review of Ron Silliman's "The New Sentence"

review of

Ron Silliman's "The New Sentence"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2358. "review of Ron Silliman's "The New Sentence""

- complete version

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- written: November 1-6, 2025

- uploaded to my Critic website November 12, 2025

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticSentence.html

review of

Ron Silliman's "The New Sentence"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 1-6, 2025

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticSentence.html

the truncated review is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8050902124

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/404571.The_New_Sentence

I probably 1st heard of this bk when it came out. It was probably touted to me as a very important bk on Language Poetry theory. The edition I have is the 4th printing, that shows how in demand it's been. To me, that's amazing. I find Silliman's writing fun.. but esoteric in a 'demanding' way. I imagine his readers are mainly academics - but even that surprises me b/c my impressions of the intellectual standards of academia are low, even very low. Are there really enuf readers of Silliman's work out there to prompt a 4th printing?! Or are the bks just somehow 'required' to be in academic libraries, who buy them w/o having the readers for them?

ANYWAY, the 1st section is called "CONTEXTS":

"Because we think we can represent the world in language, we tend to imagine that the universe itself performs as one. Yet, if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to articulate a poetics, a discursive account of what poetry might be, we find instead only metaphors, translations, tropes. That these models have a use should not be doubted-the relationships they bring to light, even when only casting shadows, can help guide our way through this terrain."

[..]

"The disaster of America's war in Indochina made it painfully clear that poetry or any other serious pursuit which was not fundamentally critical bordered on suicidal behavior. What, in such circumstances, might then be the role for poetics?" - p 3

"Writing itself is a form of action." - p 4

That was written in August, 1985. What, indeed, is the political role of poetics & writing? I had a friend who was a well-known & widely published anarchist writer. He was shocked when I sd something to him to the effect of: "But you only write." I had another friend who was a university arts professor who published a boardgame w/ some political meaning. In conversation, she sd something to the effect that 'There are more ways of being a political activist than just protesting.'

Something I frequently refer to is a drawing that was published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a Language Poetry magazine in the late '70s & early '80s. An irate reader, disgusted by the claims of contributors that their writing was political, sent in a cartoon of a hung man w/ his body slit open & his blood used to write something on a wall (or, at least, that's the way I remember it). I recall a caption to the effect of: 'THIS is Political Writing'. I vaguely also recall being told that the writer was a speed freak. I'm glad that was included in the magazine but it wasn't included b/c the editors agreed w/ it, I think it was included to show how crazy such an opinion was. &, indeed, I have no intention of murdering anyone & writing w/ their blood - but, nonetheless, I see the commentator's point: rapid revolutionary political change comes w/ great violence - but that's part of the argument against such change - esp considering how much everything seems to revert to the same old same old power structures not too long thereafter.

SO, what "might then be the role for poetics?" Personally, I tend to think that poetics err on the side of uselessness as far as politics & social change goes. No doubt that's an opinion that will not appeal to poets. Still, that sd, language is a central player in many practical manners, its use in propaganda shows how necessary it is in mass manipulation - so why not use poetics to counter that manipulation? Propaganda places particular language in the minds (or what passes for 'minds') of the target demographic. This language bcomes the building blocks for inflexible beliefs that can be used as an ideology that can excuse robopathic behaviors. Poetics can be a tool for undermining the rigidity of those building blocks.. I'm not sure I consider it to be the best tool, but I'm at least potentially willing to credit it as being a player.

Alas, if reading & writing poetry develops a skill for language-perception that's too slippery for the iron embrace of propaganda to take hold on then what's required is participation in its use & such participation is something for a person inclined to it in the 1st place - the most likely victims of propaganda may not be so inclined. Deadlock.

The next section/chapter, "DISAPPEARANCE OF THE WORD, APPEARANCE OF THE WORLD" begins w/ a quote from Edward Sapir:

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.

-Sapir, 1929" - p 7

Agreed &, to me, it's by playing w/ that language one's life becomes more playful. The people who think they justifiably enunciate 'the rules of language', such as the writers of "The Chicago Manual of Style" are our jailers.

"the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism. Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the "mystical" and "mysterious character" Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject." - p 8

Like much of what Silliman writes analytically, I find this to be 'quite a claim' &, yet, at the same time, excellent. Sapir's epigraph probably contributes to that, I can't really comment on Marx b/c I've still read so little by him. The idea of "commodity fetishism" means less to me than it obviously does to Silliman. I find that statement that "Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the "mystical" and "mysterious character"" to be particularly challenging. Do words "find themselves" in any way? Doesn't that imply a self-consciousness on their part? Or shd I just write off that portion of the sentence as 'just an expression'? & aren't words attached to anything they refer to? If so, does that make them whatever they refer to? [This] One hearkens back to Magritte's famous painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" aka the 1929 painting entitled, in English translation, "The Treachery of Images".

