The Age of Huts

New California Poetry

by Ron Silliman

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Genres: Poetry

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

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

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many people have many different opinions about Ron Silliman, but those opinions are usually about the man, or the ideas of the man. Let's talk about his poems! BY FAR his writing is more interesting than most poets of his generation, and especially his peers. The Age of Huts has lines which RING in the head long after having read them! Few poets get better with age, and fewer still reach greatness. With this book, and other recent books of poetry by Ron Silliman, he can say, or it can be said. His PASSION for poetry is very mcuh alive and well, and I wish he could show others his age how to GET BETTER and BETTER from poem to poem! Because nothing's sadder than liking a poet's earlier work best!

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If the distance becomes more, world
distance becomes real"

And the syntax multiplies and becomes more. About distances: the flex and stretch. Whose? I keep thinking. Phasing between word and world, text and metatext. I love that it ends on the fatiguing momentum of BART.

This book was good exercise, valuable tedium, a long residence and accumulations. I learned a lot.

It was helpful in thinking about closed systems.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 23-25, 2025

B/c of the word limit on Goodreads only the beginning of the review will appear there. The full review is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... .

I'm still on a roll of reading Ron Silliman bks. This'll be the 6th one I've reviewed in less than 6 wks. I actually look forward to reading each successive one (I'm reading them in chronological order) b/c I'm interested in what new strategies he'll develop. I imagine that there're other people out there, presumably poets, who've read & reviewed Silliman's work w/ a more insightful take than what I'm offering but those reviews don't appear to be on Goodreads so I might be the only person in this community who's tackling this work (can you hear it cry OOF?).

Of the ones I've read so far (Crow, MOHAWK, SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS, Ketjak, & BART) I've noted that Ketjak used only sentences ending in periods & that BART used only phrases punctuated by commas. This formal limitation has a profound effect on one's reading experience. It seemed almost 'inevitable' that the next step wd be to have sentences only ending in question marks. I was looking forward to that & here it is:

Unlike the previous 5 bks I read, wch are each organized under a single procedure, The Age of Huts is broken into 3 sections, each differently organized. The 1st of these is entitled "Sunset Debris". This is the one that has every sentence be a question. I found reading it absolutely amazing. I 'don't know what to make' of Silliman's titles: perhaps they have a meta-meaning that I'm not getting, perhaps Silliman likes to imply a referentiality that he then deliberately doesn't deliver on, perhaps they're a joke.

In my Silliman reviews, I've neglected to mention the publishers. This one's published by James Sherry's ROOF. Ketjak was published by Barrett Watten's THIS. Every press that publishes Silliman's work is excellent, they represent a 'cutting edge' of poetry. I wonder what, if anything, has superceded them? If you're interested, checking out Olchar E. Lindsann's monOcle-Lash Anti-Press ( https://youtu.be/j3rUJqr59_Y ) might be worth paying attn to. The Age of Huts is from 1986, 39 yrs ago, & it still seems fresh to me (that's why I slapped it). The cover was done by Lee Sherry, married to James at the time, & the production was by Susan Bee who I assume? deduce? to be Susan B. Laufer.

Some of Silliman's previous bks, BART, e.g., were written in notebooks, apparently based on obsevation. My 1st question to myself while reading "Sunset Debris" was 'Are the questions all overheard?':

"Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet? Is it perfect bound? Do you prefer ballpoints?" - p 11

That's how it begins. I've read that Silliman is a prison activist so the next sentence came as no surprise.

"Do you know that the true structure of a prison is built around an illegal commodities market?" - p 13

Perhaps what was most interesting for me about this succession of questions-only was my wondering Who wd ask this question? & under what circumstances?. Such questions cd be asked in every instance but some instances might be less easily answered than others. Take this:

"Do you opt for or against irrevocable acts?" - p 14

To me that's a strange question, hardly one likely to occur in a casual conversation. I imagine it directed to a class considering philosophical matters or in a psychological analysis of someone in trouble. But I don't think either of those possibilities quite nails it. Did Silliman conceive of this question as an origin-puzzler?

& what if one responds to a question by imagining an answer to it?

""When does a question become a command?" - p 15

Never? If questions can't be commands is that a point in their favor to you?

