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Demo to Ink
Poetry. Ron Silliman's DEMO TO INK includes six parts of a larger work entitled The Alphabet that includes five other books. An amalgam of contradictory, perfunctory scenes and images from the urban landscape, DEMO TO INK is the result of using systematic formulas and procedures for creating poetry. Silliman's other books include Tjanting, The New Sentence, In the American Tree, and Xing.
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
9 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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June 15, 2021Demo to Ink (1992) collects five books — Demo; Engines (written with Rae Armantrout); Force; Garfield; Hidden; Ink: D, E, F, G, H, I of what later becomes the Alphabet (2008).
“Force and Farce of the Postmodern Poet”
Don’t try measuring Force in newtons, despite the title; and the word “force” doesn’t appear, except if you force — it’s to the point! — a homonym out of “fours” or pronounce as “farce.” What’s going on then, you might ask: pushing and shoving? There’s a bit. Force of nature (as the expression has it), force of capital, force of writing,. Force is also the poet’s account of how the poet came to be a poet and to rationalize the way they write.
First though, what immediately catches the eye with this poem is its dual look of alternating verse and prose, of right-ragged rim and full-justified trim. I count eleven varying lengthed segments of each. It is one continuous text — no stanza breaks.
The prose and verse are stylistically differentiated, I’d say their conventional functions reversed.
The prose is less hinged by linear reason, less discursive, more figural (more spatial), and with a hilarity more “poetic.” The prose could be described as Bob Perelman does the collaborations he did with Steve Benson and Kit Robinson, as “launching […] into the lunar gravity of Tropeville, where one could jump in amused arcs” (Grand Piano #1) except, I think, one also has to enquire into how Force explains why poets have “auslandish[ly]” moved to “Tropeville” (at least for their coffee breaks).
The verse, by contrast, condenses argument and explanation, is combative, and moves more perceptibly through coordinates of time and place.
Second overall point about Force gets further into its construction: the recurring linguistic "shard," I'll nontechnically call it. You wouldn’t necessarily realize this aspect of it, unless noticing how, in Force a word— even part of one — used twice has by that fact already established a pattern. The patterns take over, yet they don’t cumulatively tip the text over into either a completely familiar world of meaning or an otherworldly one — the shards don’t compose a whole picture the way mozaic can, they don’t add up to a total meaning. There is no symbolic essence revealed lying “within” the text waiting for reader extraction. These linguistic shards, once they are noticed, remain for the most part shard-like. A good example is the word blue.
Blue first appears so: “Against toys, few respectable chariots, blue as cribbage, ocker as in Rx, Delaware’s a warning.” To paraphrase: hey, no archangels are going to descend on chariots to save us with godly instruction (unlike the one that did appear, at least in print, at the end of Engines — but that was different!), only disreputable religious demagogues descend (and right into the ground), like Jim Jones; nor is there a societal horizon as infinite and hopeful and undeniable as the blue sky, even if it’s an optical illusion — we only get acrylic blue as a stripe on a cribbage board game. So, why “[a]gainst toys”? Answer: “Delaware’s a warning” — Force written during the runup to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. No time for games….
But there's the rub. A caveat (paragraph-long digression) is necessary. Force contrasts real-and-actual to its opposite that is construed variously as fiction, unreality, surreal, artifice, toy, among other suggestive terms. Let me reductively call this contrast a binary opposition. The hierarchy of values binding this opposition within a social order in the text isn’t the way you might think — with “real” valued over “nonreal.” Or at least: the limits of both are being continually tested, probed, acknowledged. It’s not that both sides of the binary are “equally valued” by Silliman’s text either — as if the text is making an extra effort to affirm them in some poetics of equanimity. Force acknowledges that both real and nonreal are socially valued, that is to say socially valued by capital, whether we’re happy about it it or not.
