Ron Silliman: The Age of Huts (compleat)

The Age of Huts (compleat), Ron Silliman (U of California P, 2007)

There's something about Silliman's work that has always been just there for me – an element of the landscape, a big looming presence of possibility. I like the "compleat" Age of Huts better than the old Roof edition – as LZ says somewhere, "more of a good thing." Tho I don't think Ron would appreciate the comparison, I'm put in mind of the "fractal" character of Eno's ambient stuff – ie, the experience of hearing the 61-minute Thursday Afternoon, in details, isn't different from hearing a 6-minute extract: it just that the former is longer. (That longer, however, is a pretty crucial difference.) A poetry which not only (in Auden's phrase) "makes nothing happen," but in which nothing happens. Or rather, nothing big, dramatic happens, only a constant flow of small-scale events. "A poem without development, without events, without end" ("2197"). Every time I read RS I start covering notebook pages with diagrams & numbers for some large-scale recombinative project which I never end up writing.

[52/100]

On the edge...

of the end of the semester. A storm of papers will arrive later today, to be followed later this week by a stack of final exams. And then I can get to work on what I ought to be writing. But for now a brief breather.

***

Snatching some time to read in the interstices: Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts (compleat); I've known Age for yonks, thru the old yellow Roof edition. "Sunset Debris" and "The Chinese Notebook" are old friends. And I've become very fond of "Ketjak" now. (The recursive structure assures it that by the time you finish the poem, you're either very fond of it, or driven to active loathing.) I have the typically anal project of working thru Ron's big poem Ketjak (not the short "Ketjak"), as outlined in the preface to Age of Huts, in order of its parts: Age of Huts, then Tjanting, then The Alphabet. That's what, maybe 1500 pages of elegantly processed quotidianity? Should keep me off the streets for awhile.

Mostly thru Beckett's How It Is. One of those books that when you lay it down, you can't pick it up again, if you know what I mean. Oh, it's brilliant all right – I wouldn't want at all to sell the thing short of brilliance. But it's frankly the  single most painful read I've ever essayed. The unpunctuated paragraphs are one thing, forcing you to read at pretty much speaking pace, pausing to internally punctuate & repunctuate at every turn, looking for where the pauses ought to (or might) fall. But while that's a painstaking process (a painful process?) not unfamiliar to the reader of contemporary poetry, it's the bleakness of the "action" that really does it for (to?) me. In a few words: Conveyance: standard Beckett blind mud-crawling; Diet: canned good of dubious provenance & sell-by date; Communication media: fingernails in back, digit in arsehole, can-opener to buttocks, sharp knocks to the skull. And other nastinesses, not least of which is the intrusion of "Love" into this hellish scenario. Kathy Acker, by comparison, is sunshine & lollipops.

***

Observations on the state of modernist studies, having read thru almost 200 job applications:

•James Joyce stock remaining high, with no perceptible dips; still King of Hill

•historicism the order of the day; even the crustiest formalists apt to swath their readings in a decent chiton of historical context or anecdote

•William Faulkner holding steady – who woulda thought?

•Langdon Hammer of Yale the busiest dissertation director in the land; how does he find time to chair the department and write James Merrill's biography?

•the Edwin Rolfe renaissance still failing to materialize, despite all of Cary Nelson's best efforts

•poetry, alas, the big loser: by my admittedly unscientific estimate (ie, I don't have the notes in front of me), something like 15% of dissertations

FSG freebies

One of the more trifling and fatuous manifestations of Ron Silliman’s manic desire to divide the poetry world down the middle (sheep : right / goats : left) is his periodic boastings about what a small proportion of his poetry collection is made up of books published by trade houses.* (I believe it’s precisely 2% – or maybe he only owns two books from trade publishers, I can’t remember.) I can see his point, however: the last time I winnowed the poetry shelves, it seemed like every other book heading out the door was from Athenaeum, Random House, or some other mighty New York name.

Nonetheless, I’m a sucker for free books, & Farrar Straus & Giroux – now of course a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck – is remarkably happy to throw free books my professorial way at a moment’s notice. Right now I’m skipping thru James Fenton’s Selected Poems, just to get an idea of in precisely what ways boring English poetry differs from the cisatlantic variety. John Betjeman’s Collected Poems is useful both as a doorstop and as a reminder of how right Hugh Kenner could be: in certain quarters of English society – ie, where poets laureate are chosen & where books of poetry receive a wide readership – modernism simply never happened. Betjeman (1906-1984 – a near contemporary of Louis Zukofsky’s) is a walking, talking, versifying, & highly popular coelacanth – a 20th-century Victorian. But he’s better than Billy Collins.

All I know about Federico García Lorca, alas, I learned from Jack Spicer, and now that I finally have the Spaniard’s massive Collected Poems before me, I’m a bit at a loss as to where to begin. Any suggestions from anyone out there – favorite poems, favorite volumes? Steve Collis, you must know more about García Lorca than just an obscene Shane MacGowan lyric.

I never had a teacher or mentor who took Robert Lowell very seriously, so I happily missed the whole “Age of Lowell” buzz entirely. That is, I’ve never found him a poet that must come to terms with one way or another, & therefore I’ve never felt the need to savage his memory, to kowtow to his ghost, or even to spend much time with his work. Of the 4 collections I’ve read, I prefer the impacted formalism of Lord Weary’s Castle & The Mills of the Kavanaughs to the “ground-breaking” confessionalism of Life Studies & For the Union Dead. The recent FSG Selected Poems, which is before me now, seems to offer a handy way of assessing career without swallowing the whole bolus of his work. Of course, I wouldn’t even be offering it the inch-&-a-half of shelf space it’ll take up if it weren’t for some pregnant remarks by Peter O’Leary, a fellow whose recommendations I’m inclined to take seriously.

*By the way, any tendency on my part to rib Ron shouldn’t be mistaken for personal dislike (a swell guy, the fews times our paths have crossed), dislike of his poetry (I like and admire much of it), or disagreement with the general aesthetic tenor of his blog (I usually agree with it).