item in a newspaper or on television. In their curious collisions these “casual”
sentences point to an author who is matter-of-fact, streetwise, and largely
self-educated; his is the discourse of a working-class man (as even the ¤rst
name Ron rather than Ronald suggests) who has slowly and painfully learned
the craft of poetry, a man who’s been around and has had to put up with
quite a bit, beginning with his father’s withholding of child support. Pain,
violence, and injustice are the facts of his life; sentence after sentence refers
to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And
even at the trivial level dif¤culty dominates: “It was hard to adjust my sleep-
ing to those hours when the sun was up.” “Becoming to live with less space.”
“I used my grant to ¤x my teeth.” And so on. Yet Silliman’s characteristic
formulations are by no means gloomy; on the contrary, his “voice” emerges
as sprightly, engaged, curious, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the
wordplay of “they call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs.”
Or, “Eminent domain. Rotating chair.” Or, “There were bayonets on campus,
cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch
time.”
No individual signature? Suppose we compare the prose of “Albany” to
the following two extracts:
(1) A and Not-A are the same.My dog does not know me.Violins, like dreams, are suspect.I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.The strait has frozen, and people are walking—a few skating—
across it.On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.The world is all that is displaced.Apples in a stall at the street corner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to
blackish red.140 Chapter 7