"The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message like Alfred Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory", as well as Denis Diderot's This is not a story.

"On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in <i>Les Nouvelles littéraires</i> of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

At any rate, I'm not sure why Silliman's (& Marx's) logic leads to "independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject": even a (small) rock can be picked up & thrown. IMO, the more a "Subject" perceives, the more agency they have - & the more they play (commodity or no commodity) the more the language jail loses its inflexibility - regardless of whether its jailers are The New York Times or Fifth Estate.

"To make this effacement clear, first we need to note some key differences in the language use of groups which have as yet not been completely incorporated into the class system of the modern world. Note, for example, that the presence of "nonsense" syllables in tribal literature is unmistakable. The following is an English translation of a Fox tribe sweatbath poem:

"A gi ya ni a gi yan ni i"

[..]

"The fact that there have been as yet few attempts to incorporate such materials into "comparative literature" curricula by the educational systems of the industrial nations is not simply attributable to racism, though inevitably racism plays a role. Rather, it is that in the reality of capitalism, denying as it must any value in the purely gestural, that which serves solely to make the connection between the product and its maker, the absence of any external reference is construed as an absence of meaning." - p 9

Interesting, I sometimes think of 'nonsense', wch I like very much, as a 'cleanser', something that washes away the overly determined & helps the mind perceive more clearly. Similarly, I think of nature as something that biomorphically 'cleanses' the contricting effects of geometry. It seems probable to me that one of the 'reasons' why I like Silliman's poetry so much is that it performs a similar function, it interferes w/ the ossification caused by the unimaginative.

A, perhaps, not irrelevant aside here is that when I've tripped on LSD I've always had an experience that I've found to be indescribable w/ language after it's over - not b/c of fantastic visions but b/c of the state-of-mind. This indescribableness is profound, something to be respected. Perhaps nonsense is halfway between commodity fetishism & such indescribableness, a gateway to the latter.

"What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitlist stage of development 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. These developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality." - p 10

One thing that always seemed to me to be a weakness of Language Poets is how heavily they relied on referentiality to explain & justify their writing: one referential anti-referentiality essay after another.

"Under the sway of the commodity fetish, language itself appears to become transparent, a mere vessel for the transfer of ostensibly autonymous referents." - p 11

From the age that I became aware of them, I never had much interest in Marx.. or Freud. I read "The Communist Manifesto" 50+ yrs ago, I don't remember what my reaction to it was, I might've agreed w/ parts of it but found it to be at odds w/ my own anarchism. I imagine that if I were to read Marx more substantially I'd be able to identify w/ the above critique more. I don't really find Silliman's writing to escape the transparency. I like Language Poetry for its ways of bringing the reader's attn to the page, to the language, for encouraging a critical reading rather than just opening the mind to an unfiltered flow of propaganda. Silliman's sentence above, transparent tho it may be, is, to me, an important critique, a warning to be careful - you are what you read.

"Repression does not, fortunately, abolish the existence of the repressed element whcih continues as a contradiction, often invisible, in the social fact. As such, it continues to wage the class struggle of consciousness. The history of Angle-American literature under capitalism is the history of this struggle. It can be discussed at many levels; I will outline only a few." - p 12

Indeed. I think of the Many-Headed Hydra in the sense used by Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh in their bk "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic". Repression results in things disappearing somewhere & reappearing elsewhere. While this is hopeful, it doesn't make "the class struggle of consciousness" any less of a drag while one is fighting it.

"Another symptom of this gradual repression is the replacement, by 1750, of subjective styles of italicization and capitalization by "modern conventional" usage." - p 12

That's made far worse these days by algorithms. I've been writing my name "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" since 1979. Algorithms will inevitably 'correct' this to something like "Tentatively A. Convenience" skewing the whole meaning by turning it into a conventional name: 1st name, middle initial, last name - & that's only one glaring example. In general, the role of algorithms that perform such language-policing tasks is to discourage & prevent individuality & free-thinking.