Back to blue. That’s a pretty rich context for that word in that sentence. Then, the word begins to recur, with completely different starting-points of meaning, such as in “blue jeans” (cops against youth), “corpse blue” (Jim Jones massacre), “blue raft” (semiotic drift, perhaps), “[t]ubed blueprints” (rolling on sidewalk). Blue is the shard in a kaleidoscope of turning meanings, of beautiful patterns. The contexts are so differentiated, and so much else is going on, that it is easy to overlook the shard’s presence. Force is replete with shards of all kinds.
One other brief example, so as to show how I’m understanding shard-like recurrence: the humourous phrase “bulldozer’s yawn.” Here, “yawn” makes an unexpected recurrence out of “dozer” — bulldozer wouldn’t have meant to doze at all had it not been for added yawn. A dozing motif isn’t picked up by the text (the way blue is picked up), but there is dreaming (“swords herd in dreams”) which is a markedly distinct state from that of dozing. Visions happen in dreams. The front end of the word bulldozer is bull, and bull is variously picked up elsewhere: “roan bull,” “pit-bull,” also “bullets,” each with its distinct context of use (and hence of meanings). You can really see what I mean by shard as part of a word with the example of bull in bullet.
I’m saying this a certain way — “linguistic shard” — because one of the poem’s arguments is about what to do with recognition of the shard-like in language, how to approach shards poetically, and to what end.
Where does this recognition of shard-like language come from within the culture? External to poetry, it comes from mid-century linguistics and from the philosophy of linguistics, including Derrida’s “science” of writing — the concept of grammatology. Internal to poetry, aside from visual poetry and its cognates (Henri Michaux), it’s here specifically a consequence of the rejection of a speech-based poetics; when speech and its pragmatics of use are dropped out, language as writing appears like a physical material. Force rehearses social reasons for that turn away from speech in the first five lines of the first verse segment —
“The audients of politics
in the -torium sounds
eye is for fours
is thus tragedy first
then farce, majestic speech”
— while continuing to worry over the consequences in other segments (ending with: “Can you curl your tongue?”).
There are poets who work in starkest contrast to the way shards subtly constitute themselves as an engendering backdrop in Force, where instead shards are made overtly manifest — for some poets, there are only shards — in all their discontinuous hardness. Is there, in other words, an encrypted argument with what was once called "the materiality of the signifier" in these lines:
“[…] verse as farce
making phases what lack
phrasing’s strict consonant cluster”
Where the word blue first occurs, in that sentence, I overlooked the phrase "ocker as in Rx", which in the context of the shard can be taken as a rebuttal to P. Inman's Bay Area-published Tuumba chapbook ocker (1982). The word ocker means interest on money, but you wouldn't know it reading ocker that includes all sorts of shards, nonwords, fragments, etc.
Notice the line “making phases what lack,” that it’s a speech locution, what lack, not a “strict phrasing” (to borrow words) as in making phases that lack. And a “phase” is temporary, and passing (“just a phase”). The argument the poem is making in testing the poetic limits of the materiality of language is turned also, then, toward the limits of a speech-based poetics what lack strict phrasing. There is unavoidable farce — there is a force — within poetry, both in its spech-based and shard-like tendencies.
And Silliman’s text acknowledges that its own preferred tendency, the one it’s in the process of working out, isn’t exempt from farce either, as we see in the opening lines, beginning with ll. 1-2:
“The audients of politics
in the -torium sounds”
What as readers do you do here? We can note the unusual spelling “audients” and follow the implicit instruction by filling in the missing word-bit before “-torium” by drawing down the fitting portion of “audients” to form the word “auditorium.”
These lines strike me as a play with shards. The pull-down word-bit audi is a shard, not a prefix; likewise, “-torium” (l. 2) isn’t a suffix (the suffix is -orium). Letters have been moved around to create an aesthetic effect on the basis of materializing the word-string audi because of the phonic association it conjures with audio.
Visual and phonic dimensions of language have therefore materialized in the opening 2 lines. Now as to the situation, if there is one that this surface language-play projects, describes, or enacts — is there any communication happening therein, in this auditorium, by these sounds, for the audients?
