The Materialisation of Prose: Deixis, Automatisation, Integration and Lineation in

Ron Sillimans Tjanting

In the nineteen seventies San Francisco based poet Ron Silliman apparently
made a decision that must be seen as momentous for any poet: he chose to write
predominantly in prose. Since then he was written a number of remarkable prose
poems,1 many book-length, as well as creating a lasting, influential poetics of prose
outlined in his landmark work The New Sentence (1987). Brave though this decision
was, Silliman is, in fact, not alone in his move to prose. Steven Fredmans study of
poets prose lists over twenty contemporary American poets, primarily of the
postmodern avant-garde, who work significantly or almost exclusively in prose,
revealing, he argues, certain qualities of prose that equate with American poets
commitment to freedom and open-ness that poetic restraint does not always easily
accommodate.2

While this relationship between freedom and prose poetry is

questioned by Steven Monte who feels the constraint inherent to prose poetry has
been overlooked,3 other critics such as Margueritte Murphy stress that all is
permitted in a prose poem,4 a fact related directly to the rise of prose within
postmodern poetry, according to Michel Delville. 5 The rise of poets prose would
seem, therefore, on the surface at least, a rebellion against the constraint inimical to
the semiotics of poetry.
To view contemporary poets turn to prose as significant for contemporary
poetics alone, while logical, is only half the story. What if, as Murphy and Delville
argue in their commitment to the subversive nature of prose poetry, instead of
abandoning poetry, these writers were actually attacking prose?6 Wouldnt that be a
problem of some urgency in our prose-saturated age? Sillimans abandoning of the

restricted line as the base unit of poetic composition was a move to reinvigorate his
own practice and undermine the presuppositions of traditional, free verse poetics. 7
Yet, when one considers the aesthetic implications of new sentence poetry, apart
from abandoning the line and thus destabilising assumptions about poetry, the genre
that is destabilised the most by the breakdown of generic borders between poetry and
prose is, in fact, prose. In this article, then, I want to look at this poets prose not as
an innovation in poetry, poetry has suffered enough innovations over the years, but as
a major re-evaluation of the all-pervasive, all-encompassing, ideologically
problematic genre of prose itself.
The qualities of prose in general are taken to be its instrumentality, its
normative status due to its similarity to speech, its prolixity, its worldliness and its
transparency. Further, it is usual to establish these in contradistinction to poetry
which, dialectically, can be termed useless, abnormal, essential, transcendental and
opaque.8 However, the real distinction to be made between prose and poetry, I
believe, is that prose is a signifying practice based on an invisibility secured through
its perceived immateriality. Poetry is, in this fashion, something that happens to prose
to render its materiality visible, although historically, as we shall see, prose is in fact
something which happened to poetry several hundred years ago.

Whatever the

diachrony involved, I want to consider the effect that contemporary prose poetry has
had towards what I will call the materialisation of prose in contemporary literature.
Taking Ron Sillimans book-length poem Tjanting (1981) as an exemplary text I will
present a critical theory of the semiotics of prose based on just such a materialisation.
In particular, I want to show how poets prose destabilises prose by revealing three
essential characteristics of the genre: its ability to encompass exteriority, its

automatised cohesion through its integration of sentences into larger units of meaning
and its denial of semiotic materiality as such.
I base these characteristics of the prosaic on three major inroads into the study
of prose: Kittay and Godzichs idea of proses deictic autonomy, Russian formalist
ideas of prose as non-impeded, automatised language, particularly in the work of
Shklovsky, and Giorgio Agambens idea of prose as that which has no use of
enjambment. To put it more simply, a semiotics of prose must be based around issues
of reference, impeded automatism and lineation.

Each of these theories are

effectively definitions of proses invisibility which, when placed together, make it

clear that invisibility is the defining character of the semiotics of prose, an invisibility
that almost makes the idea of a semiotics of prose ludicrous. Such a semiotics will
allow us not only to describe the ideology of prose but also to view Sillimans
development of new sentence prose poetry as a mode of making visible prose through
an enforced materialisation.
Deictic Autonomy and Prosaic Invisibility
Kittay and Godzich locate the emergence of prose at the moment of the collapse in
influence of the French jongleur or story-teller and identify as central to proses
subsequent success its deictic function reliant on an ability to point outside the fabric
of the text to establish for the reader the significance and acceptability of that text.
The bodily presence of the jongleur meant that he could, through gesture, voice tone
and so on, engage the performance literacy of the audience to place the text in a
populated time and place. Kittay and Godzich suggest that with the new prose
technology operating in a new ideological moment a new kind of literacy was
required whose,

fundamental principle is the ability to distinguish between jongleur as a fleshand-blood practitioner of performance and the jongleur as the locus and
articulator of an aggregate of verbal and nonverbal semiotic codes. What is
required is the ability to abstract the function from the agent of
communication, a process of abstraction and analysis we link to prose
literacy.9
The key to prose, therefore, is its abstraction, a point Shklovsky also makes. 10 Prose
was able, technically, to abstract the means of grounding itself in the world from an
actual reliance on a real presence in the real world and in so doing made itself
ontologically self-sufficient. Using simple techniques like he said, they entered a
room, three years passed and so on, prose was able to point to the world at large
contained within the text using abstract functions. In contrast, the jongleur had to be
literally present and actually point indicating different identity, location, even the
passing of time through the skill of voice, gesture and a reliance on his audiences
performance literary. While this may seem a minor technical point, the move from an
embodied deixis to an embedded deixis, or the abstraction of the indicative function of
language from an actual person to a textual function, is not only the crucial moment in
the modern history of prose, but also helps come to define prose as being withheld
from view.
Deixis is a linguistic term for those words like I, he, she, here,
there, this and that which produce the spatiotemporal coordinates of any speech
act.11 As it is the moment when the material world enters into textual materiality,
identity is fixed and so on, it is of some importance to contemporary poetics
particularly that type of materialist poetics we have come to call Language poetry, 12
a movement that counts amongst its founder members numerous other prose poets
besides Silliman.13 Kittay and Godzich, following up from remarks by Benveniste, go
further in their analysis of the function of deixis than most linguists, realising that due
to the innumerable instances of textuality and their vast potential for a various