The questions might usually seem to stand on their own but, sometimes, they seem to be part of a sequence - not necessarily a sequence of questions honing in on the possibility of a particular answer, more questions put in a sequence for alliterative or other purposes.

"Who broke the cup? Why did the guard rail break? Will there be a break in the weather? Did they make a break for it? How shall I break it to you?" - pp 19-20

The possible purpose for that sequence may just be to string together varying uses of the words "broke" & "break". There may not be any 'point' to it otherwise, there may not 'need' to be. & then there's the probability of nonsense just for the fun of it:

"Is the world of leisure suits, civil suits, air conditioning?" - p 26

& what about this?:

"What makes you not an example of right-wing anarchism?" - p 26

To me, "right-wing anarchism" is an oxymoron. That seems like the kind of idea that a Communist or Socialist might posit in order to justify yet-another pogrom against anarchists, something like the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by Trotsky. It makes me wonder what type of political activist Silliman is.

"Where in the dream do you find recognition of the dream? What if I begin forgetting and writing the same sentences over and over? What if cognizance of the past began to diminish and I started to repeat myself? Is the same idea in different terms the same idea?" - p 26

Now that's a sort of trick question: since the last question starts w/ "Is the same idea" it already establishes the "same idea": thusly when the "same idea" aspect is questioned by the ending there's a sort of disingenuousness to it: since we're told it's the "same idea" then, yes, it's the "same idea". He might as well have asked: 'Is the same idea the same idea?' After all, the 2nd "same idea" is in a different place in the sentence & occurs at a different point in time. As such, it can be shown to be NOT the SAME "same idea" but a different one. As I recall, such questions are common in math. Wchever "same idea" has been written 1st, hundreds of yrs ago, is the ONLY "same idea", all others are imitations.

Silliman makes frequent reference to other writers. Sometimes his choices surprise me.

"Isn't it crucial that this only be viewed in the context of certain other workers, e.g., Acker, Watten, Andrews, Coolidge?" - p 27

Kathy Acker, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Clark Coolidge. The latter 3 have been associated w/ Language Poetry, but Acker?

Eventually, the reader notices that sentences seem to be recurring. For the most part, these questions stand on their own & don't have a cumulative relationship to the questions around them, there are exceptions.

"When does it get there? Does it sniffle? Does it waver? Is it apt to break? Is it apt to break up? Is it apt to break down? Will it wash? Will it wash out? Will it wash ashore? Will it, Washington? Is that a crack? Is that a ripoff? Is that a snide remark?" - p 31

Such sequences of apparently related sentences, wordplay, don't seem to have any meaning aside from the pleasure of their playfullness. That might apply to everything written here. It's the process that's important, not a more typical semantics. The questions have meanings but it's there interplay that provides the substance, not those meanings. The author isn't intending for you to wonder whether something's a snide remark.

Then a question happens that looks familiar, one that I'm sure I've read before, maybe in a variation, & the reading changes to include an expectancy, a looking-for repetitions. Something similar happened in Ketjak. "How does lighting this cigarette cause the bus to arrive?" (p 30)

"Isn't the problem of the question that it locates us, places us in a relation, some tangible formulation, to the text or the act of the text, s if to test meaning, to see if it will exist if can thus somehow fix all of the other terms in our equation?" - p 36

& how is that a "problem"?

the next section is called "The Chinese Notebook". Given Silliman's emphasis on the use of notebooks in such bks as Ketjak & BART the making of this section explicitly referring to the notebook is 'important' in relation to such questions as: "Is the same idea in different terms the same idea?":

"18. I chose a Chinese notebook, its thin pages not to be cut, its six red-line columns which I turned 90°, the way they are closed by curves at both top and bottom, to see how it would alter the writing. Is it flatter, more airy? The words, as I write them, are larger, cover more surface on this two-dimesnional picture plane. Shall I, therefore, tend toward shorter terms—impact of page on vocabulary?" - p 44

Are these clues?:

"5. Language is, first of all, a political question.

"6. I write this sentence with a ballpoint pen. If I had used another would it have been a different sentence?

