Silliman, Ronald, 1946-....

American poet.

American poet, writer, and editor, born in Pasco, Washington, in 1946.

Has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area most of his life, and is associated with the Language School of writers. Attended Merritt College, San Francisco State Univ., and the Univ. of California at Berkeley. Editor of the anthology In the American tree (1986) and of the magazine Socialist review.

Biography

Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, in 1946. Raised north of Berkeley in Albany, California, Silliman has spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Merritt College in Oakland, San Francisco State University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Silliman has long been associated with the Language poets. This group of poets dates, according to Silliman, from the 1971 issue of This. Controversies over Language writing have been reflected in many influential journals of contemporary writing. Although the designation "Language writer" is applied to a disparate group and is considered a misnomer by some of them, most Language writers agree that conventions of language structure everyday experience; and most mistrust what they consider the unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions of the New American poetics. Typically, Language writing redresses the illusions that words signify separately constituted things and concepts and that grammar discloses relations among them. Instead, Language is thought constitutive of that which it signifies and governs, through grammar, the relations which order things.

Ron Silliman's publications include Moon in the 7th House (Gunrunner Press, 1968), Crow (Ithaca House, 1971), Mohawk (Doones Press, 1973), NOX (Burning Deck, 1974), Ketjak (This, 1978), Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps (Tuumba Press, 1978), Legend (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980), Tjanting (The Figures, 1981), Bart (Potes & Poets Press, 1982), ABC (Tuumba Press, 1983), Paradise (Burning Deck, 1985), The Age of Huts (Roof, 1986), The New Sentence (Roof, 1987), Lit (Potes & Poets Press, 1987), and What (The Figures, 1988). He was the editor of the influential anthology In the American Tree (The National Poetry Foundation, 1986), and currently he is the editor of Socialist Review.