Michael E. O'Reilly

Ron Silliman is a wild rebel of the signifier  "Language is material and primary and what's experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations."  Steve McCaffery        I want to talk about Ron Silliman’s Book, Tjanting, as well as his views on how politics and class fit into poetry. How does Silliman think poetry can help the lower class, or promote political change in America?  What is so political about writing poetry that people might like but that nobody understands? Why does he call them paragraphs when there is no unifying subject matter?  If language is a commodity, whose meaning has become transparent, how does that effect real-life oppression and hegemony among humans?                Tjanting is a book that exemplifies Silliman’s idea of “The New Sentence.”  ...

I have read Ashbery in anthologies, and decided I like him, but The Tennis Court Oath is the first complete collection of his I have read.  It doesn’t seem like he takes on the subject of popular culture in this book, the way he does in some of his later stuff.  A couple of my favorites in other books include “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”                                                         This book is full of quickly changing moods, tones and settings which provide a rather bone-jarring ride through each poem.  It didn’t, however, seem so dislocate me to the point that I no longer care about the poem, which happens when I read Susan Howe or Gertrude Stein.        As disjointed as the lines of this book are, they stand alone as good lines, so t...

David Melnick adopts a chaotic sort of anti-grammar to comment on the lives of the men in Aida, in his poetry book of the same name (1983).  His use of language as something outside the normal rules of English usage has a direct, symbolic link to the gay lifestyle, which exists on the outside of a post-Roman, and very Christian cultural grammar.  Melnick positions his writing within a frame of Greek mythological figures, presumably for the purpose of establishing a paradigm of acceptance and normalcy, regarding homosexuality in ancient Greek and Roman times. The abandonment of traditional English grammar in conjunction with the subject matter of homosexuality illustrates the modern, western world’s lack of accommodation and understanding of homosexuality.  In other words, Melnick had chosen to take something “outside” the system, and talk about it using a grammar that operates outside the same system.  In doing so he says:  Homosexuality is outside the system, ...

Niedecker's various rhyme techniques, in three poems Not all of Lorine Niedecker’s poems involve a rhyme scheme, but the ones that do vary widely in their pattern and effect.  In fact, the word “scheme” might be inappropriate.  It would be more accurate to say that she employs an “anti-rhyme scheme,” because the placement of true rhyme and slant rhyme is unpredictable.  She seems to have moved progressively toward the non-rhyming poem as she moved into the objectivism with which she became commonly associated. These three poems serve as markers along the trajectory of her shift toward objectivism. Although all three were written early in her career, I cannot say with authority that they were written in the order they appear in The Granite Pail, or in the order I present them.  The first poem follows a scheme of true and slant end rhymes.  The second poem includes internal true rhymes, even though the rhyming words occur at the end of lines (see example for expl...

It’s a shame that Clark Coolidge wasn’t a teacher, because he coherently puts together this thoughts regarding a kind of poetry that gives most people trouble.  In his 1977 address to the Naropa Institute, he is able to explain his syntax-challenged poetry in a way that makes sense.  His interest in geology is helpful, because he is able to use crystal growth as a way to begin accessing his work.  Other geological phenomena such as fault lines and sedimentation are employed, as well.  In his essay, At Clark Coolidge:  Allegory and the Early Works, Michael Golston illuminates Coolidge’s work with the torch of structuralism, using Roman Jakobsen to back him up.  Quoting from Coolidge’s Smithsonian Deposition, Golston takes note of the innate structuralism found there.  “. . . The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes.”  These “sunken axes” he refers to are the horizontal axes of language,...

The dissimilar poetics of George Oppen and Susan Howe Although she was born almost thirty years later, it can be said she is a contemporary of Oppen’s comeback period, when he emerged after a 25-year hiatus from writing.  Back in the ‘30s, he had been associated with the Objectivist group that included Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Carlos Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Lorine Niedecker.  Oppen was experimental as an objectivist, and is experimental at times in his later work.  Howe is experimental most of the time. (I feel the term “experimental” seems to have lost a bit of meaning over the past thirty years or so.  After all, the central irony of experimental poetry is that the people writing “against” the current norms of poetry are often times members of the academic core of poetry, which happens to also represent much of mainstream poetry.)  Nevertheless, both Howe and Oppen have done things that can legitimately be called experimental, at differe...

Robert Creeley’s book, Pieces , is very much concerned not only with a struggle to return to an original body or form, but the coming to terms with the possibility that such a return cannot exist.  There are several ways Creeley takes on the idea of “form,” and the word itself is pervasive throughout Pieces.  He starts with a quote from Allen Ginsberg’s Song:  “I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born.”                                         Those lines resonate in poems, like “The Boy.”  “My mother had hair,/ and when I grew older, so did/ I, all over my face, which I wanted/ to be there, and grew a beard henceforth.” Clearly, we find the physical images relating to the desire to return to the womb. There is also the strong desire in Creeley’s voice to return to the physical forms of this world....

T.S. Eliot’s poem, "Gerontion" begins with “an old man in a dry month” and ends with “a dry brain in a dry season,” as if the fertile rains that would have brought a sprout of faith have passed him by, leaving him spiritually shattered upon the shore of history.  The idea of history is as important in this poem as it is in the rest of Eliot’s work.  His examination of history is an examination of the way we look at ourselves and the way we look at the past.     Part of Eliot’s rhetorical strategy in this poem is to employ a first-person narrative voice of a man named Gerontion.  This gives the reader the sense that the speaker has some authority on the subject because he, as a person, is an object upon whom history acts, as well as a subject who interprets and therefore creates history.  Right away he tells you that he was not there fighting during the war, yet he was very much a part of the war’s implications.      The poem deals w...

Compression and confinement are central ideas in relation to both the poetics and textual representation of Susan Howe’s work in The Midnight .  This book has five parts, two prose sections, (which I would not call fiction or nonfiction ) and three poetry sections.  Although we will address our thesis topic with regard to the prose sections, we are mainly concerned with the poetry sections; these are one, three and five, entitled “Bed Hangings I,” “Bed Hangings II” and “Kidnapped.”  All of the poems share a common graphic quality.  Most pages consist of about eight lines which are left-justified, but centered in the middle of the page, with equal space on all margins.  In addition, at no point is the use of a hyphen required, because rather than simply bringing in the right margin, Howe has either chosen words that fit her “box,” or adjusted the size of the box to fit the words.  Whatever the technique, she achieves a near-perfect square or rectangle each ...

In his book, Night of a Thousand Blossoms , Frank X. Gaspar has done a great job of making poems out of complete sentences that vaguely resemble prose poems.  There is attention paid to line and language that makes them much more than little narratives clipped from the life of a stargazing, lotus-sitting California surfer.  These first-person musings achieve a stylistic beauty not through elevated, over-workshoped technique, but through more reliable phraseology.  The diction is poetic, the arrangement is musical, but above all, (and what really makes it poetry) Gaspar repeatedly asks the big questions of the universe that poets have historically asked: those of salvation, morality and the meaning of  human existence.  While always looking to the stars, he looks to Buddha, the Hindu gods, the Greek gods and various biblical figures for the answers.  Night of a Thousand Blossoms is indeed a work of the interrogative; a work that explores hunger and demands t...