"7. This is not philosophy, it's poetry. And if I say so, then it becomes painting, music or sculpture, judged as such. If there are variables to consider, they are at least partly economic—the question of distribution, etc. Also differing critical traditions. Could this be good poetry, yet bad music? But yet I do not believe I would, except in jest, posit this as dance or urban planning." - p 43

"The Chinese Notebook" seems like the theoretical basis for the other parts of this bk. If language is "a political question" then one's use of it is presumed to be an application of one's political philosophy & intentions. If one is considering issues of distribution then the author of this bk must be considering the limited distribution that his small press publishers are able to get for their works. If the author insists that this is poetry, even though it obviously fits far easier, at least in this section, in w/ philosophy, then why hesitate to call it "urban planning"? As for "philosophy"? It's highly doubtful that this wd get grant money or be published as philosophy. It's too open-ended, too inconclusive, too vague, too unspecific to make it as phisilophy - but it's fine as poetry - & I like it better that way.

What I've never understood, or been able to relate to, is why 'poets' are so hell-bent on being 'poets'. Why not just WRITERS? Why not Language Writing instead of Language Poetry? That strikes as a career move, poets want to be seen in the context of a poetry lineage, it doesn't have to make any sense except to give them a context in wch they're likely to receive greater appreciation & support. There's money out there specifically for poetry ("This book is funded in part thanks to a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts" - p 4) Take it from me, I've insisted that I'm NOT a poet for the last 50 yrs. It's at least partially b/c of this that the poets whose works I read wd never read my own works. They'll only read it IFF I call it "poetry". Personally, I think "urban planning" might be more fun. & more creative. It also wdn't get grants.

"20. Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all. Would this definition satisfy Duncan?" - p 45

The poet Robert Duncan is also referred to in Silliman's BART. I get the impression his work is important to Silliman.

"29. Mallard, drake—if the words change, does the bird remain?

"30. How is it possible that I can imagine I can put that chair into language? There it sits, mute. It knows nothing of syntax. How can I put it into something it doesn't inherently possess?" - p 46

Is this the reasoning, therefore, behind Silliman's way of arranging words in a way that evades pinning down? Does "chair" become a word that defies being put to its usual use in language to refer to a familiar object? But since when does anything have to "inherently possess" knowledge of "syntax" in order to be used in any particular way by language? What I like about Silliman's writing isn't that I think he somehow 'solves' philosophical questions but that he takes a different approach to arrangement. I don't think he 'solves' any philosophical questions at all, the mallard & the drake are still going about their business. Silliman can't turn the chair into language but he can do what other writers do & describe it in a way so that people reading the description will know what he's referring to. What does he want?

"54. Increasingly I find object art has nothing new to teach me. This is also the case for certain kinds of poetry. My interest in the theory of the line has its limits.

"55. The presumption is: I can write like this and "get away with it."

"56. As economic conditions worsen, printing becomes prohibitive. Writers posit less emphasis on the page or book.

"57. "He's content just to have other writers think of him as a poet." What does this mean?

"58. What if there were no other writers? What would I write like?" - p 48

I remember being fresh out of high school in 1971 & being at the Woodlawn Cemetery grounds having a conversation w/ Debbie Sauter. She took great exception to my speaking in "What if" terms & philosophically berated me. I admit to feeling much the same about #58: "What if there were no other writers?" How wd that even happen?! What Silliman wd "write like" might have more to do w/ there being no other humans, e.g.. In other words, his questions are so preposterous that his apparent investigation seems trivial in contrast to other implications.

"71. An offshoot of projectivist theory was the idea that the form fo the poem might be equivalent to the poet's physical self. A thin man to use short lines and a huge man to write at length. Kelly, etc.

"72. Antin's theory is that in the recent history of progressive formas (himself, Schwerner, Rothenberg, MacLow, Higgins, the Something Else writers et al), it has become clear that only dertain domains yield "successful" work. But he has not indicated what these domains are, nor sufficiently defined success." - p 50

More references to other poets. At the time of this bk's release, 1986, there was no commonly available internet so searching for more info on the people mentioned wd've been difficult. What wd a reader not familiar w/ the poetics named have made of it all? #71 wd've been easy enuf: it's not necessary to know that "projectivist theory" refers to the work of Charles Olson & it's not necessary to know the work of Robert Kelly (you can see Kelly in my movie about Franz Kamin entitled DEPOT (wherein resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin) : on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/qDwGVNIJbgE - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/depot_201906 ).