Granted, in the audience, there are “audients," and in the auditorium ( “place for hearing” [OED]) there are “sounds.” But is anthing actually being communicated?
“[S]ounds” do not a speech necessarily make; “-torium sounds” could be mechanically made by the auditorium, or be echoing cacophony. The word “audients” at least suggests a kind of functional aural receptivity, except that it’s a reception whose functionality would appear limited and predetermined (it is the audients of politics, as if the larger mass of a democratic people was not functionally included). The scene here is more like that of a “disassembly” than of an assembly.
Do the ayes have it? Well, an eye does. The third line switches from the ear to the —
“eye is for fours”
and suddenly, these opening lines offer more than a comment on the situation they enact of purposeful political obfuscation in the media of communication (eye, ear, public audience, politics of organizing societal needs, wants and desires). The opening lines offer a poetic instruction — to visually count the number of words of the line itself in order to verify (their) sense. Four words! This will become a pattern that about half the verse segments will follow, namely four words per line, before it’s modified to five words per line, and then three.
With the withholding of genuine communication which the lines 1-2 express, there is a decisive turn in Force toward the art.
Robert Duncan in The HD Book picks up the word clairaudient to describe the undercurrent of rhetoric moving through (and moving) a poetic image, a rhetoric acquiring second-sight (“clair”) and second-hearing (“audient).” As an adjective, audient means “[l]istening; paying attention to sounds; (also) having the capacity to listen and understand” (OED). “Clairaudient” goes farther: “The power or faculty of hearing something not present to the ear but regarded as having objective reality” (Merriam-Webster).
This foretelling function, a classic (and Romantic) role for a poet, is dissassembled in Force (and elsewhere in other books of the Alphabet). "Form gathers force (my credo)," Silliman writes at the end of Lit, "for what purpose but use, source for an assault on habit." (See PhillyTalks 3 for Silliman on habit, in his exchange with Jeff Derksen.) This is a very different social orientation for poetry than the one that Duncan gives when he reads James Joyce as clairaudiently foretelling WWI in the poem "I hear an army charging upon the land” (XXXVI of Chamber Music). Foretold, so what? Habit got the war on anyway.
By line 3, Force turns away from the rhetorical pageantry of a public voice and towards the words as such that the eyes see before them. (Aside: In response to the same conditions, Bob Perelman will try a different tack by directly engaging with such a voice in The First World and Face Value.) Instead of “clair” — full of light, illumination — there is, l. 3, just “eye.” The eye sees the materialized text before it.
“is thus tragedy first
then farce, majestic speech”
A famous satirical quip of Marx’s is that the rhetoric of history is such that, the first time round, it’s tragedy, the second time farce.
The poetic instruction to count words acknowledges tragedy, the tragedy of late capital, that the aesthetic remains at one-or-more removes from the immediacy of a direct intervention in the life of the nation — speech-based poetics’ hope. Instead, there is a parallel to the way modernist writers were at one-or-more removes despite their vainest materializing efforts (hence the Language Poets' broad interest in revising modernism's story, notably the overlooked figure of Louis Zukofsky, who, too, counted words per line). Tragey, yes, the first time round, then farce: the inevitable farcical dimension must be struggled with, socially and aesthetically.
Force was written 1979-1980, run-up year to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the “make America great again” white man of the GM hour. So that the second time — Reaganism (Thatcherism, Mulroneyism…) — is farce, if the first time, the postwar America-is-great boom under cover of Cold War was tragedy.
These opening five lines are the oldest lines of the Alphabet, lines over which Silliman pondered for months before gleaning their instruction for a way forward.
Often in the Alphabet, the order of composition at any level doesn’t match the ordering of text, and so no special privilege is given these five lines — they don’t appear as in, for instance, a preface to the Alphabet, such as Wiliams’s to Book I of Paterson, where he prognosticates: “To make a start, / out of particulars / … / […] rolling / up the sum […].” the Alphabet emphasizes the arbitrary, conventional nature of arrangement.
