The Alphabet (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) [Paperback]

Ron Silliman (Author), Rae Armantrout (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2008 | Series: Modern & Contemporary Poetics

The Alphabet is a remarkable and notorious literary achievement, decades in the making, one continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments first appeared in the 1970s. Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared--in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes--its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry.

 

Ron Silliman, a founder of the  language  poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in The Alphabet the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.

 

The Alphabet is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices--historical and private--that capture the dizzying evolution of America’s social, cultural, and literary consciousness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ron Silliman's ongoing long poem The Alphabet . . . mingles quotidian observation, linguistic-philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing."

—Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Ron Silliman is the author or editor of twenty-six books of poetry or criticism, among them The Age of Huts (compleat), Tjanting, ABC, Demo to Ink, Paradise, ®, What, Woundwood, and the memoir Under Albany. He edited the landmark poetry anthology In the American Tree, and he has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, and three arts commission grants from the state arts councils of California and Pennsylvania. His widely read Silliman’s Blog, a daily journal devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics, has become a major force in online literary criticism.

Product Details

• Paperback: 952 pages
• Publisher: University Alabama Press; 1 edition (September 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081735493X
• ISBN-13: 978-0817354930
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2010. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. Check out his weblog at http:\\ronsilliman.blogspot.com\

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The pleasures of language, October 4, 2009

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William Michaels (Hillsborough, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Alphabet (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) (Paperback)

Wow! Mr. Silliman seems to be in the company of Ashbery and Clark Coolidge when it comes to making higher sense out of apparent nonsense. And 900 pages' worth--God's plenty! I am also amazed as to who published this--a university better known for Bear Bryant.

Very highly recommended for anyone who doesn't feel that poetry (or in this case, prose poetry) has to "make sense."

1.0 out of 5 stars it's a book alright..., February 10, 2012

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Pietro "Pietro Da Cortona" (Pietro Da Cortona) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Alphabet (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) (Paperback)

I've actually read this book, strangely enough. I'm not sure if everyone commenting here has read through it all. Silliman it seems is just putting everything down and frankly wasting paper. In this book is his basic conceit: riding on a bus and taking notes in the form of fragmentted "new sentences" about what he sees. He is a poet influenced by 1980's high-theory to be sure, and perhaps some 1960's beat runoff. He isn't a very good poet, but he has served as a paternal center, in terms of poetic subculture and online-poetry-culture, due mostly to his blog [e-mail].

In this massive tome, there is little readerly pleasure to be had. Mostly, it is fragmentary "new sentences" often in the form of declarative. Silliman has theorized this "new sentence" quite extensively in the volume by the same name, which I think I may have reviewed. Being a member of "Language Poetry" Silliman has managed to publish this volume through the help of fellow language poet friends in academia, through the Alabama press series overseen by Charles Bernstein, among others.

I do challenge readers out there, who are interested in poetic technique, strong tropes, socially relevant themes, conceits, prosody, pathos, or any other effect-affect that good poetry elicits, to read through this book without the aura of an alleged counter-poetical mystique that Silliman assumes he possesses. What you will get is a bunch of sentences, informed by false linguistics and outmoded literary theories; as well as some not very interesting observations. The spectre of Zukofsky's "A" certainly looms large here, even Whitman because where Whitman embedded himself in the spirit of the democratic masses, Silliman tends to do the same only the spirit is lost in Capitalist decadence and all that remains is the trash of our own dead language and the failure to form into poetry itself is reified in his gigantic book (a gigantic failure, but not even an interesting postmodern "failure," usually just a regurgitation of the manifold impressions Silliman has on a bus... for a 1000 or so pages, pretending not be "the author")...

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars steve roggenbuck's interview, March 2, 2011

By 

richard chiem - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Alphabet (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) (Paperback)

Q4: Ron Silliman has written about you before. Can you talk about that experience? What poets / writers have inspired you?