Customer Reviews

In the American Tree (Pound Scholarship Series)

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This is a masterful work. Silliman singularly possesed the ability to a major literary and critical contributor to the movement and to also recognize that it needed an anthology while it was happening. Ron Silliman has never lacked for 20/20 foresight. His own work testifies to such. He is bold... (but never just for its sake....his book The New Sentence truly is that) looking at this volume now - it is clear that only Silliman could have done it. In the American Tree frames a movement and a moment and an extension of American thought, poetics, poetry,and politics that many may never fully appreciate or have direct contact with...well society tends to want to protect itself from what those who huddle the masses perceive as dangerous, tonic, explosive. The history of Academia is this very process. I remember being in California when this book came out - and wondering if there was going to be controversy over the geographic East Coast and West Coast division that Silliman used to arrange the book. I also remember thinking that such things were probably only important to the writers within the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E "school" of writers. I think in my copy I crossed out the words West and East in the book and wrote above them "Us" and "Them". And now there is only a Tree. More unwieldy and fun than any damn wheelbarrow. So with twenty years of roots securing it, I spent a day in the American Tree and began writing. The Tree changes, it is organic, all writing is. Its leaves more supple and limbs more splayed making songs for Orpheus. I wrote in my original review that occasionally a great pitcher will deliver a ball that moves at speeds and in directions that are immeasurable and tilt on the edges of words taunting the critical concepts of explanation. It is a ball that we see leave the pitchers hand and arrives without a thumbprint. Such is Ron Silliman's delivery. Now and then. More amazing now that he saw the need to be in the tree while he was also of the tree and thankfully left it for us to climb even now. If you have never been treed - by all means do. If you have, then by all means come out again and leave the lupins to someone else.

I think of it as one of the best masterpieces