Tjanting

by Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten (Introduction)

Space heater. Writing gathers around the pigeons. This line leads to Uranus. Nun census. Silver fork upon a chippd blue plate. I saw sleeping bag, pillows in the Buick's back. The companionship of refrigerator's hum. This is beginning I again began not. Salt shaker tall as coffee's mug. Dented Opel's orange fender. Gray dawn.

Genres: Poetry

212 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2002

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

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely one of the most influential books for me, and still my favorite of Ron's (though he keeps on developing in exciting new directions).

It's a book in which the quality of the reading changes drastically as one's immersed in it over a long period. At first, one knows the repetitions and variations are coming, and expects their altered familiarity, as well as the novelty of new sentences. Fairly early on, though, the number of sentences has increased to the point at which it's nearly impossible to keep track--have I seen this before? Or is it just similar to one I have seen? (Silliman plays with this uncertainty, in fact, by occasionally adding a new sentence that's highly similar to one we've seen--a varying original which will, in fact, recur in this paragraph or the next). The distance between recurrences and the numerical and qualitative complexity of the contexts in which any individual sentence has occurred keeps on increasing. By a certain point, what I experience in the reading is a model of what I experience in daily life--the anticipation of recurrences, slow or sudden variation, new phenomena, passing the same spot on a different route or in a different mindset, things coming to attention that I'd missed before--so that, by the open-ended end (with its implication that this text could go on forever), I have a crisp, explicit view of my own (usually primarily habitual) processes of synthesizing all this disparate stuff into "experience."

I can't think of another book that does this.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first glance, this book seems to be all gibberish. The trick about it, though, is that it's written following the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, etc.). The first paragraph has one sentence. The second paragraph, 1 sentence. Third paragraph, two sentences. Etc. Not only that, but it's oftentimes almost like a dialogue between the odd and the even paragraphs. For example, the first paragraph says "Not this." Second paragraph: "What then?" Furthermore, Silliman refers back to many phrases and ideas throughout the book, or restructures sentences to create new ones, sometimes related but not always ("Analogy to 'quick' sand" goes to "Sand & logic to the quick;" similarly, "Not this" later becomes "Knot this."). It's quite a trip reading the book, especially if you try to keep track of the repeated elements and all of the instances of his tricks.

Themes that stand out: baseball, sex, and writing. (And really, isn't that what life *should* be about?)

[Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Hejinian better.