I just got my copy of Tjanting in the mail yesterday from Salt Publishing. Already,  I am wondering if attempting to read Pound’s Cantos, Ron Silliman’s Tjanting, and Anne Carson’s Nox all during the same week (though I do not expect to finish them in a week – this is an exercise in personal edification and pleasure, not a book report) is not a bridge too far. Especially with the Byron’s far less demanding (though no less satisfying) Childe Harold beckoning.

Silliman’s prose poem style takes some getting used to. I got a taste of it when I read My Life by Lyn Hejinian a few years ago (I picked it up in a bookstore in Seattle – the name now escapes me).

No doubt Silliman himself would castigate me as an enabler of the “School of Quietude” and it is never fun for a one time rebellious youth to look in the mirror at his mid-thirties self and see someone who does not properly appreciate the avant garde.

I am, beyond a doubt, a creature of the “line” in poetry. I love prose poems, but typically shorter ones, that don’t go on for more than a page and a half. At that length, they still feel tied to the idea of “line” to me. But perhaps that is part of Silliman’s project in these dense structures?

He has written about the “New Sentence” and one is necessarily reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the argument that the sentence is the most basic, atomic (in the Greek sense) part of language. But, of course, I never properly understood Wittgenstein.

All I can say is that I hope I have the patience to build a greater appreciation for Silliman and for Language Poetry in general. I learned a lot from poets who altered and reformulated how the “line” is used poetry. Perhaps it’s time I learned something from someone who has done away with it altogether.