interpretation by a readership, while the act of exterior referentiality seems stable, the
actual referent, the actual he or she of a texts deixis, is more an effect of the text
than reference to a real instance of time, place or person. Just as the jongleur acted
out different personae and created the effect of a locale or of time passing, so too, it
would seem, prose deixis is in fact a performative effect, not an actual instance of
pointing. This radical insight leads Kittay and Godzich to conclude that:
deixis indicates, in a fashion that is in some sense wordless (that is, it assigns
no labels), that which surrounds and contains it. Deixis refers to that for
which the discourse has no name but on which it depends; deictic expressions
indicate only what is outside the discourse, but their reference draws one right
back to the discourse.14
If deictics are an act of referentiality they refer not to an actual exterior world,
instead, they refer to the fact that language has taken place and that it is something
that takes placedeictics are the means by which language makes itself into
something that can be referred toDeixis shows the very instance of discourse; it
shows that discourse is taking place.15 Proses abstraction from an embodied to an
embedded deixis, therefore, effectively eradicates the idea of a textual exteriority.
The outside, the thing that deixis refers to, is not literally the world out there, but the
textual effect of a world out there as foundation for discourse. Prose is profoundly
referential, appreciating that its authority resides in its instrumentality in relation to
the world rather than its own essential nature, yet what it refers to is the act of
referentiality itself which it validates by eradicating. Thus prose is everywhere and
yet somehow nowhere, and its referentiality not an indication of the presence of the
world but a construct of the presence of the world one can only term ideological, 16
leading Kittay and Godzich to conclude that prose is deictically autonomous. Prose,
able to carry its deixis from within itself, can give us the world. 17 Prose achieves this
suspect presentation of exteriority by liberating language from a somatic reliance

necessary for differentiation, allowing prose to pretend to be both language and what
is under it.18 What is in the text is no longer founded on a referential link to what is
exterior to textuality but on the absorption of the idea of exteriority into the interior,
abstract functions of text itself. The scission between subject and object presupposed
by many theorists to be essential for the acquisition of language, itself a fraught and
ill-resolved trauma, is magically healed by a simple technical adjustment. The result
is that prose is impossible to see because all one can see is pure prose. If one could
see prose then one would be admitting to a textual exteriority, a position of bodily
exteriority in effect, that immediately ceases to be prosaic. If we were able to fix
prose down and control it, revealing that it is merely a semiotic construct not the
precondition and simultaneous erasure of semiosis, then at that juncture this pinned
discourse would no longer be prose. It would, in fact, revert back to poetry.

If Not This, What Then?: Tjanting and Anti-Deixis

Sillimans Tjanting, first published in 1981 and reissued by Salt in 2002, is a booklength prose poem written over three years consisting of just over two hundred pages
broken up into only nineteen paragraphs of significantly unequal lengths. The first
paragraph, for example, Not this. is a mere two words, as is the second, What
then?, however the last paragraph takes up well over seventy pages and has been
estimated to consist of 42% of the books total length. 19 The reasons for this become
apparent when one learns that Tjanting, like so many of Sillimans works, is based on
rule-governed procedures established in advance and designed to be generative of a
text. In this instance, Silliman used the Fibonacci number sequence to determine the
number of sentences in each paragraph. The Fibonacci sequence is possibly now one
of the most famous sequences of numbers, beginning as follows: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,

21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181 and so on. We stop at 4181
because thats where Silliman did. Some mathematicians actually start the sequence
at 0 and naturally, for the purposes of a book-limited work like Tjanting, it must end
in 0 as well. We will turn to the implications of this later on, for now it is enough to
realise that each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. Sillimans
explanation for this complex procedure was that he wanted a content-dependant or
content-centred work,20 which emulated the dialectical materialism of the class
struggle allowing him to show what class struggle looked like formally.
Thus, returning to our number sequence, the first sentence for Silliman
constitutes the thesis, the second and all subsequently underlined numbers are the
antitheses. Each paragraph that follows, in this bifurcated double sequential model,
contains all the sentences from the previous paragraph on its side of the dialectical
divide, plus an amount of additional sentences equal to the number in the paragraph
that directly precedes it. In addition, the repeated sentences nearly always go through
some sort of modification to alter their sense or reveal new links with the sentences
that surround them within the paragraphSilliman call this torquing. As Silliman
explains, the kernel of the book is two sentences each of which expands into a series
of paragraphs interspersed with the other,21 a particularly attractive schema for him
as it begins with two ones, a structure that not only permitted the parallel articulation
of two sequences of paragraphs, but also determined that their development would be
uneven, punning back to the general theory of class struggle.22
While ostensibly Marxist and procedural in design, I am not going to read the
challenging structure of Tjanting in quite this way. The Marxist element now seems
merely a notion to get the poem started, 23 and the issue of procedurality in Silliman is
dealt with by me elsewhere. 24

