis is a kind of capitalist conspiracy. "What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development," he writes in "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," is "an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of 'realism,' the illusion of reality in capitalist thought." Since it seems to me that when language passes into any stage of development--through the development of "society" and "culture," however rudimentary--the "tangibility of the word" will be sacrificed for expository and descriptive power, to emphasize the culpability of capitalism is only to affirm you especially don't like its kind of anaesthesia.The argument that poetry is fundamentally an effort to counter the anesthesia of language in general is certainly credible enough, but Silliman's version simply subsumes poetry to a larger ideological project, however much it purports to "unmask" ideology.

Ultimately, however, much of what Silliman has to say in essays like "The New Sentence" can stand, lightened of its Marxist baggage, as a perfectly coherent defense of a "poetics" anchored in parataxis and organized around sentences and paragraphs replacing, for the most part, lines and stanzas. As I wrote in a prior post, "The New Sentence" in particular is "first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated." Although Silliman makes exaggerated claims for both the revolutionary potential of the new sentence and the unprecedented nature of its appeal to language over sense, the kind of poetry Silliman's explication of it makes possible seems entirely plausible.

The Alphabet certainly confirms the plausibility of such a poetry, but in doing so it also illustrates that an artistic practice inspired by a non-artistic agenda can hold up as an artistic practice, especially over such an enormous canvas, only if it is aesthetically justified quite apart from whatever other motives brought it into being. The Alphabet does withstand aesthetic judgment, in my opinion--indeed, any reader could read any or all of this book with no knowledge of Silliman's ideological commitments and be able to appreciate his poems (or not) solely for their contribution to the "art" of poetry. It is admittedly not art of the musical, imagistic, or strongly figurative variety associated with what Silliman labels the "school of quietude" in poetry, but whatever long-term value The Alphabet will prove to have can only come not just from its status as part of Silliman's challenge to school of quietude poetics but as a successful collection of poems manifesting an alternative poetics that is no less aesthetically compelling.

That the first poem in the book, "Albany," is quite brief, a single arranged paragraph of hypotactic sentences, gives an uninitiated reader the opportunity to get an immediate purchase on Silliman's aesthetic strategy, an opportunity Silliman enhanced by the previous publication of Under Albany, in which he gives an account of the circumstances behind (under) the composition of the poem, line by line. Through Under Albany the reader can get a sense of what the poet believed himself to be doing and of how the poem emerges from actual experience after all, however much it might seem at first to be just a series of disconnected declarations. While this may seem an overly onerous way to begin a book, such a reading strategy not only makes it more likely the reader will continue with the other poems but begins to indicate the way in which reading The Alphabet will not be like the experience of reading a conventional book.

For readers who still find the dissociated density of "Albany" intimidating, moving on more quickly to the second poem, "Blue," might be productive. Still a reasonably short poem, "Blue" is structured as a series of short paragraphs which manifest Silliman's "new sentence" poetics but perhaps in more approachable portions:

Rust designs that old truck door. The number of objects is limited. Some leaves on the fern are more yellow. Sooner or later you will have to get up to change the record. That buzz is the dryer.

If we turn to the brief notes for each of the poems that Silliman provides at the back of The Alphabet, we learn that "Blue" was "occasioned by a long walk through the Lower East Side." From this paragraph we get one sentence, the first, that must surely be a detail from this walk, but the other sentences seem to have little, or at least very obscure, relationship to this initial detail. At least one, the last, seems to be in deliberate contrast to the details of the walk, as if a moment from the poet's own more comfortable life intrudes on the immediate, tawdry scene. Otherwise, the sentences might seem randomly arranged into a "paragraph" the exists mainly to store these seemingly discrete sentences.

Such a paragraph can stand as a model of what Silliman has in mind in the use of parataxis. The construction of the paragraphs, as well as the unfolding of the paragraphs as a "poem," provoke us to meld these sentences into an ongoing discourse or chain of images, but the relationship among them is not as a progression but as a simple juxtaposition. Thus at first such a poem as "Blue" frustrates our desire to make it yield sense or meaning, yet the reader who again spends some time with it might find it actually yields more meaning when the possibilities of a paratactic juxtaposition gradually reveal themselves. That the sentences considered as a forward-directed chain do not willingly release their meaning does not preclude us from finding meanings by reading them in a different way.

TO BE CONTINUED

Comments

[Jacob Russell]

A lucid appreciation (in all the senses of that word) of Silliman's project--refreshingly outside the skirmish zone of the poetry wars. I hope you turn to poetry more often in the future.

[Dan Green]

Thank you, Jacob.