Somewhat against the grain of arrangement, I give these five lines, and the poem Force, a privileged position in the Alphabet, a “genetic” and chronological priority, because the struggle in the poem, as I read it, is partly with poetry itself in its effort to respond to the current conditions (Bay Area and national politics included), since neither an entirely speech-based nor an entirely shard-like poetics seems adequate to the overwhelming reality.
In this respect, Force is, in my view, a partial account of the making of a poet. To briefly show this:
Education of the Poet
Education, what is it? How’re you going to get it as a poet? Where or to whom do you turn? If you’re a poet, you want to find, in that genial Creeleyism, “like-minded folk,” of poets and poetry. But also, you want to find the good books to read. Yep, there are “good” books that are more like monuments than pizza — which means, too, there is the other kind of book. The other kind prevails. “Up against the whiteout,” educational institutions and training of various kinds appears throughout Force. Anyway, our poet finds his teacher in print, therefrom the kind of education he needs. In the poem, the teacher goes unnamed. From the description, I’d say William Carlos Williams:
“taught himself unthoughtfully spoken
toward the sake of
particulars […]”
How to Write
Visions happen in dreams (ask Piers the Plowman), and one does emerge here that with insight into how it is with this poet in terms of proportioning two vast categories impinging on the history of the lyric: being and writing:
“[…] dream
clashing long after strong
seams sighted the writing
as scaffold to building
reveals little within […]”
Writing as mere scaffold is the profound insight. Writing as without intrinsic interiority, despite the lyric tradition suggesting otherwise (to find your voice, to express your feelings, etc). Writing is outward-facing, an external, social medium / product. The poet’s being will be oriented that way, toward phenomenological description of the world, instead of inward self-direction toward the Bildungsroman spiritual journey, the middle class apprenticeship of character, personality and experience. Building versus Bildung, great pun!
How to Live
How to make a go of it as a poet? Seeing as for this poet writing is outwardly directed, turning to
“[…] dawn’s quiet rescue
repeats robin’s elm admonition
‘seek only immediate necessity
worm/twig/wind/sun’”
but not so far as to lose sight of household management, having, for instance
“[…] clear
clean salt water seen
solving drought[….]”
when even today that’s a long shot (GlobalCitizen.org’s statistic is 1% of the world’s population drinks desalinated water as of 2016).
“Force and Farce of the Postmodern Poet”
Don’t try measuring Force in newtons, despite the title; and the word “force” doesn’t appear, except if you force — it’s to the point! — a homonym out of “fours” or pronounce as “farce.” What’s going on then, you might ask: pushing and shoving? There’s a bit. Force of nature (as the expression has it), force of capital, force of writing,. Force is also the poet’s account of how the poet came to be a poet and to rationalize the way they write.
First though, what immediately catches the eye with this poem is its dual look of alternating verse and prose, of right-ragged rim and full-justified trim. I count eleven varying lengthed segments of each. It is one continuous text — no stanza breaks.
The prose and verse are stylistically differentiated, I’d say their conventional functions reversed.
The prose is less hinged by linear reason, less discursive, more figural (more spatial), and with a hilarity more “poetic.” The prose could be described as Bob Perelman does the collaborations he did with Steve Benson and Kit Robinson, as “launching […] into the lunar gravity of Tropeville, where one could jump in amused arcs” (Grand Piano #1) except, I think, one also has to enquire into how Force explains why poets have “auslandish[ly]” moved to “Tropeville” (at least for their coffee breaks).
The verse, by contrast, condenses argument and explanation, is combative, and moves more perceptibly through coordinates of time and place.
Second overall point about Force gets further into its construction: the recurring linguistic "shard," I'll nontechnically call it. You wouldn’t necessarily realize this aspect of it, unless noticing how, in Force a word— even part of one — used twice has by that fact already established a pattern. The patterns take over, yet they don’t cumulatively tip the text over into either a completely familiar world of meaning or an otherworldly one — the shards don’t compose a whole picture the way mozaic can, they don’t add up to a total meaning. There is no symbolic essence revealed lying “within” the text waiting for reader extraction. These linguistic shards, once they are noticed, remain for the most part shard-like. A good example is the word blue.