Instead, I want to look at how the structure of the

poem allows the main body of the work to materialise prose as a semiotic presence
thus going against its main functionality which is to hide its materiality. Based on
Kittay and Godzichs groundbreaking work, to reveal prose one must address directly
its use of deixis and somehow relate it back to the embodied physicality of writing.
Therefore, the deictic autonomy of prose must be disrupted at the point of its
indication of itself as discourse and a kind of anti-deixis employed. This is precisely
what occurs at the beginning of Tjanting as the reader comes to terms with its
semiotic strangeness, structural complexity, and destabilising referentiality. Lets read
the first seven paragraphs, one third of the books total number of paragraphs
occupying only one of its two hundred and four pages:
Not this.
What then?
I started over & over. Not this
Last week I wrote the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the
rump roast I cld barely grip the pen. What then? This morning my lip
blistered.
Of about to within which. Again and again I began. The gray light of
day fills the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease had
spilld on the stove top.
Nor that either. Last week I wrote the muscle at thumbs root so taut
from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp. Not so. What then? Wld I
begin? This morning my lip is tender, disfigurd. I sat in an old chair out behind
the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.
Wld it be different with a different pen? Of about to within which
what. Poppies grew out of the pile of old broken-up cement. I began again &
again. These clouds are not apt to burn off. The yellow room has a sober hue.
Each sentence accounts for its place. Not this. Old chairs in the back yard
rotting from winter. Grease on the stove top sizzled & spat. Its the same, only
different. Ammonias odor hangs in the air. Not not this.25
That the first sentence of the poem is an anti-deictic statement reveals
immediately two central problems with prosaic deixis. The first is that pointing in a
text can occur in a non-instrumental way rendering it opaque as a linguistic function.
If, the reader might ask, the thing to which you refer is not this, then why refer to it at
all? Instead, why not refer to the thing that you are actually taking about, as this is the

purpose of prosaic, deictic instrumentality?

This problem is exacerbated by the

procedural structure that I have already detailed. The poem begins at sentence 1,
which, within Sillimans stated rule-governed procedure, must be the thesis of the
dialectic, however, problematically it is an antithetical statement. This would suggest
that the real thesis of the book resides in the missing sentence that occurred before
sentence 1.
Using traditional poetic parallelism, which allows us to fill in textual gaps
based on the strict patternation of the poems semiotics, something not allowable in
prose,26 we can speculate that paragraph 0 was Thisremember some
mathematicians begin the Fibonacci sequence with 0.

Two things occur at this

juncture before the poem has even got underway. Deixis is pointing to something that
not only exists outside of this discursive texture, but which permanently resides
outside of prose and is only accessible through a poetic function of semiotic
parallelism. Sentence 1 points to the absence of the this of sentence 0, locating a
margin or limit to prose, Kittay and Godzich note that it is proses lack of margins that
makes it so hard to fix as a visible entity.27 In addition, what it is pointing to is the
actual act of deixis or all-important this.
In placing the useless not this within discourse and the useful this in a
never to be recuperated outside, Silliman reveals the second problem with deixis.
Deixis is nothing other than a textual function designed to produce the effect of a
world beyond discourse as the central definition of discourse. As soon as the this is
seen not as an actual reference but as merely an instance of reference, we see deixis
for what it really is. With this in mind, paragraph 2, What then?, becomes the key
question of the work. If this prose poem is not prose in that it makes materially
apparent the very function of deixis whose invisibility prose is dependant on, then

what is this text in front of you? If these grammatical sentences gathered together in
paragraphs are not prose, then what are they? This alone is a challenge to the
hegemonic ubiquity of prose as the signifying practice of the modern age.
The word this is central to the language-orientated, denotative poetics of
Silliman and his contemporaries because it allows poetry to find its place within the
world of things, taking restricted poetic reflection towards inclusive prosaic
reception.28 Yet a receptive poetics opens up a paradox at the heart of the Tjantings
attack on prose in that it is itself a work dominated by prolix, descriptive, mundane,
prosaic detail disruptive of its status as a poem: Imagine what these running shoes
wld cost if they hadnt been made in Korea. Sometimes I stand paralysd before a
choice of frozen juices, gleaming in the supermarket freezer (Silliman, Tjanting
201). Thus, while the opening sentences consist of a meta-prosaic reflection on deixis
as the origin of prose, the rest of the section, and by far the majority of the rest of the
book, is taken up with the kind of detailed, world-including deixis we come to expect
from prose.
Barrett Watten highlights this problem in his fascinating introduction to the
new Salt edition: Not this: a denial or surpassing of the act of reference as a
condition for the unfolding of the poem. The origins of a metalanguage, beyond the
reciprocal cancelling of proposition and context. A will to write oneself out of the
thicket of particulars, toward the certainty of form. 29 At first glance this would seem
to be true in that the formal element of the poem dominates, yet the sheer length of the
book and the massive amount of detail it contains leads poet David Bromige to ask
Where did Silliman come by all these sentences? Their proliferation is
breathtakingmy impression is of a bustling demos.30 Also, the kind of detail here
hinted at with reference to everyday activity such as carving meat, and usually

10

unspoken embodied detail associated with writing like cramp, means the poem cannot
be a rejection of things, indeed Hank Lazer is so struck by the sheer amount of detail
to be found in Sillimans The Alphabet that he terms it an extended ethnographic
project31 resulting in Poet as indigenous ethnographer32 and a writing that honors
and engages that infinite world of particular and difference. 33 Reconsidered in light
of this fact the opening of the poem might be read as If not this, what then?; if you
reject the particulars of material life, what are you left with? This is certainly in
accord with Sillimans Marxist dialectical materialist ideas and also chimes with the
critics concentration on prosaic receptivity. Silliman is operating a war here on two
fronts, it would seem, attacking prose through a poeticisation of deixis, and
undermining poetry through a prolixity of things pointed out. Could it be, then, that
the poems dialectic is less a depiction of class struggle than a staging of genre
struggle; prose against poetry? This would certainly be in keeping with recent critical
work on prose poetry which tends to characterise it as nothing other than a zone of
generic instability.34
Watten also notes that This was the name of one of the Language poets first
and most important journals, established by Watten in the early seventies and often
featuring Silliman. Now, in the early eighties, was Silliman rejecting this project, this
famous turn to language that typified their work? In fact, Watten concludes, Not
this is a challenge to the very conception of referentiality taken as an automatised
and thus unproblematic act of language, in poetry, but also in prose, narrative and
everyday speech:
The denial of this, of all acts of point to something out there that could be
labelled that, thus accedes to a relationas precondition of the total form.
The denial of this becomes a test of adequacy of the representation of others,
as well. You are not in the place I had reserved for you. Relation is predicated
on that which is not. Nonreferentiality must then defer, before it enters into
any relation, to that not. Not as an intentional act.35