"The dream narratives of surrealism, because they were narratives, could never hope to go beyond the fetish of plot, as hopelessly trapped within it as "socialist realism."" - p 15

Given that Silliman's a socialist I wonder why he puts "socialist realism" in quotation marks. When I refer to something that I'm questioning I usually use single quotation marks thusly: 'socialist realism' - by wch I mean that I'm calling into question something about that pair of words: perhaps I question whether it's really socialist or really realism or both. Is Silliman doing the same by using double quotation marks? - As if to say 'So-Called Socialist Realism'?

"Contemporary poets such as Clark Coolidge or Robert Grenier frontally attack referentiality, but only though negation by specific context. To the extent that negation is determined by the thing negated, they too operate within the larger fetish." - p 15

Given that Coolidge is one my favorite poets I find the above interesting. I've read little-to-none of Grenier so I've no comment on that. So far, I've given Silliman credit for not being poetically competitive but I have to wonder. It seems to me that Silliman mainly respects West Coast poets & looks for things to attack in East Coast ones. Furthermore, Coolidge's attack on referentiality seems more thorough but, perhaps, less theoretically backed than Silliman's. I imagine that Silliman knows what he's talking about when he claims that Coolidge's attack is "only though negation by specific context. To the extent that negation is determined by the thing negated, they too operate within the larger fetish" - but, really, that's opaque to me. It seems like theoretical double-speak. When is there ever a negation that doesn't have an interdependency w/ the thing negated? Why doesn't that apply to Silliman's anti-capitalism as much as to anything else?

"Perhaps only due to its historical standing as the first of the language arts, poetry has yielded less to (and resisted more) this process of capitalist transformation. It remains, for example, the only genre in which spelling may be unconventional without a specific narrative justfication." - p 17

WHEW! Ok, Silliman loves poetry - but I think his claim(s) for it are a bit far-flung. I think all sorts of things can & do happen in other forms of writing including unconventional spelling - alas, yes, the language police usually crack down on such things & try to make them unpublishable. Even in such academic liberal magazines as Fifth Estate there's not even much living up to claims endorsing 'free speech', everyone must conform - but being published in such straight-world publications isn't the only way to go. Thank the holy ceiling light it it were I wouldn't be as widely published as I am.

"the long four-and-one-half decade period (1911-1955) when the number of book titles published in the United States per year remained relatively static at under 12,000, in spite of the emergence of large corporate publishing firms, while membership in the Modern Language Association (MLA) rose from 1,047 to 8,453."

[..]

"Membership in the MLA (itself much more diversified) was to peak in 1971 at 31,356, while the number of book titles published per year now exceeds 40,000." - pp 26-27

One shd never trust statistics, they're easily made to serve special interests & ulterior motives. That sd, I love them anyway. Alas, the last time I asked statistics to marry me they looked at me funny. I wonder how many bks are published annually in this day & age of POD?

"Poulantzas, however, has a very restricted class model, considering mental work and service sector employment to be unproductive, and therefore excluded from the working class as such"

[..]

"Noting that more than 30% of economically active Americans had, by 1969, come into the "unproductive mental" labor sector, Wright notes that

"The contradictory locations around the boundary of the working class represent positions which do have a real interest in socialism, yet simultaneously gain certain real privileges directly from capitalist relations of production." - p 28

Who, exactly, is Working Class? I sometimes call myself a "Working Class Intellectual" but I'm not in "the "unproductive mental" labor sector" insofar as I've worked in manual labor jobs that've definitely been physically productive. I prefer to call myself "No-No Class", not a member of any class other than a class that rejects classist boundaries. I wonder about what defines working class. Classes are most easily defined in terms of their economic situation. I don't have a cut-off point but it's easy enuf to say that people in prominent power positions w/ access to billions of dollars are ruling class. But are working class people necessarily poor? Nope. A plumber might pull in $150 an hr & get pretty well-off w/ steady work, thusly becoming middle class. Is an unemployed person working class?

When I was doing some labor organizing I was asked by a union activist who was helping me if my group wd be open to managers. Given that I knew at least one who was interested in being part of it all I sd yes. That was a mistake. The person so admitted did nothing that helped the cause & much to inhibit it. But, then again, there were at least 2 people who weren't managers who solidly qualified who were the worst saboteurs of all. Were they working class or were they middle class people pretending to be interested in working class labor issues?

One friend of mine, the daughter of a Washington DC lawyer, told me that I'm not working class b/c "working class people don't collect VHS tapes". I thought that was incredibly stupid insofar as it expressed the opinion that working class people cdn't have intellectual interests but must, instead, just guzzle cheap beer & watch sports on TV - &, yet, I think there're people who identify as working class who probably think much the same way. Take those who think of Charles Bukowski as the ultimate working class poet, there's an embracing of degradation & alcoholic imbecility.