Blue first appears so: “Against toys, few respectable chariots, blue as cribbage, ocker as in Rx, Delaware’s a warning.” To paraphrase: hey, no archangels are going to descend on chariots to save us with godly instruction (unlike the one that did appear, at least in print, at the end of Engines — but that was different!), only disreputable religious demagogues descend (and right into the ground), like Jim Jones; nor is there a societal horizon as infinite and hopeful and undeniable as the blue sky, even if it’s an optical illusion — we only get acrylic blue as a stripe on a cribbage board game. So, why “[a]gainst toys”? Answer: “Delaware’s a warning” — Force written during the runup to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. No time for games….
But there's the rub. A caveat (paragraph-long digression) is necessary. Force contrasts real-and-actual to its opposite that is construed variously as fiction, unreality, surreal, artifice, toy, among other suggestive terms. Let me reductively call this contrast a binary opposition. The hierarchy of values binding this opposition within a social order in the text isn’t the way you might think — with “real” valued over “nonreal.” Or at least: the limits of both are being continually tested, probed, acknowledged. It’s not that both sides of the binary are “equally valued” by Silliman’s text either — as if the text is making an extra effort to affirm them in some poetics of equanimity. Force acknowledges that both real and nonreal are socially valued, that is to say socially valued by capital, whether we’re happy about it it or not.
Back to blue. That’s a pretty rich context for that word in that sentence. Then, the word begins to recur, with completely different starting-points of meaning, such as in “blue jeans” (cops against youth), “corpse blue” (Jim Jones massacre), “blue raft” (semiotic drift, perhaps), “[t]ubed blueprints” (rolling on sidewalk). Blue is the shard in a kaleidoscope of turning meanings, of beautiful patterns. The contexts are so differentiated, and so much else is going on, that it is easy to overlook the shard’s presence. Force is replete with shards of all kinds.
One other brief example, so as to show how I’m understanding shard-like recurrence: the humourous phrase “bulldozer’s yawn.” Here, “yawn” makes an unexpected recurrence out of “dozer” — bulldozer wouldn’t have meant to doze at all had it not been for added yawn. A dozing motif isn’t picked up by the text (the way blue is picked up), but there is dreaming (“swords herd in dreams”) which is a markedly distinct state from that of dozing. Visions happen in dreams. The front end of the word bulldozer is bull, and bull is variously picked up elsewhere: “roan bull,” “pit-bull,” also “bullets,” each with its distinct context of use (and hence of meanings). You can really see what I mean by shard as part of a word with the example of bull in bullet.
I’m saying this a certain way — “linguistic shard” — because one of the poem’s arguments is about what to do with recognition of the shard-like in language, how to approach shards poetically, and to what end.
Where does this recognition of shard-like language come from within the culture? External to poetry, it comes from mid-century linguistics and from the philosophy of linguistics, including Derrida’s “science” of writing — the concept of grammatology. Internal to poetry, aside from visual poetry and its cognates (Henri Michaux), it’s here specifically a consequence of the rejection of a speech-based poetics; when speech and its pragmatics of use are dropped out, language as writing appears like a physical material. Force rehearses social reasons for that turn away from speech in the first five lines of the first verse segment —
“The audients of politics
in the -torium sounds
eye is for fours
is thus tragedy first
then farce, majestic speech”
— while continuing to worry over the consequences in other segments (ending with: “Can you curl your tongue?”).
There are poets who work in starkest contrast to the way shards subtly constitute themselves as an engendering backdrop in Force, where instead shards are made overtly manifest — for some poets, there are only shards — in all their discontinuous hardness. Is there, in other words, an encrypted argument with what was once called "the materiality of the signifier" in these lines:
“[…] verse as farce
making phases what lack
phrasing’s strict consonant cluster”
Where the word blue first occurs, in that sentence, I overlooked the phrase "ocker as in Rx", which in the context of the shard can be taken as a rebuttal to P. Inman's Bay Area-published Tuumba chapbook ocker (1982). The word ocker means interest on money, but you wouldn't know it reading ocker that includes all sorts of shards, nonwords, fragments, etc.