11

As Watten rightfully indicates by these comments deixis is a conventional agreement,

a presupposition between two speakers that this refers to a thing out there, and
prose steps in at this point to safeguard this process. At the moment when someone
says not this, however, the convention of pointing is destabilised and what seemed
normative and not worthy of comment, becomes contentious and materially present.
Not to point as an intentional act in language; who would perform such an act? The
answer, it would seem, is the poet.

Fingered: The Embodied Materiality of Deixis

There are several instances, away from the meta-prosaic commentary on deixis
through the use of this/not this, which reveal that the conventions of pointing in
cohesive prose, while seemingly normative and automatic, are nothing other than
linguistic convention. Paragraph 4, for example, begins with the complex embedding
of a self-referential statement on the physicality of writing, I cld barely grip the
pen, into a larger meta-prosaic comment on what he wrote previous to writing
Tjanting. Unless we are to assume that it took the poet a week to write the ten words
of the first three paragraphs, we must locate the citation outside the poem in the zone
of the this of paragraph 0. Yet everything here points to the not-this status of the
phrase, which is not part of this poem but something written outside its confines. This
is shown especially by its being a citation, and simultaneously undermined by the
power of citation to include the not-this into the ever present this of prose.
The early use of citation to destabilise prosaic deixis is an apt decision on
Sillimans part as citation is the most powerful instance of deictic autonomy in prose
in particular because it allows prose to absorb prosaic-seeming speech. Speech is a
great rival to prose, Shklovsky for example sees prose as merely speech written

12

down,36 occurring pre-verse and having greater claims for being normative and
transparent because of this. However speech, like verse, is body-dependant and thus
tied down to a reliance on a presence outside of itself for authority. Speech comes
after the human and is reliant on the authority of an individual spokesperson.
Remarkably, through the technological development of citation marks, prose is able to
contain speech.

By comparison, speech can never contain prose as Kittay and

Godzich note:
As it reaches down into the foundations of language as taking place, prose
can make allowances for speech within it. Put differently: once having
worked out the basic problem and mechanisms of deixis (how language
connects itself with what is under it), prose can pretend to be both language
and what is under it. This is what a body cannot do: a body relies upon deixis,
uses it, but does not constitute it.37
Speechs reliance on the body was, historically, its downfall but if a prose work like
Tjanting could reconnect prose to the body then it seems logical that the hegemony of
prose could be loosened, perhaps even broken.
Silliman attempts to do this by stressing over and over that the prose being
written takes the form of material marks on the page written by the hand of a real
person, a gesture typical of his phenomenological poetics in general. 38 In these
opening sections references to the role of the hand holding a pen in writing begin a
wider, more profound, analysis of the embodied act of writing at the root of all prose.
This challenge to the immateriality of prose is never fully debated in this
permutational, endlessly shifting work, but about a quarter of the way through there
are a flurry of sentences on the embodiment of prose that almost cohere into a
statement of summary:
A spill on the page that might be a wordGradual decay of penmanship.
Shop shingle. The body leaves one no options. Is not reading speech aloud.
The large old house stood empty. People imagine sitting down. Later I dont
recall writing it. Water never the color of its own glassWriting as a
diminuation of a first ideaThese gestures in the place of thought. Taken

13

where talk wentI crouch on the sidewalk to write. More than we know
down are letters to write. Big hairy rats with dicks this long. Scratch, scratch.
Eats like a machine. By day graffiti is. Credit peg. Tonic wch gin what.
Words, like a shadow, cross a stain on the pageIf for instance we had
learned to write words from the middle. (Silliman, Tjanting 46-7)
Taking into consideration the reiterative and modifying structure of the poem
it is inevitable that these phrases about language will proliferate and mutate as the
poem progresses into its later stages, but at this fairly early point it is possible to note
three basic themes relating to the embodiment and materiality of prose writing. The
physical act of writing is highlighted here by references to penmanship, the
recollection of writing, the gestural process of writing, and the description of the
awkwardness of writing while crouching.

As Silliman states, with an almost

impossible wisdom, these gestures of writing occur in the place of thought. A

diminution of the first idea, or pre-language dream where there is no separation
between thought and the world rendering language useless, is thus avoided in prose by
its eradication of the differentiation between subject and object through its use of
deixis.