"A poetics whose ultimate motive is nothing more than the maintenance of its own social position within a status quo reaches such an audience only if it fosters no action whatsoever." - p 30

Righto, maintaining the status quo is the goal of all who wallow w/in it - but not those of us who find it intolerably rotten.

"the possibility that "present conditions" might include a society in which the proletariat, or at minimum its vanguard, has already assumed power." - p 39

& here we come to what I find so damned about capitalism, communism, & socialism - all of them are about assuming power. I don't want power over other people, I the ability (call it power if you like) to prevent other people from having power over me. In my more idealized conception of socialism I imagine socialists revolting against a vanguard seizing power in the name of the proletariat. But that's not the way it is. Socialism is built on a hypotheticallly beneficial relationship w/ 'the people' - but, IMO, the type of person who aspires to a place in the upper echelons of a power structure, a "vanguard", INEVITABLY use that power structure for the power itself.

I've told the following story before, maybe even in another review of a SIlliman bk, I don't remember. Nonetheless, it bears repeating. A socialist attempted to recruit me to be a part of a vanguard, apparently I'd accrued some 'leftist' reputation thanks to speeches I gave on May Day. The socialist spoke highly of Stalin. I told him that Stalin had betrayed the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War & that I have a low opinion of him for many reasons along those lines. I also explained that I'm an anarchist, that I don't want to be a leader, ie: in a vanguard, of anyone. One of the people at the meeting where I was approached saw me later at a demonstration at wch she sd disgustedly to me that "At least you're not a Fascist." She was already a marshall, wearing a uniform of sorts & bossing people around. I wonder if she realized that Mussolini, the archetypal Fascist, was a militant socialist, just like her, before he nationalized his socialism & turned it into Fascism.

"By 1840, only three years after its invention, "most of the innumerable painters of miniatures [i.e., portraits] had become professional photographers, at first only on the side, but soon, however, exclusively."" - p 40

I've obviously quoted the above, yet again, out of context but I did so b/c I find it an intrigueing little tidbit. Has or will such a transformation happen(ed) in my lifetime?

"Yet Atget was neither the first photographer to purge "man" from his images, nor the most extreme: William Henry Fox Talbot had been making "direct contact reproductions of prints, drawing, lace and leaf forms in the late 1850s." The photogram, which Talbot's "photogenic drawings" anticipate" - p 50

Another person whose work I now want to know more about. So, yeah, I went online, found a shitload of bks about him & showing his work, many of them extremely cheap, & ordered one. Is that Commodity Fetishism?

"Moholy-Nagy himself treated the photogram as if it were a direct descendent of constructivist painting, although Man Ray's practice is more clearly in the cubist tradition.

"This is the decisive moment for all abstract or formal modes of photography, including such recent extensions as structuralist cinema. Defining light, and not the camera, as the irreducible element, the photogram proposed a reversal in the usual relation of content to form in which the aura itself might be resurrected." - p 52

I have an ongoing interest in photograms, the portal index to my websites features one I made: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl . One of the things that's entertained me is the names that early practioners used: Man Ray: Rayogram; Christian Schad: Schadograph. What cd be made from William Henry Fox Talbot's name?

"The New Sentence" is divided into 4 sections, the 2nd of wch has a subsection called "ON THEORY, TO PRACTICE":

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. -Theodor Adorno"

[..]

"Robert Creeley states the case for this confinement:

"A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves its attention outside the poem." - p 58

"Not surprisingly for a society based on capitalism and its ideology of individualism, these perceptions often consist of unorganized intuitions."

[..]

"Reaction, in this sense, is always the inverse of action: it is the kind of intuition that recognizes the objective existence of a large mass of permanently unemployed black males in this society, without perceiving why or how such a fact has come to be, thus apt to blame individuals for a lifestyle they were born and literally tracked into. Organized intuition would transfer one's anger to the appropriate causes of this condition. One rises from the concrete person to the abstract politics of labor." - p 59

It seems to me that "inaction" is the inverse of "action". The use of the concept of "reaction" in this way is a politicized meaning. I've used it that way myself in the title of my bk "Reactionary Muddle America". Still, tho, I find it a bit inaccurate. Wdn't a reaction against poor labor conditions be a revolution? As for "capitalism and its ideology of individualism"?! I consider myself to be an individualist who practices mutual aid. I've never know capitalism to be particularly encouraging of or friendly to my individuality. Bosses want conformity, Socialists want conformity - any ideology based on a hierarchy is anti-individualist. This notion that capitalism somehow promotes individuality may be supported by capitalist propaganda but it's just that, propaganda, there's no truth to it whatsoever - it's like so-called 'Free Trade': "free" for who?

