Under Albany
Ron Silliman
Salt Publishing, 2004, ($14.99)
http://www.saltpublishing.com

It is high time to explicate Language Poetry.  There is enough distance from the movement now that it can be spoken of honestly and without undue reverence or scorn.  After all, Ron Silliman, one of Language Poetry’s foremost practitioners, is now a blogger – (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) – and, perhaps, the ultimate explicator.

Under Albany consists of a series of autobiographical and explicative prose pieces (they might be prose poems, they might not) that enrich the 100 sentences of his 1981 poem, Albany.  Silliman’s new work is, in general, a rich and unique memoir that is both frank and honest, and which possesses a unique and identifiable voice.  Authors of books are both the best and worst sources to consult about those books.  With this caveat in mind, Silliman wrote, in a personal correspondence, that in writing the book he “wanted both to write a memoir and to investigate that particular poem, which is the first section of The Alphabet.  Each sentence of Albany is thus used as a ‘header’ for a section of Under Albany.  Some of the sections are very directly what I was thinking about when I wrote it, others are more free form association.”  Thus, the majority of the text of Under Albany is actually under Silliman’s poem Albany.  And the new poem is, in many ways, a comment on the old poem filled with meta-sentences such as “The ‘average’ sentence in Albany is 6.94 words long” (5).  These meta-reflections and the general structure of Under Albany provide many opportunities for critical ruminations on the nature of Silliman’s oeuvre and of Language Poetry in general.

Although Language Poetry (‘LangPo’ in some formulations) resists definition at every chance, some of its key practitioners have, from time to time, attempted one.  The poet Charles Bernstein said in an interview that the Language Poets

were interested in poetry that did not assume a syntax, a subject matter, a vocabulary, a structure, a form, or a style but where all these were at issue, all these were explored in the writing of the poem.  In the 70s, much of the then conventional poetry relied on the use of a consistent ‘voice,’ but if such-voice-centered poetry was rejected it wasn’t to deny voices or voicing or even speech but to allow them to be newly discovered in the poem.¹

Additionally, in her essay, “The Secret History of the Dividing Line,” the poet Susan Howe wrote that

it's a “community of concern for language as the centre of whatever activity poems might be.”  Silliman would also confirm that this notion may be expounded in any style or method providing the product is not merely a ‘voice poet’, that is, the writer conveying to reader a ‘natural’ message in narrative sequence …Language poetry is about going beyond the boundaries ‘traditional/conventional’ language usage places on notions of meaning.

Language poetry was about critiquing the voice in the dominant poetic paradigm of the time. By dismantling the existing and established discourse and subverting the subsequent ideologies often attached to this discourse, Language Poets often force the reader into an uncomfortable metaphysical (and linguistic) space. 

Silliman himself, in another personal correspondence, said that there

are a million ways to define Language Poetry, none very adequate, in part because the term was coined by people who needed a name in order to dismiss something.  It is fair to say that language poets were the first to deal with the materials of their language as a conscious component of the craft of writing, much in the way that abstract expressionist painters used paint.  But one could also say that it was the group of New American Poetry acolytes who all took theory seriously.  Or that it was the avant-garde poetry that the war in Vietnam generated.  However, my favorite definition is that a Language Poet is anybody who has ever been accused of being a language poet.

These attempts to define Language Poetry are useful in varying degrees and can be regarded as a springboard for thinking about Silliman’s new book and Language Poetry in general.

By now the heyday of Language Poetry has passed, as many emerging poets have found it to be too austere and, for some, lacking a certain humanism.  As Christian Bök notes in his essay for After Language Poetry, Darren Wershler-Henry “has at times remarked that, because Langpo seems to have exhausted itself without generating any innovative successors, what Langpo needs is ‘a good swift kick in the ass’ - a new mandate that might jumpstart our creativity, exploiting the lessons of Langpo on behalf of some other, as yet unimagined, practice.”² Or, as Juliana Spahr has remarked in slightly different circumstances:

language writing for people who come after language writing (I guess that would be anyone who was, like me, still in grade school when L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E first came out) can sometimes be a difficult topic.  Despite being a movement with roots in turn of the century modernism and a movement that is over twenty years old, language writing can continue to take credit for a complicated knot of emotions and reactions among those who were in grade school in the 1970s.³

But even as Language Poetry’s initial glimmer has faded, its lessons have not.  Many of today’s younger poets are re-infusing Language Poetry with a new kind of lyricism, and they are re-imagining the various possibilities that writers like Silliman have inspired. Because this is occurring in poetry right now, it seems a perfect time for an explication of LangPo by one of its founding members, Ron Silliman.  Under Albany enacts a great stride in this direction.