Sillimans emphasis on the bodily-based activity of writing immediately

undermines this dream. From very early references to the role of the hand in writing,
Call this long handEach finger functionsHands writingThese gestures
generate letters, (Ibid. 16-17) on, Silliman never tires of pointing to the role of the
hand in the creation of prose: Mute hand moves, leaves thots tracings. (Ibid. 38).
These continual references to a phenomenology of the physical act of writing
as a servant to thought, but also as a challenge to thoughts immateriality, reveal a
second physicality in the poem, that of the word or language as such. Thus we have
references to the complex material difference between speech and writing, taking us
back to Kittay and Godzichs thoughts on the relation of speech to prose: Is not
reading speech aloud. If the poem is a result of being taken where talk went then the

14

precedence of prose over speech would be questioned, but the poem is an eloquent
statement of the beautiful materiality of written prose. Instead, Silliman wonders
about the relationship of the letter to the thought, the convention of serial progression
of letters in writing words, thoughts which are echoed throughout the poem as early
on he struggles with questions as to What writing writes (Ibid. 34). It is the
materiality of the prose that he searches for, that elusive shadow of the word on the
page as he describes it. If it is true that Words fossilize on the instant of writing
(Ibid. 30) then prose cannot be invisible. In perhaps the most telling phrase for my
attempt at the materialisation of prose the poet asks: Writing as writing, who will see
it? (Ibid. 38).
The final part of the puzzle of how to make written prose visible as a physical
and embodied materiality is the page itself, the consumer object of the poem essential
to Sillimans political poetics.39 Returning one more time to our exemplary section
the poet talks about words as spill on the page allowing the idea of penmanship to
become provocatively gendered to the degree that the rats with big dicks seem to use
them to scratch words into the page. The stain they leave in the form of the shadow
of words is not just ink, therefore, but a double sense of dissemination, a similar
analogy to that used at the end of Sillimans Sunset Debris.40 Realising, as Foucault
did before him, that the body is little more than an ideological construct, Silliman is
able to show, through embodiment, that any simple act of writing is located within
larger ideological processes.
Sillimans emphasis on writing as ink, scratched onto paper, which is stained
by the ink and then bound together into a commodity called a book is perhaps the
most notable and original element of the investigation in the poem into the semiotics
of prose. The poet reminds one that the prose writer counts, just as the poet counts,

15

only he does not count words but sentences in paragraphs and pages in a book,
About 150 typed pages (Ibid. 107)that this sentence occurs on page 107 reveals
the transition of writing in notebook form to a published object, an issue Silliman
investigates in his long poem The Chinese Notebook.41 Over 200 pages the poet goes
in search of the materials of writing: Words as if they are. Objects of words I have
not photographs for. Dry spots and dead ones. ScriptionMerely scars upon a
page. (Ibid. 79) At some points he is in wonder at this material process : Each
time one writesinvent these letters shapes anew. (Ibid. 88) and the strange tools
we use to bring it about, Cheap back pens with fine fluid pointsThese words just
flow by (Ibid.), but he is always focused on one simple fact: prose is as embodied
a practice of signification as speech or poetry were before prose came along and
usurped them. The poems conviction that Prose is what you do with a typewriter
(Ibid. 35) suggests that this other, more embodied, pen and ink form of prose is
nothing other than writing itself. Writing is the material process by which a physical
person employs their hand to write words on a page using an instrument. It is tactile,
contingent, poignant, sometimes sexual, violent even; it is also itself wonderfully
poetic. Silliman is not alone in being a poet enamoured by the poetic beauty of marks
in space, but he is unique, I believe, in returning prose back to us by emphasising that
proses very existence points to its hidden secret, namely that like verse and speech
before it, indeed like all instances of language, prose is embodied.
REDUCE SIGNIFICANTLY USING SUMMARY.

Automatisation: A Speech Impediment

The combination of making strange the basic prosaic function of deixis and relocating it in the familiar phenomenology of the bodily-based materials of writing

16

strikes a serious blow at the heart of the invisibility of prose. The prose of Tjanting,
in being revealing of its constructedness, 42 also demonstrates that prose does indeed
have semiotic presence, however hard its ideology tries to suppress it. However, the
invisibility of prose depends not only on its use of deixis but on what Shklovsky, in
his Theory of Prose, calls its automatisation:
It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose speech
with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words. The ideal expression
of this process may be said to take place in algebra, where objects are replaced
by symbols. In the rapid-fire flow of conversational speech, words are not
fully articulatedBy means of this algebraic method of thinking, objects are
grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely
recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes us, as if it
were prepackaged. We know that it exists because of its position in space, but
we see only its surface.43
While talking of written prose as a form of speech, something Kittay and Godzich do
not allow, the logic of Shklovskys influential argument on automatisation and
alienation is all but identical to the idea of the deictic autonomy of prose. The
incomplete nature of the discourse is the move from essential to instrumental, so
typical of prose. Objects as they are in the world are not seen in their actuality but
through a process of discursive replacement and the spatial presence of words occurs
so easily that it ceases to be perceived. The object, the thing in the world, is,
Shklovsky says, prepackaged, and indeed it is true that within prose the world out
there is wrapped up and so hidden from direct perception, wrapped-up in prose.
Following a rather different logic, therefore, we arrive at the same conclusion as
Kittay and Godzich that what prose shows us when it points is the ability of prose to
point.
While Kittay and Godzich maintain a stance of disinterestedness in their study
of prose, Shklovksy goes on the attack in relation to prose automatisation declaring:
Automization eats away at thingsIf the complex life of many people takes
place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then its as if this life had never

17

been. And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us
feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.44
Here we arrive at a rather different historiography of prose locating its emergence not
in the 12th century but simultaneous to the mythical emergence of poetry, arriving on
the scene as poetrys enemy effectively. Shklovsky then, like a number of critics, is
only interested in prose because it helps him to define poetry. As he says after his
long diatribe against prose: weve arrived at a definition of poetry as the language of
impeded, distorted speech. Poetic speech is structured speech. Prose, on the other
hand, is ordinary speech: economical, easy, correct speech.45
While there are some problems with Shklovskys conception of prose as
written speech, his work is particularly useful in an analysis of Silliman and his
contemporaries as Language poetics is in part a response to Russian formalist ideas of
automatisation and alienationCharles Bernsteins now famous idea of antiabsorptive poetics, for example, is a highly sophisticated finessing of the formalist
idea of automatisation.46 What Shklovsky brings to poets prose, therefore, is the idea
of taking poetry to prose as a critical and political tool to destroy the damaging effect
of automatisation. This political attack on the role of prose in bolstering up and
distributing capitalist ideologies of instrumentality, transparency, semantic exchange
and the like is close to the heart of Sillimans political poetry, so much so that his own
theory of serialisation tightly echoes Shklovskys definition of automatisation:
The two primary types of human relationship are the group and the series
Serialization (often termed alienation or atomization) places the individual as a
passive cipher into a series of more or less identical unitsThe function of the
commoditizied tongue of capitalism is the serialization of the language-user,
especially the reader. In its ultimate form, the consumer of a mass market
novel such as Jaws states numbly at a blank pagewhile a story appears to
unfold miraculously of its own free will before his or her eyes.47
Serialisation, as Silliman terms it here, intervenes between text and reader stopping
them from seeing the text as an object. Rather than perceiving the work of art they