Notice the line “making phases what lack,” that it’s a speech locution, what lack, not a “strict phrasing” (to borrow words) as in making phases that lack. And a “phase” is temporary, and passing (“just a phase”). The argument the poem is making in testing the poetic limits of the materiality of language is turned also, then, toward the limits of a speech-based poetics what lack strict phrasing. There is unavoidable farce — there is a force — within poetry, both in its spech-based and shard-like tendencies.
And Silliman’s text acknowledges that its own preferred tendency, the one it’s in the process of working out, isn’t exempt from farce either, as we see in the opening lines, beginning with ll. 1-2:
“The audients of politics
in the -torium sounds”
What as readers do you do here? We can note the unusual spelling “audients” and follow the implicit instruction by filling in the missing word-bit before “-torium” by drawing down the fitting portion of “audients” to form the word “auditorium.”
These lines strike me as a play with shards. The pull-down word-bit audi is a shard, not a prefix; likewise, “-torium” (l. 2) isn’t a suffix (the suffix is -orium). Letters have been moved around to create an aesthetic effect on the basis of materializing the word-string audi because of the phonic association it conjures with audio.
Visual and phonic dimensions of language have therefore materialized in the opening 2 lines. Now as to the situation, if there is one that this surface language-play projects, describes, or enacts — is there any communication happening therein, in this auditorium, by these sounds, for the audients?
Granted, in the audience, there are “audients," and in the auditorium ( “place for hearing” [OED]) there are “sounds.” But is anthing actually being communicated?
“[S]ounds” do not a speech necessarily make; “-torium sounds” could be mechanically made by the auditorium, or be echoing cacophony. The word “audients” at least suggests a kind of functional aural receptivity, except that it’s a reception whose functionality would appear limited and predetermined (it is the audients of politics, as if the larger mass of a democratic people was not functionally included). The scene here is more like that of a “disassembly” than of an assembly.
Do the ayes have it? Well, an eye does. The third line switches from the ear to the —
“eye is for fours”
and suddenly, these opening lines offer more than a comment on the situation they enact of purposeful political obfuscation in the media of communication (eye, ear, public audience, politics of organizing societal needs, wants and desires). The opening lines offer a poetic instruction — to visually count the number of words of the line itself in order to verify (their) sense. Four words! This will become a pattern that about half the verse segments will follow, namely four words per line, before it’s modified to five words per line, and then three.
With the withholding of genuine communication which the lines 1-2 express, there is a decisive turn in Force toward the art.
Robert Duncan in The HD Book picks up the word clairaudient to describe the undercurrent of rhetoric moving through (and moving) a poetic image, a rhetoric acquiring second-sight (“clair”) and second-hearing (“audient).” As an adjective, audient means “[l]istening; paying attention to sounds; (also) having the capacity to listen and understand” (OED). “Clairaudient” goes farther: “The power or faculty of hearing something not present to the ear but regarded as having objective reality” (Merriam-Webster).
This foretelling function, a classic (and Romantic) role for a poet, is dissassembled in Force (and elsewhere in other books of the Alphabet). "Form gathers force (my credo)," Silliman writes at the end of Lit, "for what purpose but use, source for an assault on habit." (See PhillyTalks 3 for Silliman on habit, in his exchange with Jeff Derksen.) This is a very different social orientation for poetry than the one that Duncan gives when he reads James Joyce as clairaudiently foretelling WWI in the poem "I hear an army charging upon the land” (XXXVI of Chamber Music). Foretold, so what? Habit got the war on anyway.