"THE NEW SENTENCE":

"The sole precedent I can find for the new sentence is Kora in Hell: Improvisations and that one is far-fetched." - p 63

I have yet to read William Carlos Williams but the frequent mentions of him in a bk by & about Mina Loy that I'm in the midst of reading have prompted me to think it's about time so I just ordered a copy. To my surprise, there aren't many available online, odd considering Williams's prominent positionas a poet.

"I am going to make an argument, that there is such a thing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in the prose of the Bay Area."

[..]

"There is, in the domain of linguistics, philosophy and literary criticism, no adequate consensus as to the definition of a sentence. Odd as that may seem, there are reasons for it.

"Milka Ivic, in Trends in Linguistics, noted that linguists, by the 1930's, had proposed and were using more than 160 different definitions of "the sentence."" - p 63

That's fascinating for me. I think, subconsciously at least, I've always taken it for granted that a sentence is defined as something like '2 or more words in a sequence that have a trajectory resulting in an ending or a completeness of thought'. Perhaps a further elaboration wd be that a sentence ends in either a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark - w/ that distinction being to distinguish it from a phrase, wch I don't think of as having a punctuation ending. Still, there're exceptions to the punctuation. In that sense it's like melody distinguished from musical phrase.

"John Ries' final effort: "A sentence is a grammatically constructed minimum speech-unit which expresses its content in respect to that content's relation to reality."" - p 68

That definition is too mired in some kind of normative ideology for me to be able to relate to it.

"Everyday discourse is purely ideological, but so too is all specialized discourse. The constraints posed on all modes of professional jargon and technical language, whether scientific, legal, medical or whatever, communicate class in addition to any other object of their discourse. There is no such thing as a non-ideological or value-free discourse." - p 74

It's not clear to me (probably b/c I didn't read closely enuf or don't remember mnths after reading this) whether Silliman is distinguishing his preferred poetry as non-discursive. I'm assuming he does. W/ that assumption of mine forming a questionable basis, I ask: Doesn't non-discursive poetry also "communicate class" insofar as it usually takes a special type of reader to understand the poetry as anything but gibberish? W/ that special type usually (but not always) involving education not uniformly affordable to all?

"the modes of integration which carry words into phrases and phrases into sentences are not fundamentally different from those by which an individual sentence integrates itself into a larger work. This not only gives us a good reason for demanding a theory of sentences, but also suggests that such a theory would lead us toward a new mode of analysis of literary products themselves." - p 75

I really don't see how that follows. I don't see why a theory of sentences is any more necessary now than ever. I CAN see how such a theory wd prompt new overall analysis. Still, what's this "demand" business? Who's it being demanded of? That seems like an overly dramatic & misleading word choice.

"So what is the new sentence? It has to do with prose poetry, but not necessarily prose poems, at least not in the restricted and narrow sense of that category." - p 87

It seems to me that he doesn't answer his question yet.

"However, there is another important element here as a result: the length of sentences and the use of the period are now wholly rhythmic. Grammar has become, to recall Barthes' words, prosody. As we shall see, this is an element whenever the new sentence is present." - p 88

"Let's list these qualities of the new sentence, then read a poem watching for their presence:

"1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;" - p 91

Silliman's doing a practically heroic job of trying to put his finger on something. Then again, most creative people, at least those that indentify w/ avant-garde trajectories, want to be able to claim their place in the warm weather w/ something new that they can take credit for. I'm all for that. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the newness is of paradigm shifting consequences. Pronouncing sentence length, e.g., to be a "unit of measure" doesn't necessarily amt to much. new alphabetical a if sentence parts speech order in of in What one wch ? were are arranged What if a 'new sentence' were one in wch parts of speech are arranged in alphabetical order? That wd give the mind a good fucking. new [adjective] alphabetical [adjective] a [article] if [conjunction] sentence [noun] parts [noun] speech [noun] order [noun] in [preposition] of [preposition] in [preposition] What [pronoun] one [pronoun] wch [pronoun] ? [punctuation] were [verb] are [verb] arranged [verb]

"The new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signified, and is the first method capable of incorporating all the levels of language, both below the horizon of the sentence and above" - p 93

I'm sure that Silliman is quite sincere here & that his conclusion is well-thought-thru. Nonetheless, it seems to me like a rather hyperbolic claim. If emphasis on the signifier is revolting against "the tyranny of the signified" does it matter wch signifier is used where & when? Norkin.