Because of Under Albany’s unique “relational” structure, it is necessary to understand the scope, at least in part, of Albany before moving on to Under Albany.  Marjorie Perloff help provides some understanding of this earlier work:

(Albany) is a long prose paragraph made up of one hundred ‘New Sentences,’ to use Ron Silliman's own term, defined in a now well-known (and hotly debated) essay by that name.  The ‘new sentence’ is conceived as an independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences that precede and follow it.  Like a line in poetry, its length is operative, and its meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system…. The signature of Albany is a "normal" declarative sentence (‘I can't afford an automobile’), or part of a sentence (‘To own a basement,’ ‘Died in action’), sometimes commonsensical, sometimes aphoristic, sometimes an item in a newspaper or on television.⁴

And, in order to understand the original poem Albany, it is necessary to examine Silliman’s notion of the New Sentence.  According to Bob Perelman, in his essay on Silliman’s Ketjak, the New Sentence is

a term that is both descriptive of a writing procedure and, at times, a sign of literary-political proselytizing.... A new sentence is more or less ordinary itself, but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance: new sentences are not subordinated to a larger narrative frame nor are they thrown together at random. Parataxis is crucial: the autonomous meaning of a sentence is heightened, questioned, and changed by the degree of separation or connection that the reader perceives with regard to the surrounding sentences… The new sentence, on the other hand, is defiantly unpoetic. Its shifts break up attempts at the natural reading of universal, authentic statements; instead they encourage attention to the act of writing and to the writer's multiple and mediated positions within larger social frames.⁶

Eric Rosenfield points-out, in his analysis of Silliman’s poem “VIII” that “The new sentence, in his (Silliaman’s) view, was an attack on traditional narrative – as the narrative suppresses immediate attention.”⁷ It’s interesting to note that Silliman’s “new sentences” from Albany are now old. These sentences of Albany are explicated through the use of Under Albany’s many “old sentences” in the sense that they employ a more conventional and, perhaps, linear discourse.  It’s essentially an interrogation of the interrogatory by traditional sentences.  That which once interrogated normal poems is now being interrogated by “normal” sentences.  This same paradoxical view is exercised throughout the book.    

Under Albany is an autobiographical work that riffs directly from an earlier work that remains in opposition to the fundamentals of autobiography.  In Under Albany the reader learns that many sentences from Albany were autobiographical in the original Albany.  For example, the line from Albany: “Revenue enhancement” is followed by the new line “I do not recall a time in which I was not the absolutely poorest kid in my class.”  Ironically, this new interest in autobiography might undercut some of the original positions of the Language Poets, such as their critique of the poet’s voice.  This tension is exemplified by Silliman writing, “Autobiographer’s motto: You have a right to remain silent” (51).     

Furthermore, Under Albany can be regarded as a historical document in the form of an original document.  This format makes the text readable as a poetic work of Ron Silliman’s as opposed to remaining only readable as a historical document.  It is a history that can be read poetically.  For example, the original new sentence from Albany, “If it demonstrates form they can't read it,” is updated with the following sentences: “The reception of my writing can be divided easily into two periods—before the publication of Ketjak in 1978 and after.  I'd been toying with the idea of a larger prose poem and the idea of something programmatic” (61).  This type of poetic history in some sense justifies all that Language Poetry had to offer and, in another sense, marks the final passing of LangPo’s moment. 

However, since Under Albany is partially an explication of Albany, I had hoped for a little more textual analysis and, perhaps, critical “revelation.”  As it stands, the book is primarily composed of vignettes that illuminate the lines in Albany and quasi theoretical-riffs on those original lines.  This first category is exemplified by this original line from Albany, “I used my grant to fix my teeth,” which is followed by the sentence-long story “Eating a biscuit in Perkos’ café on Henderson in Porterville, 1997, I break another tooth” (39).  In this second category belongs the original line “They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip,” which is followed by the new rendering: “We improve our heroes out of no need of their own.  This is why, at least in part, the reaction to any statement that seems to attack this defended image is met with such fierce opposition” (68).  Unfortunately, these two categories are sometimes not enough to maintain a critical interest in the book.   

In Under Albany, Silliman confronts his old poem and old ideas with his current life and new ideas, but he does not confront it critically/poetically.  That is, I’m not sure if he takes his original Albany seriously enough.  Marjorie Perloff addresses the complexity and “seriousness,” if you will, of the poem when she writes the following:

Albany relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause, whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional ‘expressivity’ by refusing to present us with a consistent ‘I,’ not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be . . .

It seems that Silliman himself should be able to take his old poem just as seriously unless, of course, there wasn’t that much seriousness here to begin with. But, perhaps this could be the point? Has Silliman duped us in a sense?  That is, the mask of irony might in fact be the guiding principal here, even if the impulse in Under Albany is an earnest one.

Ultimately, the experience of reading Under Albany is very pleasurable, in the sense that Barthe’s meant it via a kind of “jouissance”; it’s like learning a slew of breezy secrets that are sometimes sensual and sometimes enigmatic; it’s as if Silliman has made the reader feel like he’s keeping a secret by somehow shunning you, while also making you feel privileged and welcome at the same time. 

---------------------- Notes

(1) http://home.jps.net/~nada/bernstein.htm

(2) http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/bok.html

(3) http://www2.hawaii.edu/~spahr/afterl.htm

(4) http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/langpo.html

(5) http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/ketjak.htm

(6) http://www.ericrosenfield.com/longtitle.html