By line 3, Force turns away from the rhetorical pageantry of a public voice and towards the words as such that the eyes see before them. (Aside: In response to the same conditions, Bob Perelman will try a different tack by directly engaging with such a voice in The First World and Face Value.) Instead of “clair” — full of light, illumination — there is, l. 3, just “eye.” The eye sees the materialized text before it.
“is thus tragedy first
then farce, majestic speech”
A famous satirical quip of Marx’s is that the rhetoric of history is such that, the first time round, it’s tragedy, the second time farce.
The poetic instruction to count words acknowledges tragedy, the tragedy of late capital, that the aesthetic remains at one-or-more removes from the immediacy of a direct intervention in the life of the nation — speech-based poetics’ hope. Instead, there is a parallel to the way modernist writers were at one-or-more removes despite their vainest materializing efforts (hence the Language Poets' broad interest in revising modernism's story, notably the overlooked figure of Louis Zukofsky, who, too, counted words per line). Tragey, yes, the first time round, then farce: the inevitable farcical dimension must be struggled with, socially and aesthetically.
Force was written 1979-1980, run-up year to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the “make America great again” white man of the GM hour. So that the second time — Reaganism (Thatcherism, Mulroneyism…) — is farce, if the first time, the postwar America-is-great boom under cover of Cold War was tragedy.
These opening five lines are the oldest lines of the Alphabet, lines over which Silliman pondered for months before gleaning their instruction for a way forward.
Often in the Alphabet, the order of composition at any level doesn’t match the ordering of text, and so no special privilege is given these five lines — they don’t appear as in, for instance, a preface to the Alphabet, such as Wiliams’s to Book I of Paterson, where he prognosticates: “To make a start, / out of particulars / … / […] rolling / up the sum […].” the Alphabet emphasizes the arbitrary, conventional nature of arrangement.
Somewhat against the grain of arrangement, I give these five lines, and the poem Force, a privileged position in the Alphabet, a “genetic” and chronological priority, because the struggle in the poem, as I read it, is partly with poetry itself in its effort to respond to the current conditions (Bay Area and national politics included), since neither an entirely speech-based nor an entirely shard-like poetics seems adequate to the overwhelming reality.
In this respect, Force is, in my view, a partial account of the making of a poet. To briefly show this:
Education of the Poet
Education, what is it? How’re you going to get it as a poet? Where or to whom do you turn? If you’re a poet, you want to find, in that genial Creeleyism, “like-minded folk,” of poets and poetry. But also, you want to find the good books to read. Yep, there are “good” books that are more like monuments than pizza — which means, too, there is the other kind of book. The other kind prevails. “Up against the whiteout,” educational institutions and training of various kinds appears throughout Force. Anyway, our poet finds his teacher in print, therefrom the kind of education he needs. In the poem, the teacher goes unnamed. From the description, I’d say William Carlos Williams:
“taught himself unthoughtfully spoken
toward the sake of
particulars […]”
How to Write
Visions happen in dreams (ask Piers the Plowman), and one does emerge here that with insight into how it is with this poet in terms of proportioning two vast categories impinging on the history of the lyric: being and writing:
“[…] dream
clashing long after strong
seams sighted the writing
as scaffold to building
reveals little within […]”
Writing as mere scaffold is the profound insight. Writing as without intrinsic interiority, despite the lyric tradition suggesting otherwise (to find your voice, to express your feelings, etc). Writing is outward-facing, an external, social medium / product. The poet’s being will be oriented that way, toward phenomenological description of the world, instead of inward self-direction toward the Bildungsroman spiritual journey, the middle class apprenticeship of character, personality and experience. Building versus Bildung, great pun!
How to Live
How to make a go of it as a poet? Seeing as for this poet writing is outwardly directed, turning to
“[…] dawn’s quiet rescue
repeats robin’s elm admonition
‘seek only immediate necessity
worm/twig/wind/sun’”
but not so far as to lose sight of household management, having, for instance
“[…] clear
clean salt water seen
solving drought[….]”
when even today that’s a long shot (GlobalCitizen.org’s statistic is 1% of the world’s population drinks desalinated water as of 2016).
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