"Another author whose works anticipate this mode is Hannah Weiner, particularly in her diaristic prose pieces where the flow of sentences (their syntactic completion, let alone integration into larger units) is radically disrupted by "alien" discourses which she ascribes to "clairvoyance." While, in general, the new sentence has not been nearly as visible on the East Coast as it has on the west, something much like or tending towards it can be found in the writings of several poets, including Peter Seaton, Bruce Andrews, Diane Ward, Bernadette Mayer (especially in her early books), James Sherry, Lynn Dreyer, Alan Davies, Charles Bernstein and Clark Coolidge." - p 88

I wonder what those writers felt/thought about being potentially included in Silliman's "New Sentence" group. I had the pleasure of meeting Hannah Weiner & reading on the same bill w/ her at the EAR INN on January 9, 1982. My part of the reading is here: https://archive.org/details/ear-inn . I liked her & her work very much. Even though she was included among the Language Poets, I consider her to be someone distinct from everyone else, a true individual. Alan Davies is an old friend of mine, I think he moved on from Language Poetry by the time this bk was written. In general, I like the idea of the new sentence (or, for that matter, the new syllables) but I don't know how many of those listed above identfied w/ it - maybe James Sherry did, he published this bk.

"Here again, Jakobson is unmistakenly clear:

"Whereas all other elements have specific, positive content, direct meaning, phonemes by contrast have a solely differential value, thus a purely negative value. . . . Saussure understood the purely differential and hegative character of phonemes perfectly well, but instead of drawing out the implications of this for the analysis of the phoneme he overhastily generalized this chaacterization and sought to apply it to all linguistic entities. He went so far as to assert that there are in language only differences with no positive terms. . . ." - p 104

Oh, well, I finished reading this bk on August 16, 2026 - over 2&1/2 mnths ago. Given that I probably spent at least a mnth reading it & that my review notes were taken during that time I look at these notes & haven't much of a clue about what the broader context was. Then, when I'm writing the review, I'm in a hurry. Right now I have a pile of 10 bks to be reviewed after this one + other high priority projects & a life that's dwindling to a vanishing point. In other words, I'm obviously missing something in the above: Silliman probably specifies his use of "negative" & "positive" but, to me, saying that phonemes have a purely negative value is basically meaningless.

"If writing and speaking are overlapping, but not identical, subsets of a greater whole, where might the differences be that give rise, in writing, to prose, and hence to the prose poem?" - p 106

That's an interesting question but I don't see why "the differences" "give rise" "to prose" & "to the prose poem". It seems obvious to me that "the differences" between speech & writing are obviously physical, speech manifesting as sound, writing manifesting visually. Why wd "the differences" between sound & vision "give rise" "to prose". It seems to me that prose can be manifested in either way physically.

"MIGRATORY MEANING":

"The degree to which this coherence is a direct consequence of the Parsimony Principle acting within the mind of the reader and not the simple determinism of the text can be gauged by the fact that "Migratory Moon" is not the title of Ceravolo's poem, but the result of a typographic error. The word in Transmigration Solo is "Noon." A single letter transforms the work." - p 119

Amazing. But not surprising. The story goes that Beethoven's "Fuer Elise" was not the actual dedication. Supposedly Beethoven's handwriting was difficult for someone to read so "Fuer Therese" became "Fuer Elise". I found this so inspiring that I created a piece called "Fuer Her" ( https://archive.org/details/Piano_Illiterature_Vol_I_of_II ). Accepting human foibles is bad enuf (but somewhat desirable if one wants to get along w/ others) but accepting algorithm dictatorships is far worse (& considerably less desirable if one is trying to develop one's intelligence above the level of a machine).

"What can be drawn from this as a contribution towards an eventual shared vocabulary for poets and readers of the contemporary poem? First, that essential to such a lexicon would be a theory of the device. Such devices can best be determined and described by function, by the shifts which they create in the semantics of the poem, so as, in turn, to demonstrate the semantics of the poem, so as, in turn, to demonstrate the contribution of each part to the construction of the whole, whether that be the single envisionment of a vulgarly "realist" text or something more problematic and complex. Without a theory of the device, there can be no rhetoric or listing of those actually in use." - p 120

