Ron Silliman

In the 1960s, Silliman attended Merritt College, San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, but left without attaining a degree. He lived in the San Francisco Bay area for more than 40 years.

As a published poet, he has taught in the Graduate Writing Program at San Francisco State University, at the University of California at San Diego, at New College of California and, in shorter stints, at Naropa University and Brown University.

Silliman has worked as a political organizer, a lobbyist, an ethnographer, a newspaper editor, a director of development, and as the executive editor of the Socialist Review (US). While in San Francisco, he served on numerous community boards, including the 1980 Census Oversight Committee, the Arson Task Force of the San Francisco Fire Department, and the State Department of Health's Task Force on Health Conditions in Locale Detention Facilities. Silliman worked as a market analyst in the computer industry before retiring at the end of 2011.

Silliman classifies his poetry as part of a lifework, which he calls Ketjak (the name refers to a form of Balinese dance drama based on an ancient text.) "Ketjak" is also the name of the first poem of The Age of Huts. If and when completed, the entire work will consist of The Age of Huts (1974–1980), Tjanting (1979–1981), The Alphabet (1979–2004), and Universe (2005-).

Although he has come to be associated with the Language poets for most of his career, Silliman came of age under the sign of Donald Allen's New American Poetry (1960). Regarding the latter publication, he's said that it is:

"unquestionably the most influential single anthology of the last century. It’s a great book, an epoch-making one in many ways."[1]

Silliman was first published in Berkeley in 1965. In the 1960s he was published by journals associated with what he calls the School of Quietude, such as Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, Southern Review and Poetry. Silliman thought that such early acceptance was less a recognition of his skills than a lack of standards or rigor characteristic of that literary tendency; he began looking for alternatives. Some of these alternatives were initiated through various editing projects that he took part in, which gave him the opportunity to work with a wide range of poets. One of the more influential projects was Silliman's newsletter called Tottels (1970–81),[2] that was one of the early venues for Language Poetry. He says that "The Dwelling Place," a feature article on nine poets published in Alcheringa (1975), was his "first attempt to write about language poetry".[3]

In 1976 and 1977, he co-curated a reading series with Tom Mandel, at the Grand Piano, a coffee house. Nearly three decades later, some of the poets who took part in this series were still collaborating on a work based on these readings.[4] This collaboration became part of what was called "an experiment in collective autobiography," co-authored by ten of these Language poets in San Francisco. When the project was completed, it consisted of 10 volumes in all. The other nine writers included were Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson. "[F]rom 1976 to 1979 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project, begun in 1998, was undertaken as an online collaboration, first via an interactive web site and later through a listserv."[5]

In 2012, Silliman was one of three Kelly Writers House Fellows at the University of Pennsylvania, together with Karen Finley and John Barth. In 2010, he received the annual Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation.

Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, as well as a PEW Fellow in the Arts in 1998.

He is memorialized in the Addison Anthology, a sidewalk portion in Berkeley, California containing plaques honoring poets and authors. Silliman was voted the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere[8]

• Works by or about Ron Silliman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• EPC page
• PennSound page
• Poem by Silliman at Milk Magazine
• Ron Silliman papers at UCSD
• Ron Silliman on Poets.org Profile and poems.
• Silliman profile at Modern American Poetry
• Silliman's Blog A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.
• Silliman at UbuWEB, online books
• Interview with The Argotist Online
• "Torque" & The New Sentence Silliman discusses background & conception of his influential "manifesto" The New Sentence
• “The New Sentence”: The original talk – given September 16, 1979 at the San Francisco Art Institute in Bob Perelman’s Talk Series
• Ron Silliman, making poetry, unmaking rules review of The Age of Huts (compleat) by Andrew Ervin, at philly.com, June 24, 2007
• The Grand Piano website devoted to the 10 volumes of "Collective Autobiography" by 10 of the so-called "West Coast" group of Language poets, including Silliman, which began serial publication in November 2006.