In #72, however, it wd help the reader if they knew the work of David Antin (see the beginning of my review of David Antin & Charles Bernstein's A Conversation with David Antin here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), Armand Schwerner, Jerome Rothenberg (recently deceased), Jackson Mac Low (see my movie entitled "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260"" on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/0Zn9rl8PBqc ), & Dick Higgins & his Something Else Press (see my review of
the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... ).

"98. Good v. Bad Poetry. The distinction is not useful. The whole idea assumes a shared set of articulatable values by which to make such a judgment. It assumes, if not the perfect poem, at least the theory of limits, the most perfect poem. How would you proceed to make such a distinction?" - p 53

Agreed. If one were to use such terms one might at least qualify what they mean to you before applying them. It might be more useful to just skip the "good" & the "bad" & go straight to what one's standards are.

"109. So-called non-referential language when structure non-syntactically tends to disrupt time perception. Once recognized, one can begin to structure the disruption. Coolidge, for example, in The Maintains, uses line, stanza and repetition. Ashberry's Three Poems, not referential but syntactical, does not alter time." - pp 53-54

That seems like quite a claim, to "disrupt time perception". I deduce that that's what Silliman thinks he does. I'm not sure I agree but I find it interesting. It seems to me that if "time perception" is disrupted that a very palpable feeling wd be sensed. I don't think reading Silliman's poetry has that effect on me. It's more a matter of my becoming more aware of unusual technical procedures & the way they disrupt expectations. For me, that's not quite the same thing as disrupting "time perception" - maybe it is for Silliman.

"145. There are writers who would never question the assumptions of non-objective artists (Terry Fox, say, or even Stella or the late Smithson) who cannot deal with writing in the same fashion. Whenever they see certain marks on the page, they always presume that something besides those marks is also present." - p 58

Again, interesting. I wdn't call Terry Fox, whose work I like very much, or Robert Smithson, "non-objective" artists, even if the art criticism of this time (1986) wd've done so. Is Terry Fox's destruction of a flower garden at a museum café in protest of the destruction of the Vietnamese environment w/ Agent Orange & the like "non-objective"? Is Smithson's Spiral Jetty "non-objective"? I can say, tho, that creative people are often only provisionally open-minded - so I agree w/ Silliman's point about writers who can't deal w/ "non-objective" writing. Whether Silliman's writing qualifies as "non-objective" is a different story - it seems to me that his subversion of objectivity depends on objectivity to work. Visual Poets are more "non-objective".

The full review is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS...

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me some time to finish this. I started reading this around my fall semester 2021 and was enamoured by it, I finished Ketjak, Sunset Debris, and Chinese Notebook and was just completely enthralled in Silliman’s style and language poetry in general (I still am!). I, at the time, had only really started dipping my toes in poetry w/ David Berman, John Ashbery (my two heroes!), Kenneth Koch, the New York School generally, and some other Black Mountain poets. Basically I had been getting into the whole postwar, pomo, “New American” poetry after long thinking I wld never get or like poetry. While I wld say Berman and Ashbery were the two biggest in unlearning the kind of psychical damage done by public schooling in the learning of literature and poetry, Silliman, in his own ways, was the one who really untangled absolutely everything for me. Ketjak was truly a radical experience to read, I hadn’t really read any of the precursors to Language (besides Ashbery w/ The Tennis Court Oath), so the experience and act of reading it was entirely fresh w/out knowing what to expect. Silliman’s practice at the level of the sentence, the new sentence, completely changed everything for me and in a way enabled me to begin writing myself.

