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Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps
Book seventeen in Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press series.
- GenresPoetry
12 pages, chapbook
First published September 1, 1978
5 people want to read
About the author
Ron Silliman
66 books169 followersRon 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 16, 2025
review of
Ron Silliman's SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025
I'm reading my Ron Silliman bks in chronological order, the early ones I read 45 yrs or so ago & now I'm rereading them for the sake of writing these reviews - w/ an eye to collecting them in one or more bks to be called Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic. Whether I'll live long enuf to do that is another story. I've already written at least 219 poetry reviews but there are ssooooooo many more I'd like to write, if I were to read & review all the poetry bks that I have an eye on in my personal library this whole project cd drag on for yrs.
SO, I've reviewed Crow (1971) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & MOHAWK (1973) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & now it's time for SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS (1978). By then, Language Poetry was getting somewhat well-known amongst people interested in new mvmts in poetry. Silliman was on the West Coast of the US & on the East Coast there was "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine. This chapbk was published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press, Hejinian was also a part of the West Coast Language Poetry scene & her chapbks were very nicely done w/ good quality paper & color printing, these were crafted, the inside text is in blue ink. This is from back in the day when the NEA actually supported work like this, as it did here. I.E.: the NEA supported it as long as it didn't deviate visually from their norms, what I call "Field Writing", wch is what much of what I wrote at the time was, wd've been rejected out-of-hand for not conforming to their "double-spaced" requirement. This chapbk is unpaginated so I've given the odd-numbered pages numbers for reference sake.
"High gray sky. A large wood table with only a green bottle of "white" Rhine wine atop it (empty). An open umbrella upside down in one corner of the room. Ritz crackers topped with cream cheese and, beside them, crayolas. Gray plastic bottle of lemon ammonia on its side on the green tile in back of the toilet. My red-and-black checked CPO jacket atop a guitar in my rocking chair. Butter on the knife. Dobermans and Danes." - p 7
SOO, it starts off descriptively, seemingly a description of the same place & time. What I imagine is Silliman carrying a notebk that he writes in whenever moved to do so, akin to carrying a sketchbk. However, unlike narrative description he doesn't try to contextualize the sentences, he doesn't say anything like: 'Here's the room where I'm living for awhile, I've taken a break from the city to concentrate on writing under a rural influence.' Instead, the sentences just accumulate & can be deduced from w/o guidance from the writer. The descriptions become more 'unglued' from a potentially obvious context.
"Chipped cup. The submarine on the horizon in the sunset. State of null karma. Undefinied descriptive predicate. Little lobes. Some handsome hands." - pp 7-8
Seemingly, the more he writes, the broader his scope of what interests him & the broader the environment.
"All toes of identical length. Odor of stale soap, bus depot john. Abductor muscles. The bitterness of women. The problem of truth in fiction. Abandoned railroad cars on a siding by a rock quarry. Advanced life support unit. Geometry of the personal. Midget in a large felt hat. Fork lift. Abandoned industrial trackside cafeteria amid dillweed stalks. My droor thing. Corridor of condos. Post-nasal drip. Hot hamster. Send in the notebook. A salt-water cave. Eroded ruins. The bend in the pelican's wing-spread. Algae in a tidepool. An old windowless house of concrete, its door rusted off, with nothing inside it but odor and an open safe." - p 9
Sometimes the details surprise me: "Hair in an Afro-blowout" (p 11), "A lad with an Afro blowout." (p 12)
All in all, I enjoy this writing technique. It wdn't work for me if each of Silliman's sentences weren't so evocative but the writing's very crisp & there seem to be 'no wasted words'.
Ron Silliman's SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025
I'm reading my Ron Silliman bks in chronological order, the early ones I read 45 yrs or so ago & now I'm rereading them for the sake of writing these reviews - w/ an eye to collecting them in one or more bks to be called Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic. Whether I'll live long enuf to do that is another story. I've already written at least 219 poetry reviews but there are ssooooooo many more I'd like to write, if I were to read & review all the poetry bks that I have an eye on in my personal library this whole project cd drag on for yrs.
SO, I've reviewed Crow (1971) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & MOHAWK (1973) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & now it's time for SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS (1978). By then, Language Poetry was getting somewhat well-known amongst people interested in new mvmts in poetry. Silliman was on the West Coast of the US & on the East Coast there was "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine. This chapbk was published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press, Hejinian was also a part of the West Coast Language Poetry scene & her chapbks were very nicely done w/ good quality paper & color printing, these were crafted, the inside text is in blue ink. This is from back in the day when the NEA actually supported work like this, as it did here. I.E.: the NEA supported it as long as it didn't deviate visually from their norms, what I call "Field Writing", wch is what much of what I wrote at the time was, wd've been rejected out-of-hand for not conforming to their "double-spaced" requirement. This chapbk is unpaginated so I've given the odd-numbered pages numbers for reference sake.
"High gray sky. A large wood table with only a green bottle of "white" Rhine wine atop it (empty). An open umbrella upside down in one corner of the room. Ritz crackers topped with cream cheese and, beside them, crayolas. Gray plastic bottle of lemon ammonia on its side on the green tile in back of the toilet. My red-and-black checked CPO jacket atop a guitar in my rocking chair. Butter on the knife. Dobermans and Danes." - p 7
SOO, it starts off descriptively, seemingly a description of the same place & time. What I imagine is Silliman carrying a notebk that he writes in whenever moved to do so, akin to carrying a sketchbk. However, unlike narrative description he doesn't try to contextualize the sentences, he doesn't say anything like: 'Here's the room where I'm living for awhile, I've taken a break from the city to concentrate on writing under a rural influence.' Instead, the sentences just accumulate & can be deduced from w/o guidance from the writer. The descriptions become more 'unglued' from a potentially obvious context.
"Chipped cup. The submarine on the horizon in the sunset. State of null karma. Undefinied descriptive predicate. Little lobes. Some handsome hands." - pp 7-8
Seemingly, the more he writes, the broader his scope of what interests him & the broader the environment.
"All toes of identical length. Odor of stale soap, bus depot john. Abductor muscles. The bitterness of women. The problem of truth in fiction. Abandoned railroad cars on a siding by a rock quarry. Advanced life support unit. Geometry of the personal. Midget in a large felt hat. Fork lift. Abandoned industrial trackside cafeteria amid dillweed stalks. My droor thing. Corridor of condos. Post-nasal drip. Hot hamster. Send in the notebook. A salt-water cave. Eroded ruins. The bend in the pelican's wing-spread. Algae in a tidepool. An old windowless house of concrete, its door rusted off, with nothing inside it but odor and an open safe." - p 9
Sometimes the details surprise me: "Hair in an Afro-blowout" (p 11), "A lad with an Afro blowout." (p 12)
All in all, I enjoy this writing technique. It wdn't work for me if each of Silliman's sentences weren't so evocative but the writing's very crisp & there seem to be 'no wasted words'.
Displaying 1 of 1 review