The Age of Huts (compleat) / Edition 1

by Ron Silliman

Overview

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520250161
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/09/2007
Series:	New California Poetry , #21
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ron Silliman is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry. His most recent books include Woundwood, Under Albany, MultiPlex, and N/O.and the weblog "Silliman's Blog" (ronsilliman.blogspot.com).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Ketjak
Sunset Debris
The Chinese Notebook

2197
I am Marion Delgado
I Meet Osip Brik
Rhizome
Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap
The Joy of Physics
San Francisco Destroyed by Fire
The Four Protozoas
Turk Street News
Invasion of the Stalinoids
Allied Gardens
The Scheme of Things
Considerations of Representability
Do City

Satellite Texts
Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps
BART

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"For readers who have not read Silliman before, The Age of Huts is a fine place to start."—Rain Taxi

"In Silliman's hands, language—so often manipulated for political coercion and economic gain—is restored to its most mechanical, primal functions, upending our ideas of the poem and of the sentence, and reawakening us to what it is we're doing when we're reading, writing, thinking."—Boston Review

Editorial Reviews

In Silliman’s hands, language—so often manipulated for political coercion and economic gain—is restored to its most mechanical, primal functions, upending our ideas of the poem and of the sentence, and reawakening us to what it is we’re doing when we’re reading, writing, thinking.

Boston Review - Rob Schlegel

For readers who have not read Silliman before, The Age of Huts is a fine place to start.

Rain Taxi - David Huntsperger

This new volume collects for the first time the four components of Silliman's seminal The Age of Huts, including one of the prose poems he is best known for, Ketjak. Silliman has taken on new guises since the original publications of these early works, especially as the author of the volumes-long The Alphabetand as inveterate blogger. This book shows a dynamic artist questioning nearly all the assumptions of English-language poetry. That he manages to dramatize the excitement of a very new way of thinking in an accessible way is a feat: no elitist head-in-the-clouds grandstanding here; Silliman writes in charismatic, direct sentences. "The Chinese Notebook" takes its primary structure from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations-numbered paragraphs that ask questions about language and form while playfully operating throughthem-while "Sunset Debris" is a serial autobiography strangely punctuated by questions concerning sex: "Isn't it that certain forms of language, for example of erotic content, focus perception away from the words and the syntagmemic chain, a world suppressed in reference to another?" This volume makes available one of the few must-have works of American avant-garde poetry of the late-'70s. (Apr.)

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