But then, I got to 2197, and felt like taking a break from Silliman and reading some other things. And then that became months of not finishing The Age of Huts cycle. To which I picked it up again about a week ago while, in my typically scrambled mind, decided to finish it. And I can say I’m almost sort of glad I did take that time but also wished I wld have finished it then too. Because now coming back to it w/ more knowledge and ideas concerning poetry and langpo I felt like I enjoyed it even more than I did when I first read it. Yet, it also didn’t have the same mysterious sense of when I read Ketjak and didn’t know what I’d be in store for. Having began to read again when knowing other poets like Coolidge, Watten, Hejinian, WCW’s prose experiments, Silliman’s own criticism, helped to contextualise a lot of what is going on in these massive prosoid type “Everything Work” but it’s also a bit at the loss of that experience lf the unknown adventure of poetry. Regardless I enjoyed 2197 and the Satellite Texts included very much, BART in particular is amazing for following an idea I was also having concerning the accumulation of details into one long sentence that runs on for pages and pages. His use of commas is really musical, none of the language ever feels rigid and cold but genuinely has a sense of musicality to it. It reminded me a lot of Coolidge’s free jazz poetics albeit not as focused on the sound direction of the words. Or Kerouac’s sketching. What I do love of Silliman’s sentence style and structures is that they allow in not only sentences at the level of description and sketching of things, people, and places that he sees whether riding on the bus, train, sitting down, etc., but that he allows in philosophical sketches, daydreams, memories, any thoughts and ideas that may flow through during the act of writing. I really don’t see his poetics as being so deeply impersonal and cold as I’ve seen people want to make them out to be. There’s a lot of life and fun within Silliman’s writing and I certainly loved to be taken on the bus ride in BART w/ Silliman.

The Age of Huts is exemplary of the LANGUAGE poetry style and of Silliman’s theorisation of “the new sentence.” All of the books contained have definitely been really influential on my own practices and Silliman certainly redefined what poetry cld be and do within these pages.

Also within the edition, using Jess’ Arkadia’s Last Resort was an incredible idea that really works in conjunction w/ the poems themselves as these expansive collages of everyday life. And embedded within these sentences of everyday life is a critique of the everyday life processes along class, economic, and cultural structures that generate the everyday. Silliman really does redefine narrativity and place within these poems and I wld like to one day write more on that particular topic. There is a certain critique of narrativity going on within the poems and he is very sensitive to the structures and generation of place as said in BART: “what is described forms a place, all words aim at that” 304) and “a relationship of words to place” (305).

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terribly mixed feelings about this one. Ketjak was enjoyable, a prose poem where each stanza grows larger & repeats previous lines until the final one lasts fifty pages. Then Sunset Debris, a poem of questions, was unreadable, hundreds of questions in a row is enervating and annoying, a toddler trying to get under your skin. The metapoetry of The Chinese Notebook was equally uninteresting, at one point he even invites you "if you're bored, stop reading" and I thought "well, ok."
Then the final suite of poems, 2197, mixing prose with lines while employing the same repetition as Ketjak, but with broken grammar, was excellent and striking at times, similar to my older poetry in a way I haven't seen before. But everything is so samey; the problem with this sort of "language poetry" (what a terrible term...) is that the pile of unrelated sentences and repetition makes even the most unique writing indistinct. Because nothing ever builds, there's no momentum nor direction, you might as well flip randomly through the book's pages and stop whenever you feel like it. Silliman is using particular forms but the complete lack of line-to-line cohesion annihilates them into a shapeless mass of dull words. Finally, the BART poem is probably only interesting if you're familiar with the Bay Area, an Oulipian exercise, and does not fit the rest of the collection at all.

[EIJANDOLUM]

"Can you feel the hum, the vibration? Are these kites large enough for us to ride them, to sail out over the water? Do you see how that haze obliterates the horizon, sea become sky become sea? What did Wordsworth see, looking down into that valley? What is behind your language? Are you your vocabulary or are you your syntax? If we push you, shove you, what will we find? Can you hear what you are thinking under what you are reading? Does it at times drown the reading out? Would you just go out to the ocean one day and begin to swim, outward without limit toward a vague conclusion? What of a poem that stretched from summer to summer? Does the sky in your mind have a limit? Did you go into that phase and go through it? What kept you here? Where do the words come from? What if we drained them of their meaning just to see what remained? What if we said that we had done this thing? Can you give a yes or no answer? Can you say it in a few short words? How is it with all this language there is still this thing so vast that we have no name for it, even if we sense it as a thing we have seen? Were the words trapped in the pen, just waiting? Did they burst, sperm-like, into meaning in our mouths? Can you taste it? Can you feel it? What about it?"

And it goes on and on and on.