18

merely consume it. Returning briefly to Shklovsky, we can see the same concepts put
into play:
The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the
organ of sight instead of recognition.
By estranging objects and
complicating form, the devices of art makes perception long and laborious
The life of a poem (an of an artefact) proceeds from vision to recognition,
from poetry to prose48
Prosaic automatisation, it would seem, is primarily a problem of vision, which
is fitting when we consider that prose is defined by making invisible its semiotic basis
in deixis. It is also the result of social forces sponsoring a signifying practice that is
normative, transparent, instrumental and ubiquitous precisely because the blindness
that results from automatisation restricts from view the real material conditions of the
individual. Silliman is looking, therefore, for a textual strategy which can attack
directly this prosaic automatisation and he sees no need to look any further than the
powerful ability to estrange, and thus make opaque, linguistic and rhetorical devices
that is the defining characteristic of poetry. As he says: By recognizing itself as the
philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of
a post-referential language within the existing social fact.49 This is a pretty good
description of Tjanting I feel, and also explains the motivation behind his
development of a new prose practice now called new sentence poetry.

New Sentence Poetics: A Disruption of Cohesive Prose Integration

The new sentence was devised initially by Silliman to describe what he and his
contemporaries were doing in their prose poetry. It is an incredibly rich essay and I
only have time here to touch on the implications of a small number of its issues,
primarily those undermining of prose, although the original idea behind new sentence
poetry was to rethink the formal assumptions about poetry. The basic idea of new

19

sentence prose is to replace the broken, measured line of the poem with the nonbroken, unmeasured sentence as basic unit for composition. However, in replacing
the line with the sentence, while a number of presuppositions about poetry are
attacked, numerous other assumptions about prose, more powerful in their way, are
taken on board. The main problem, as Silliman states it, is that of the integration of
the sentences into a larger structure of semantic cohesion, in particular the paragraph
and the book as a whole. He notes an automatised syllogistic movement in reading
prose that works strenuously to relate proximate sentences in a linear progression to
each other by subordinating them under a larger assumed unity. While in poetry too
there is an urge for syllogistic cohesion, incoherent elements are allowed if they are
dictated by the laws of prosody.

New sentence prose attempts to remove the

syllogistic leap as Silliman calls it, by placing sentences together which do not
cohere into a unified narrative or argument at the paragraph level. As fellow language
poet Bob Perelmen notes:
A new sentence is more or less ordinary in itself, but gains its effect by being
placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance: new
sentences are not subordinated to a larger narrative frame nor are they thrown
together at random. Parataxis is crucial: the autonomous meaning of a
sentence is heightened, questioned, changed by the degree of separation or
connection that the reader perceives with regard to the surrounding
sentences.50
It is clear from this that new sentence is something of a misnomer. More fitting
would be new paragraph or, because ostensibly what Silliman is attacking is the
means by which sentences integrate through what linguistics call cohesion into a
semantic unit defined by the quality of texture, new text.
Silliman has noticed, like many of us, that if you give a reader two or three
recognisable semantic units in proximity, they will begin to construct meaningful ties
between the units. He calls it the parsimony principle although stylistics simply calls

20

it cohesion, or a presupposition as to what words are referring to that is satisfied as the

text unfolds and relations of interpretability are established within a unified semantic
context. 51 Typically, readers seek to integrate the units based on the context of their
presentation and own reading habits, 52 three lines of poetry then will be read into
cohesion rather differently than three prose sentences. Noticing that in prose semantic
cohesion through integration into a larger semantic unit is essential, Silliman negates
that larger integration forcing the reader to find semantic cohesion at the localised
sentence level. It is a simple act of making the basic unit of prose, the sentence, fully
visible to the reader, perhaps for the first time.
This poeticisation of prose units is further heightened by the use of torquing,
common to prosody but rather unusual in ordinary prose.

Torquing, Silliman

explains, is the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection
into that of combination53 by which he means the writer chooses the word not due to
its semantic equivalence, it says what the writer means, but due to its ability to fit into
the textual unit. Rhyme is the classic example of this where a word is chosen first
because of its sound and only second because of what it means. In new sentence
prose the meaning of a word is determined by its location or placement in proximity
to those sentences around it, for these are the only locales of possible cohesion. For
the first time the reader is forced to look at the sentences location in space to find its
meaning as the overall syllogistic presupposition of the text based on the
presupposition of texture has been omitted.
All of this is rather technical and the he best way to understand the new
sentence remains to read some so let us return once more to Tjanting. Take, for
example, paragraph 9:
Forcing oneself to it. It wldve been new with a blue pen. Giving oneself to it.
Of about to within which what without. Hands writing. Out of the rockpile grew

