The New Sentence

by Ron Silliman

Cultural Studies. Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. "Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order" -Bruce Boone.

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Theory, Criticism

214 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1987

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

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historically significant, these essays—intellectually earnest, occasionally strident—provide ample evidence that Silliman is hardly a lazy critic, as some who read his famous blog occasionally claim. Most useful about the book now, to my mind, is the record it leaves of certain ways of thinking about poetry that became essential for several significant writers in the 1970s and early 1980s. A sequel is long overdue. A reprint edition would also be nice, one that included a new introduction explaining to present-day readers why it is that that way of thinking was essential (or seemed essential) at the time, how it looks in retrospect, and what needs to be different today.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
Ron Silliman's The New Sentence
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 1-6, 2025
The complete review will appear here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... after I make the webpage - probably w/in 5 days of posting this truncated review on Goodreads.

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 Les Nouvelles littéraires 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_Tre...

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 hopefull, it doesn't make "the class struggle of consciousness" any less of a drag while one is fighting it.

"Another sympom 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?

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Silliman as a critic and provocateur, and thought parts of this book were excellent. I appreciate much of his analysis of syntax, and the historical lessons tracing parataxis back to Rimbaud. And this book might be the best introduction to LANGUAGE poetry I've read.

Then he switches gears from analysis to manifesto, and things go off the rails. As they always do whenever anyone makes an attempt at politicizing style. I would have hoped that Silliman's awareness of history (in all the arts) would have helped put the brakes on this, but no such luck. The result is a screed that's instantly dated, and paints Silliman as someone not worth taking seriously. Which is a shame, because much of his work, including work in this book, is well worth reading and rereading.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong words from battles on small fields?

I loved, loved, loved the title essay. The first one too. I still think of Silliman's figure for poetry as being a writer's attempt to move toward a lack. And for poetry as being a tool for overcoming the serialization of the individual in a capitalist state.

Otherwise this book includes a lot of work that feels occasional or supplementary in nature.

[Laura]

i bought this at the penn bookstore years ago and have been holding onto it. i will definitely read it at some point along with other contemporary poetics heavy hitters "everybody's autonomy", "syntactically impermanence" and "artifice and indeterminacy"

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

rreally a great book. highly recommended. will make any writer sit and churn ones idealisms about writing anew. can't overstate the amount of help Silliman gave me with understanding poetry with this text.

[Paul Siegell · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is gonna take me a little while...

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good ideas and observations about language and the role of poetry/poets in society, but a lot of ranting and hard to follow at times.

[TQ-tip Shandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The always enthusiastic and wonderful Ron Silliman. The master at work.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Language Poetry primer.