Ron Silliman

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Ron Silliman has written and edited 25 books to date, most recently Woundwood. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem entitled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. He is the editor of the anthology, In the American Tree and the author of the critical book, The New Sentence. Silliman was 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 lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. His weblog on poetics, Silliman’s Blog, has had over 170,000 visitors in its first two years.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710515
ISBN-10:  1844710513
ISBN-13:  9781844710515
Author:  Ron Silliman
Title:  Under Albany
Series:  Salt Modern Lives
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CVL
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-04
Extent:  116pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  174 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year 2004”. This memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman’s work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection.

Table of contents:
If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable, though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the corner store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord’s control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-celling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry’s father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can’t read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison, a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (76 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

The event was nothing like their report of it.

Working all day as a shipping clerk for PG&E in Emeryville, I was unable to get to the UC administrative building in which the students were holding their sit–in before the campus police locked the building at 5 p.m. For hours, I and several thousand other people milled around the building, singing songs from the civil rights movement along with the several hundred students indoors. People brought newly purchased plastic garbage cans filled with hot coffee, plus small buckets filled with birth control pills for the women now locked in. These were sent up ropes to the second floor balconies while film crews in the building’s lobby turned their kliegs on us. The entire plaza had the air of a festival about it, with the very serious undertext of the presence of the police.

I stayed until midnight, then headed home as I had another long day at work the following morning, so was not around when, at 4:00 a.m., Governor Pat Brown (at the urging of local officials who claimed that the offices were being trashed by demonstrators, which was not true) sent in the cops and over 450 students were arrested.

The next evening, Brown was quoted by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News as declaring that students had been misled by outside agitators. To illustrate the concept, the screen showed the images of us on the building’s steps outside, carefully raising buckets and cans up the ladders. I was on screen for all of five seconds.

The following morning, when I reported for work, I was told that my position as stock clerk was “no longer needed.”

Unpublished endorsement :  With startling frankness, Under Albany lifts each “new sentence” of Silliman’s Albany to show us what's underneath. The resulting paragraphs are glimpses not only into Silliman's history, but into that of our times. Each is a sensitive seismograph reconding shocks of social struggle.

Rae Armantrout

Unpublished endorsement :  Under Albany is the shadow movement of Ron Silliman’s epic of everyday life, The Alphabet. Silliman provides a set of extended, vividly etched, mostly autobiographical, meditations on the background for each of the original 100 sentences of his 1981 poem Albany. This constructivist memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman’s work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection.

Charles Bernstein

Review quote:  Ron Silliman's latest book, Under Albany (Salt Publishing, 2004), is a brilliant series of autobiographical, deep background vignettes that explicate – no, enrich each of the 100 sentences of his 1981 poem Albany. It is detailed, moving, exasperating, romantic, heartfelt and delicious. For anyone interested in recent literary history and leftist politics, this is a must read.

Tom Beckett
Unprotected Texts

Review quote:  Under Albany shows us that “Albany,” a representative of Silliman’s characteristically language-centered work, is not a product of random language, chance operation, or chaos, a charge often directed at writing like this. Rather, it is a profoundly complex exploration of the mind and emotion that is directly connected to the world and experience from which it emerges.

Mark Tursi
Rain Taxi