21

poppies. Sip mineral water, smoke cigar. Again I began. One sees seams. These
clouds breaking up in the later afternoon, blue patches. I begin again but it was
not beginning. Somber hue of a gray day sky filld the yellow room. Ridges &
bridges. Each sentence accounts for all the rest. I was discovered on the road.
Not this. Counting my fingers to get different answers. Four wooden chairs in the
yard, rain warpd, wind-blown. Cat on the bear rug naps. Grease sizzles & spits
on the stove top. In paradise wrecks are distributed evenly throughout the desert.
All the same, no difference, no blame. Moons rise at noon. In the air hung odor
of ammonia. I felt a disease. Not not not-this. Reddest red contains trace of blue.
That to the this then. What words tear out. All elements fit into nine crystal
structures. Waiting for the cheese to go blue. Thirty-two. Measure meters pause.
Applause. (Silliman, Tjanting 16)
The integration of these sentences into a larger texture of meaning based within the
paragraph structure is first of all denied by the Fibonacci sequence that dictates the
length of this paragraph must be 34 sentences. The paragraph becomes, at this stage,
a unit of measure not of semantic cohesion: there are 34 sentences no because that is
how many were needed to explain or narrate a situation, but because the rule of
measure dictates this.54

Integration is further hampered by the replacement of

hypotaxis with parataxis as a means of combining sentences. Silliman, Perelman,

Kittay, Godzich and Fredman all note the reliance of traditional prose on hypotaxis or
of one sentence running on into the next as central to the effect of prose. 55 The effect
being, as I have stated it, its invisibility. Parataxis, the piling up of phrases without
only minimal attempts to tie them together, immediately disrupts cohesion, while at
the same time instigating a new attempt at cohesion on the part of the reader to refind
those essential cohesive ties.56

Denied the cohesion of paragraphs as units of

integration, how does the reader make sense of paragraph 9?

If we were to assume a reader of some poetic literacy with knowledge of the
poems structure then a number of readings might occur, many of which have already
been rehearsed by readers of this and other new sentence works. 57 We know, for
example, that every sentence in paragraph 7 must feature in paragraph 9 and they
become anchor points for reading the new sentences. We might start with Not this.

22

as this was our very first sentence which, due to its location in the text, has probably
been invested with a good deal of significance on our part. In 7 Not this. was
torqued into Not not this, here in 9 it threatens to spiral out of control with Not not
not-this.

The accumulative torquing of this phrase at this point, therefore,

undermines our original faith in its semantic significance. The poet augments the
sentence by selecting words merely for their repetition, trying to see at what point the
to and fro of the string of negations stops us from working out if not not not-this
results in this or not this.58
Another favourite early phrase is Wld it be different with a different pen?
which here becomes It wldve been new with a blue pen. Again the effect of
torquing is apparent. Surely new and blue occur here because they rhyme, although
new can be synonymous with different, and blue is a recognisably standard colour for
pens. The grammatical shift internal to the sentence from its being a question to a
conditional, Wld it to It wldve, suggests a time shift in the narrative meaning an
answer to Wld it? has been provided and now the narrator its looking back
retrospectively. Unfortunately, the semiotics of the poems procedure means the only
place this narrative syllogistic conclusion could have occurred is in paragraph 8.
What happened to this sentence remains permanently obscured then by the inability of
the sentence to be repeated except in odd-numbered sections. Something happened in
paragraph 8 but all we are allowed to see is the aftermath.
The torquing combinational technique of Tjanting means that phrases recur
and the reader latches on to them as familiar landmarks in increasingly unfamiliar
territory. Slowly, then a textured cohesion begins to build up. However, Silliman is
very much aware of this desire for cohesion at the integrated higher level, indeed
Tjanting is composed precisely to question this, and so we remain at all times at the

23

mercy of the author.

Sometimes reiteration is friendly, at other times it is the

equivalent of a false friend in language learning. The only level of integration left to a
reader, therefore, is the local level, which is the intention of new sentence poetics. 59
The automatised activity of larger scale integration has been disrupted, but what of the
local ties between sentences, are these also impeded and thus rendered visible as
Shklovsky dictates?
The network of ties and integration in paragraph 9 is rather complex, in fact,
and I can only touch on a small number of elements here. The first is to note that
there is a rhythm of interchange of scales of integration more complex than the basic
theory of the new sentence suggest. Some sentences are recognisable from previous
paragraphs as we saw. Others are new and need to be integrated locally. Take the
centre of the paragraph. A gray day finds the poet in a yellow room. He seems to be
writing because he makes one of hundreds of self-reflexive comments on the act of
writing the poem. The ridges and bridges seem to come out of nowhere but then he
leaves the room and is found on the road where such things may be observed. In
addition, the rhyme provides a semiotic motivation for the line, this is still a poem
after all. Then not this, which within the mini-narrative might suggest that he has
not quite said what he wanted, although we already know that this is a repetition of
paragraph 1.60 The counting of his fingers is a torquing of the age old prosodic act of
counting syllabic feet and refers again to the composition of the poem, the different
answers being the different permutations of the same sentences. The yard could be
the in-between space between road and room, it is also host to an act of counting and
a place that it is known Silliman sits to write poetry. Finally, this yard mediates
between two significant metaphors for the two different acts of writing going on here.
The word stanza means room of course referring to limiting box of the poemJohn

24

Ashberys Fragment is a good recent example of the self-consciousness of

contemporary poets to all that is implied by this term. In contrast, the freedoms of the
road are much more typical of prose. The roads long linearity and multiple possible
junctions means one does not notice that it too is a form of restraint, forcing one
always forwards and denying the kind of sideways and backward looking movement
more typical in the counting, torquing dynamics of the poem. 61 Tjanting is yard-based
poem therefore, relishing the commonality of the yard, its American-ness, a space
from which to break out of poetic boxes but also to rein in the ideology of prosaic
freedom by reminding us that prose too is subject to strict rules of semiotic restraint.

