The Next Big Thing

My partner in rooming and doffing, Jen Coleman, has tagged me in a series of cryptic chainletters. It involves answering a series of questions revolving around a hypothetical, but unnamed "book," which I will pretend is referring to my forthcoming chapbook "10th Spectral Cannon," published by Hank's Original Loose Gravel (hanksoriginal.com).  

What is the working title of the book? 10th Spectral Cannon

 Where did the idea come from for the book? It's a section of a larger book, which is technically untitled but always gets called Spectral Cannon. 

 What genre does your book fall under? Colorful poetry.

 What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie
 rendition? Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers as an ampersand. Leo Daedalus as Ron Silliman. Richard Froude as all of the orange sentences. Homer Simpson's voice as the person talking about the dragonfly. Jen Coleman as the tongue-in-cheek sentences. That guy from Tron as Jeff Diteman.

 What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? Supercritical bottleneck.

 How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? As a formalist, that is hopelessly complicated.

 Who or what inspired you to write this book? I had a dream where I thought I could write all these sentences in different colors, and then if I wrote them again in yet different colors they would say something different entirely. I thought it was a Ron Silliman thing. It was. He needs to acknowledge this.

 What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? It's designed by Morgan Ritter. She is a famous artist. 

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Jim McCrary is no ordinary agency.

 My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:  Crag Hill, Morgan Ritter, Paul Maziar, Chris Ashby, Sam Lohmann.

When this you see...

Someone else already has a blog dedicated to this (and it's not Ron), but it seems like a good place to start. I've had two dreams involving Ron Silliman (don't worry, that's as creepy as it gets). The first was in 2009, and he wasn't in it, but the dream was about a form of poetry involving a system of shifting colors throughout a text, a mnemonic device that would control a system of permutations. It was clearly inspired by some things he actually said in The Age of Huts. If you write the same sentence in a different pen, is it a different sentence (forgive me, I'm paraphrasing). I began the poem, actually using the strategy (poorly described here, and for good reason), sometime around last January, and am halfway through it.

The second dream, more recent was about catching him read at an arena (and I want to say in Seattle, but, again, it was in my head). A huge event space, and we got good seats. I was excited. I will be excited to finally see him read the first week of November, in New York.

The Age of Huts may be the first book of contemporary poetry I ever picked up (though there was a stack of others to follow it). I must have discovered the blog around the same time, and shortly thereafter met the poets of Portland, and as the dialogues began, here in place, and the web in space, I found myself in awe of the side of poetry that is theory and opinion. The former I think I was predisposed to, though it was mostly private, and before I realized there was a nebulous community simulteneously here and there, it was much for general, for me, than something concerning poetry. Opinion- how can I claim to be unfailiar to its auspices. And yet it seemed to me like a large bat slowly opening its wings before me, or a sad flag sagging at first, and then beginning to beat fiercely.

One of the first things I noticed in this new world was the disdain of the various for the choices Ron made with his spotlight. The opinion of opinion. He certainly has made interesting choices on the light itself he chooses to cast, especially with his reorganization of the hierarchies of those at work into the School of Quietude and the post-avant, with a certain appreciation for the latter, though the connotation of the name is not necessarily positive from a modernist standpoint, and then the School of Quietude, an aggrandizing name to some degree, for the apparent opposition. From this vantage, I believe him to be more diplomatic than he sometimes gets credit for. I have on at least one occasion noted his appreciation for certain Quietists, so the label (basically undefined, again) does not refer to things like 'good' or 'bad' poetry.

As a poet, and critic, I think he is a practitioner of great subtlety. I see his forebear, or a very significant forebear as a writer to Ron being the composer (and writer) John Cage. He at least within his own work seems to be invested in the indeterminacy of experience, his work a chronicle of his rotating and shifting perceptions. Not non-egoic, to be sure, the tradition appears to be in the independence of each sentence or statement as it follows the last, in his long work, The Age of Huts. He at one point thought he would contain all of his work in a single poem called the Alphabet, but it doesn't seem the alphabet was large enough a signifier, as he now places the Alphabet aside Universe, alongside Tjanting and Age of Huts, as Ketjak.

Another thing I can appreciate is one who changes their mind. Creating an arc, and ark. Look forward to seeing you, and remember.