[Abi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it, I think Ketjak is doing something very interesting. I did not enjoy Chinese Notebook because I had to read a whole different philosophy paper to understand it.

[Ted Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ron Silliman is one of the most interesting poets working today, a writer who has road tested the limits of given phrases and circumlocutions to frame experience and create a steadfast idea of the world being as it should be as it appears before our senses. We find instead that , in Silliman's choice conflations and decoding, that language is a something that doesn't describe the world is , fixed and in place despite our moods, but rather is a medium in which the world is changed, it's purpose and tonality shifted and altered, according to our internal turnings. Age of Huts is a collection of books the poet and essayist has published over the last thirty years or so, and comes to us as a major edition to anyone's library that specializes in poets who've extended the possibilities of language; Silliman himself might take exception to this idea, but I think what he's done is rid us of the thin barrier between
poem/world and to make the world, as such, an integral part of the work itself, not a quality separate and addressed in abstruse terms.

[Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know, this isn't exactly a book I'd say is core to the modern literary canon (which is how it's been touted). It's thick, tricky, wordy, insightful, silly...and far too self-congratulatory. Silliman is a notoriously brash blowhard when it comes to poetic theory, and also incredibly knowledgeable. OK, fine. But rarely do you find a theorist who can actually write the form he/she so criticizes. Case in point for Age of Huts.


It has plenty to offer, and is definitely worth cracking, for its sheer length, its breadth and depth of ideologies, and its attempts at the re-definition of poetic rules (the music is the equivalent of an amplifier spitting feedback at volume 10: listen long enough, and you'll begin to hear rhythm and order).


I'm sure Silliman would write a brilliant thesis-length blog refuting that assessment, but I stand by it!

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a big dictionary or a household Bible, there to be dipped into rather than taken in all at once. "Sunset Debris" (the all-questions section) and "Ketjak" (the Fibonacci section) are some of my favorite poetry, but there's other stuff in here my attention has skimmed and slipped right over without taking a thing away.

On another note, it's a pleasure to read Silliman in a passionate, caught-up mode. I've loved a lot of his prose-on-poetry, but it's tough stuff -- theoretical and didactic. After reading prose works like The New Sentence, reading The Age of Huts is like singing karaoke drunk with him.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I thought I would hate this book because the premise sounded so pretentious and wooden and gimmicky (the first poem is 100 pages long. It is comprised of "ballooning" paragraphs. Each one contains everything in the previous one, so you start with just phrase, then pretty soon they're 10 pages long).

OH HOW I WAS WRONG! Exactly opposite of what I expected, this was one of the most human, meaningful, compelling books I've ever read. The patterns build meanings into themselves and you develop relationships with the repeated phrases. Reading it was an experience.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

LANGUAGE theory in practice, an embodiment of sentences made new. [i]Ketjack[/i] and [i]The Sunset Debris[/i] are standout sections, perhaps because their form feels new and yet is recognizable, though [i]The Chinese Notebook[/i] seems a bit more digestible because of its size. [i]2197[/i] was almost a punishing reading experience, insofar as it pushes beyond expectations and interest levels as it plays against syntax. [i]BART[/i] is a sentimental favorite, as I’m a bit of a train nut and the poem captures a ride.

[John Hyland]

i picked this up when UCP was having a sale last fall . . . & have slowly been making my way in, thru, & around it . . .

update--september 14, 2009--saw silliman's blog post of three days ago & cannot get that very bizarre appropriation of spicer's work out of my while i read age of--or all things--"huts"!

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silliman is brilliant. In this piece, he is channeling Derrida (and de Saussure). The text has a physical momentum.

I know Silliman has written work based on the Fibonacci sequence - this text might be the one, I can't remember. Either way, he plays with rhythm.

[Anne Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird kind of poetry...in the 'stream of consciousness' department, but his words repeat and expand from on sentence to 70 pages of insightful comments sprinkled in a fluff of nonsense...was only okay to me.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

THIS blog was written during a read of this book.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ron Silliman's most satisfyingly ambitious work, from a time when Language Poetry was still figuring out what it might be.

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goes a long way toward convincing me that this is the guy we SHOULD have exploring the internet for us. A great collection. I still haven't picked up the Alphabet, but Age of Huts is fantastic.