Why? It may seem, by this point, that I'm just being a Devil's Advocate but, vulgar really, I have a high regard for this bk & for Silliman's writing in general. However, this bk is too much like philosophy to me - w/ philosophy being a waste of time: it's like nailing yr foot to the floor so you can keep it still long enuf to eat yr toes. I don't really perceive "a theory of the device" as being necessary for much of anything. When I have the inspiration for writing something outside this discursive critical mode I usually have an idea in mind for a technique that will generate something that I've never encountered before, something ORIGINAL. I'm not really trying to fit what I'm writing into "an eventual shared vocabulary for poets and readers of the contemporary poem" - I'm more naturally creating something outside of that. That's, I'm sure, a big factor in why my work is so thoroughly disliked or ignored. Take, e.g., "Po, Li, Ou": https://archive.org/details/360c.-po-li-ou-purist . There shd be lines of people stretching for miles in front of every bkstore in the world, all hoping to buy "Wrjtjng spelled w/ a "q"" ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2024WrjtjngV1.html & http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2024WrjtjngV2.html ). People who haven't read this at least twice shd sign a form verifying that they're not intellectuals &, possibly, not even superhuman. In front of these bkstores there shd be confused 'pro-life' protestors. Anyway, the point is, you don't need a theory of the device to understand such work, you need a thoughtful mind - & that's not something you're likely to get studying theory even if you spend entirely too much money on a PHD.

Section III "Z-SITED PATH":

"As a process, influence is active and seldom neutral. The three ghosts that hover visibly over the texts of Richard Brautigan are Lew Welch, a suicide, Ernest Hemingway, a suicide, and Jack Spicer, who killed himself through alcohol abuse at the age of 41." - p 129

If you're considering suicide, I hope you don't do it. Suicides are usually sensitive people, yr death just increases the odds in favor of the brutes (by wch I don't mean non-human animals who're far more sensitive than humans seem to give them credit for). I've been suicidal for 58 yrs, I'm still holding out.

"There is of course a critical element of oppositionality in the work of William Carlos Williams, as indeed there is in Stein, Zukofsky, Olson or Creeley. In each instance it lies in the identification of method with content. Opposition to the horrors of daily life in the twentieth century, whether or not these are equated with any given social and economic system, is expressed through opposition to the normative or inherited practices of that literature which embodies the status quo. One need only read Spring & All, The Mayan Letters, or Proprioception to see that this writing presumes that perception is not possible within the confines of cultural norms. Poetry, according to Williams, is defined as "new form dealt with as a reality in itself," or, again, "the perfection of new forms as additions to nature." Even in the distorted version offered by Pound, it is evident that this "poetics of the new" represents a fundamentally utopian project." - p 132

Whew! Silliman really has high hopes for poetry, he's a believer. Personally, I see poetry as generally impotent, a waste of time for people wanting to revolutionize sociiety. It seems to me that people often mistake their intellectual pursuits as paradigm shifting when they're more ways of avoiding taking any risks that're likely to accomplish more. Such a hope for poetry strikes as similar to the hope that some, often drug-addicted, people of very little power in their lives have for ceremonial magik. Aleister Crowley's wealth was inherited, after he blew it all he was living as a heroin addict in the woods. Crowley was a poet too, in his opinion, a very great one.

By the by, I DID read Olson's The Mayan Letters & I DID review it. Here's a small excerpt from my review:

"Helping out an injured bird is the kind of thing that's going to make me like someone &, yes, Olson comes across as just my kind of fellow: questioning authority & getting his ass out there in the world to try to have his own perceptions of it instead of the prepackaged ones.

"I am the one who is arguing that the correct way to come to an estimate of that dense & total thing is not, again, to measure the walls of a huge city but to get down, before it is too late, on a flat thing called a map, as complete a survey as possible of all, all present ruins, small as most of them are.["]"

- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2060210446

That link's just to the truncated review. Goodreads eliminated the section where the full review appeared & I haven't gotten around to making a webpage for the full thing. The full review WILL make it into my "Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic" bks if I ever find time to put them out.

"In addition, tendencies not foreseen by the Allen book, such as the work of Antin, Rothenberg or Jackson Mac Low, complicate matters." - p 134

It's nice to see Mac Low mentioned. I made a movie this yr of me reading his entire "Asymmetries 1-260": on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/asymmetries-1-260 .

On William Carlos Williams: "This leads to a definition of the term "good." If the poems in the book constitute necessary corrections of or emendations to human conduct in their day, both as to thought and manner, then they are good. But if these changes originated in the poem, causing thereby a direct liberation of the intelligence, then the book becomes of importance to the highest degree." - p 138

That seems like more wishful thinking to me.

