Tjanting (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

It’s true we need another Allen Ginsberg. Unfortunately, I don’t see one on the horizon, unless Ron Silliman can get himself arrested.

Of all the Language Poets, Silliman’s express-line writing was and is the one that stuck to my ribs. It was so thingy, so specific, so formally radical, so hard-headed, yet witty, and now and then, in spite of itself, lyric. I liked his post-industrial music. I loved Ketjak and Tjanting and Paradise ... And the reach – the compulsion to pull everything in.

Silliman’s writing is fun to read: Its pleasure lies in the gradual unfolding of intricate forms and in the mix of puns, declarations, sounds and sights from our daily environment, the range of references from philosophy to baseball.

Silliman’s major long poem published in a new edition and introduced by Barrett Watten. Tjanting abounds in a wealth of cultural reference and explores the strategies and procedures of constructing a reality in language. This classic text will delight readers and provide students of modern American poetry with a key work of the late 20th Century.