This just seems "off" to me. It's a list of 40 contemporary American writers who have had the most influence on Ron Silliman. For me a profound influence is profound, discernible in the writing itself, or somthing that actually makes a difference that could be defined. Say someone wrote a different way after reading a particular poet. Much as I like Ron's poetry, it is simply not that multi-dimensional, despite its length. It does one or two things well. Or even, for the sake of argument, let's say it does a half-dozen things. The sheer number of names on this list precludes the average influence (say the 40th most profound influence out of 80) from being very profound at all. Given that this is just the list of women and more than half of his profound influences are probably in the masculine gender. it's like saying that someone is your 80th best friend. Such a diluted concept becomes virtually meaningless.

I'm also assuming that not all writers we like and admire will actually have any real lasting influence on us. I've written a book on Lorca but I can't say that I've been influenced by Lorca. (Ojalá que no fuera así, although I generally think of being influenced by Lorca as a bad thing.) For me, the ratio is something like one in fifty. So even assuming Ron is more of a sponge, soaking up influences right and left, it's probably safe to say that this is more like "Writers Ron admires or approves of and wants to be thought of in association with."

(147)

*Ron Silliman. Paradise. 1985. 63 pp.

I thought I might as well re-read this book while I was at it. I've owned this volume since the late 80s probably, when I was teaching at Ohio State and would walk over to a bookstore on High Street that stocked Silliman and Coolidge books as though that were a normal thing to do. From there dates my love of palatino.

(128)

*Silliman. N/O. 1994. 107 pp.

Two sections of the Alphabet, "Non" and and "Oz," are collected in the volume, published by Roof.

The various sections of this long poem were not published by one publisher. Nor were they written or published in sequential order, A through Z. I acquired the parts that I own in different places and at different times, with no particular interest in being "completist." I don't even have all my Silliman books in one place. In short, my experience of this work is rather discontinous, fragmented. I suppose i could buy the complete work between two covers, available now, but what would be the fun of that?

It takes Ron about 4,000 words to twist around what should have been a positive--The Hat is a good magazine, good poems and poets, clearly defined editorial agenda--into a negative. With some misdirection about fonts (what's a "san seraph" by the way? I've never heard of that category of fonts! something to do with a lack of angels?), the lack of contributor notes, alphabetial order, etc.., a little slight of hand, he ends up with the conclusion that the strength of the magazine is really a weakness. Ok... if you so say so.

I'm totally biased, of course, since I am a Hat contributor. I think it's pound-for-pound about the best publication that's out there. That's the only criterion that matters. The more you overthink it, the less clear you will be on that.

Silliman is under the mistaken impression that the New York School of poetry does not RULE THE UNIVERSE. It's the West Coast bias again.

The problem of Silliman's Blog is not the insistence on the decrepitude of the school of quietude, but a kind of critical lassitude that allows him to praise almost every poet under the sun as long as the poet has a few concrete images and is not utterly cringe-worthy. Ron actually likes a hell a lot of poets, probably about 100 times the number I do. This ought to be admirable. Yet somehow I am not convinced. It often feels like he's conferring a perfunctory stamp of approval rather giving himself up to a genuine passionate engagement. He quote a poem today, for example, and says it's not a piece of bad writing if you take away a few metaphors. But this is manifestly false. It's crap even without those lame metaphors. The problem is not that Ron is too mean and narrow, but that he is way too generous. The SoQ label just is a convenience to save him for liking 1,000 other poets.

Let's see if this myth is true. Here is the first stanzas of a famous ED poem:

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room -



There's a yellow rose in Texas,
that I am going to see,
Nobody else could miss her,
not half as much as me.

She cried so when I left her,
it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her,
we nevermore will part.

The first problem is that the Emily D poem is in alternating lines of 4 and 3 stresses, whereas "The Yellow Rose of Texas" is in lines of 3 stresses. When you sing this song (not that you would do such a thing) you'll notice that there is no accented word sung on the fourth beat of the measure. In other words, you sing "NoBOdy ELSE coud MISS her [beat]..."

Of course you could fiddle around with the melody and the accentuation of the words to make it fit. But then the original statement turns into a far weaker claim: that any poem in any variation of the basic hymn or ballad stanzas can be sung to just about any melody in the hymn or ballad genre. In its weakest form: any stanza based on three or four beats per measure is going to be fairly adaptable to music in 4/4 time. If there's three beats in a line you just leave a rest at beat four of the music and you're fine. Yet you never hear anyone saying that all of Isaac Watt's hymns can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. Or for that matter the "fourteeners" of renaissance poetry. Chapman's Homer could be sung to any ballad tune also, if you want to make that argument.

All of Alexander Pope can be sung to the tune of St. Louis Blues, for that matter. That's not a statement about Alexander Pope. You can rhyme St. Louis woman with her diamond ring with a little learning is a dangerous thing but that just means that certain basic things are shared across a wide spectrum.

Problem number 2 is the Emily is very irregular. She'll throw ipentameters or dimeters, or even one-stress lines, in the mix fairly often. Or mix up her fours and threes in jagged, unpredictable patterns. It's not (only) the dashes that make the rhythms irregular. She's no Isaac Watt and no Alexander Pope either.

It's a little known fact that almost all of Ron Silliman's poetry can be sung to the tune of "Night in Tunisia." Now why anyone would want to sing his poetry to the tune of "Night in Tunisia," I have no idea. Just thought you'd like to know.

Ron had a kind of odd take on the post below... I can't say he's wrong to associate me with Bill Knott's weird sense of third-rate despair. Why was I projecting such negative feelings that particular day? It certainly does not reflect my mood today.

When I think of my Successful Academic Career I can't be too discontented. It wasn't all that hard to be one of the top people in my field, from the very beginning after my PhD. I think the secret was the I actually knew something about poetry and had found a way of translating that into an academically acceptable form. Looking around at people in my field I can't say that all actually know enough about poetry itself to be really first-rate critics. You can master the academic language but without really having anything to say. I've seen the opposite case too, people who can't seem to muster the discipline to write acceptable academic articles. Not that that's the only desirable goal in life, but it is the metric of my particular corner of the world.