"The dead Ricky of "A" - 3 turns out to be the younger brother of Whittaker Chambers, Zukofsky's college friend and erstwhile Objectivist poet who later became the tope editor of Time and a key figure in the McCarthy era." - p 142

Cool, is that poetry gossip?

"SPICER'S LANGUAGE":

"Spicer's position here and in his final books seems virtually identical, even to the figure of the poet as medium, to that taken by Rimbaud in the letter to Georges Izambard of May 13th, 1871:

"I have realized that I am a poet. It's not my doing at all. It's wrong to say: I think. Better to say: I am thought. Pardon the pun.

"I is somebody else. So what if a piece of wood discovers it's a violin . . ." - p 164

What if a violin discovers it's a piece of wood? Rimbaud's a sore spot in the history of poetry, a cancre. He had his lover put in prison, he was a slaver & a gun runner. I'm glad he was before my time.

"SENTENCES":

"Simply piling cards into what seems to be the fewest intelligible groupings, I arrive at 16 types, which in turn cluster around two general concerns that parallel the distinction filmmaker Malcom LeGrice makes between compositional and investigatory modes of art." - p 169

Malco[l]m LeGrice! Author of "Abstract Film and Beyond" & one of the very few filmmakers associated w/ Materialist Film. I've read that bk & seen some of his super-8mm films. Silliman has made reference to Structuralist Films, a kissing cousin to Materialist Films. That's a nice surprise, there aren't that many people who know about such things (especially nowadays).

"The effect of these last lines, syllogistic flow, Bernstein in "Writing and Method," calls projection: that act of the reading mind which interprets new words, phrases and sentences as possessing the least disjunctive meaning. While the effect of this phenomenon is to minimize the recognition of gaps and changes in context, content or scale. Bernstein takes it in the opposite direction, making tangible to the reader the act of projection itself, an (unwilling) participation to locate meaning(s) which she knows no "literal" interpretation could support." - p 178

But does it work? Artists seem to frequently make claims about their work that aren't experienced by people outside of their coterie. People creating something invest that something w/ all sorts of ideas & intentions that aren't apparent to anyone but themselves.

"By now the close reader should be able to pursue the poem very nearly as straightforward argument, in spite of increases in ellipses and stoppage, and the disruptions of syllogistic flow through the insertion of a number of imagized sentences." - p 182

Is that right? Maybe it wd be in a technical manual but in poetry? I can imagine a group of "close reader"s from different educational backgrounds having a variety of interpretations for just about anything. The conclusion of this analysis of Charles Bernstein's "CONTROLLING INTERESTS" is:

"But, to the degree that an oppositional movement within bourgeois poetics reflects a similar fissure within the bourgeosie itself-an opposition whose goal is not domination of class, but an end to all relations of power predicated upon human difference, those "controlling interests"-this is a poetry which demands our attention. It exists not to be appreciated, but to be understood." - p 184

That's all well & good. I take it for granted that Bernstein's bk is excellent but I haven't read that one. Unfortunately, Poetry World is like Art World: You scratch my back I scratch yours. Try finding a bad review of someone's poetry bk written by another poet. If you find one it means that the poet being reviewed is either dead or so far away from having power that their feelings are 'unimportant'. Judging by Goodreads, I'm not even sure that the bks have been read by the 'reviewers'. At least Silliman has read the bks.

"HANNAH WEINER":

"These works represent a major departure from Clairvoyant Journal the long prose "diary' for which Hannah Weiner is best known. What comment there has been on her writing has focused largely on the claim to clairvoyance, specifically on the capacity to see words figured with the qualities of light or of such substances as pencils or dog fur. Such comment tends to obscure the essential fact that these works <i>are writing</i>, literary productions rigorously following all the demands posed by the questions of their composition to a unique and rich result." - p 185

Bravo! Weiner wasn't a one-trick-pony, her writing is varied & consistently of interest to me.

"All writing makes present to its readers the intense activities of the mind, although some genres, such as hournalism and "realist" fiction, tend to efface the traces which lead back to the author. In fact, it is precisely the existence of genre, purely a social convention, which carries any finished text away, however small a distance, from the presentness of activity, as such. We might say, therefore, that genre erases the assertion of an authorial subject." - p 186

In documentary moviemaking it's common for the documentary maker to ask questions of a person & to ask them to reply in such a way that enables the removal of the questioner. 'Tell me where you were born.' 'I was born in Oklahoma.' Then it seems like the interviewee is offering up such information spontaneously rather than being led into it. As w/ the removal "of an authorial subject" this helps create the illusion of objectivity & FACT. That's perfect for propaganda but not so good for accuracy.

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