Poetry (it seems) is Ron Silliman’s life. He started publishing
poetry in his early twenties, at first in mainstream journals like Poetry
Northwest and TriQuarterly but moved away from this kind of poetry
fairly soon. Today he is probably one of the most influential figure in
contemporary poetics (at least according to the Poetry Foundation) and an
important part of the original group of language poets. I could write whole
paragraphs about him and his amazing work which encompasses more than 30 books
of poetry, critical work, collaborations and anthologies and includes
ground-breaking ideas like the “new sentence”. Since the 1970s he has been
working on one complex piece of work entitled Ketjak which is made up of a series of individual books: The Age of Huts (1974-1980), Tjanting (1979-1981), The Alphabet (1979-2004), and Universe (2005-present). Each of
these books makes use of a slightly different procedure, so e.g. Tjanting is written according to the
Fibonacci number sequence, whereas The
Alphabet represents a long book made of smaller books, each of which
focuses on a different letter of the alphabet. I highly recommend reading the
biography on the Poetry Foundation website to get even a glimpse of the amplitude
of his work.
I am personally a big fan of language poetry and love
playing around with writing procedures and rigid constraints. I am with the
essayist Hank Lazer who once noted that language poetry is “following upon the
most adventurous work of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos
Williams and Jack Spicer.” Who would say no to adventures like that?
Following Ron Silliman’s procedure of Tjanting, I also chose a number sequence to determine the number of
sentences in each paragraph. In my case this number sequence is 5-smooth (aka
regular numbers),
a numbers sequence which also appears in music theory in the just
intonation of the diatonic scale. See below for the result.
Links:
5-smooth
So what.
Cool and caring sweet on a late night bar stool. She smiled.
Smooth over what matters. It was compelling. The gleam
caught in the brass yellow light shivering like a hot tune.
No, no, no. The definite certainty over little flicks as he
drew it to his mouth. Singing. Sweet sweet sugar baby in the murky tea.
Dancing like a rain cloud. A land of just. The pitches in
a single octave of this scale along rising steady as she. She shoe
off caught by. A blue in green.
This could be a tune if anyone cared to blow it. This could
be certainly certainty. Cool as caring in a long way past the bottom of a high
bowl. Don’t look at me that way. She said. She keep them on the whole time
while it trickled down her spine.
Don’t mingle. Stay sweet. Don’t be hasty with the burning
iron. In the corner of the room the lights drew to a close softly like the
blues. Track listing evenly divide powers of sixty, for example like the
k-smooth. It was sticking to the drum beat counterhoop clockwise. The brushes
on the skin like white sand through an hourglass. She kept it slow.
A filing cabinet with the dirty sleeves. Three fingers of
scotch and a roll of mints. On the bar it was getting later every minute.
Silver sheen in the dim before he went. It was a push and a pull and sticky
chewy saxophone. It was driving everybody to the corners of the night. This
isn’t a story. So what if this isn’t a plot. She shoe off caught by in the
rain.
Black keys stroking something heavy behind the backstage
door. Something sensually compelling behind the brass wood. She drew the stool
an inch closer smelling sweetly. She said. Little matters most. An American
song book lay open beside a bottle of red and a handkerchief. Rings of red and
Jupiter. Which might be the solution – a regular number. A caller disconnected,
resolved in aspirin. A simple tune filled the sky.
She shoe off caught by sense of midnight. The laces around
her thighs. My heavy breath so no no. So what. So better gin, no hesitation. He
held a feeble note in sweaty palms. Bright light she waited, playing jukebox. A
dime thrown through an algorithm into something white. A blue in green. A
sudden shudder. A tune changed numbers in a certain way. A strange fix and kind
of blue.
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