Xing

by Ron Silliman

Reprint of the 1996 Meow press edition. Standing at the crossroads of New York School immediacy, high linguistic theory, radical Left politics, and Objectivist prosody, Ron Silliman's Xing wants to make a deal with your poetic soul. One of the founding "Language Poets," Ron Silliman has written and edited 24 books to date, most of them available through SPD, including the anthology In The American Tree . His popular blog has recently brought him to the attention of a new generation of poets. "Brown shoes with gray slacks. Sun bloats, setting into the toxic sky"— from Xing .

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

About the author

Ron Silliman has written and edited 30 books to date, most recently articipating in the multi-volume collaborative autobiography, The Grand Piano. Between 1979 & 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. The University of Alabama Press will publish the entire work as a single volume in 2008. Silliman has now begun writing a new poem entitled Universe.

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 lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silliman's Xing, modest in length only, is good poetry. I'd have to reach for Basho to find something comparable in the way it balances the work of writing and that difficulty and at the same time a seemingly effortless play. I'd read Xing when it was first published by Meow Press, and this spring via the more recent Factory School edition enroute from Manhattan to Main Street, Queens, or was it the other way around? An absorbing & lovely experience of being in the world.

[Richard Meese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense. I find something new every time I read it.