Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet.

In the 1960s, Silliman attended Merritt College, San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, and left without attaining a degree.

Silliman classifies his poetry as part of a lifework, which he calls Ketjak, a name which 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-).

In 1995 Silliman moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife Krishna and two sons.

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."

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), 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".

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. 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."