Paragraph 19: The Turning Point for Prose

As the reader becomes familiarised with the textual strategies of Tjantings prose, they
begin to move towards a kind of automatised appreciation and a third level of
cohesion seems possible at the level of the book. Rules determining numbers of
sentences, their recurrence, their transformation, their non-integration and their
localised semantic field, combine with a familiarity of material pertaining to the
physicality of writing and excessive everyday detail and ones overall sense of the
architecture of the work, which may or may not be dialectical and materialist. 62 This
portrait of Tjanting, which is not just dependant on the readers desire for cohesion
but is also the critics job to a degree, while never, perhaps, threatening to make
Tjanting an integrated and semantically cohesive prose unit, does reveal that even the
most deviant prose will make moves towards invisibility. This hermeneutic cohesion,
however, is radically undermined by the last paragraph of the work, paragraph 19,
which makes up over 2/5ths of the book.

25

Silliman insists in the new sentence that the sentence replaces the line as the
basic unit of his poetry thus negating the semiotics of lineation, yet the opening and
closing sentences of the final paragraph suggest that while he does not see the
paragraph as a unit of sense, he still sees it as a semiotic unit of some order. Thus the
paragraph begins, in typical self-reflexive style, What makes this the last paragraph?
Was it the turns tide to turn then?Retracing my dark in the steps. If you ever
navigated on the weary canal. Downward press momentum. (Tjanting 125). What
makes this the last paragraph, ultimately, is the bracketing of the total 19 paragraphs
by the presence of paragraph 0 and the never to be written paragraph 20, itself the
repetition of paragraph 0, bookending the work. While some mathematicians begin
the Fibonacci sequence at 0 none would ever end it there, its extension being
illimitable and effectively infinite. Similarly, Kittay and Godzich, in denying prose
any margins, propose a model of prose as an endless continuum whose actual material
margins, in an essay or book, are of no importance. In poetry, however, it is the
semiotic presence of absence around the units of the poem that define those units and
thus a consciousness of the finality of paragraph 19 reveals Sillimans conception of
the semiotics of the paragraph.
Poetrys reliance on the semiotic presence of absence is a point made more
than once by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Poetry interjects space into the linear
series of writing in a manner that privileges semiotic issues of metre, rhythm, rhyme
and so on, over the fluid progression of meaning. In fact, Agambens deceptively
simple definition of prose is based on the very question of the last paragraph: We
shall call poetry the discourse in which it is possible to set a metrical limit against a
syntactic one (verse in which enjambement is not actually present is to be seen as
verse with zero enjambement). Prose is the discourse in which this is impossible. 63

26

This definition intimates a philosophical, rather than historiographic (Kittay and

Godzich) or political (Shklovsky) definition of prose as that which is itself
immaterial. Prose, while it exists on paper for example, totally exhausts its material
presence through its instrumentality: it serves thought totally.64 Why does Agamben,
therefore, taking on a key debate in contemporary philosophy, that between
philosophy and poetry,65 base his whole argument on a seemingly minor rhetorical
device?
He goes on to explain:
Enjambement reveals a mismatch, a disconnection between rhythm and
meaning, such thatpoetry lives, instead, only in their inner disagreement. In
the very moment that verse affirms its own identity by breaking a syntactic
link, it is irresistibly drawn into bending over into the next line to lay hold of
what it has thrown out of itself.66
Linking verse etymologically with versus, Agamben defines poetry as the sublime
hesitation between meaning and sound,67 whose semiotics demand that it resists the
linear progression of prose into cohesive links and overall semantic integration. Yet
the semiotics of poetry has built into it a basic prosaic gesture: the end of each line
only makes sense with the commencement of the next. Like the need for a stressed
syllable to have an unstressed nearby, the broken line depends on a texture of other
lines with which it finds ties to be fully effective as a potential disruption of those ties.
In light of this revelation, Sillimans self-consciousness about paragraph 19
being the last in the book is indicative of the fact that he has never ceased to think of
the paragraph as anything other than a form of lineation, something he confirms when
setting out some of the key rules of the new sentence: The paragraph is a unity of
quantity, not logic or argumentSentence length is a unit of measureSentence
structure is altered for torque.68 All three of these statements make apparent a
semiotic, measured form of prose to be found within each technique utilised in prose

27

to achieve the syllogistic integration of its divergent units into one unit of sense, the
essence of its deictic power and its automatisation. It would seem, therefore, that like
all good poets, Silliman cannot resist the hesitation of verse between holding back and
going on. This is confirmed by the various metaphors he invokes at the beginning of
the last, huge, paragraph: the turn of the tide, the retraced step, the weariness of the
canals linearity and the downward press of the momentum of any text towards its
completion. Some of these are indications of poetrys holding back (versus), the tide
and the retraced step typical of poetic cataphora, others are typical of the prosaic urge
to push on towards integration (pro-versa) to be found in prosaic reliance on
anaphoric indicators.69 The new sentence, therefore, is, to my mind, not a theory of
the sentence nor a statement on poetry but a theory of the interrupted cohesion of the
paragraph resulting in a radical statement on the semiotics of prose. Not so much new
sentence or even new text, as new prose.
Taking Silliman and Agamben at their word, paragraph 19 is not a paragraph
as such but an extremely long line, possible the longest line in poetry. Again Silliman
does nothing to divert one from this conclusion at the very end of the paragraph,
which also ends the book: Punctuation is mortar. The song of the sprinklers on
these well-trimmed lawns presents a false surface. What then? (Tjanting 204).
Punctuation indeed is revealed as mortar in the poem, a material convention that holds
together the parts of prose; as Silliman and others have noted, the full stop takes the
place of the line break in new sentence prose.70 However, I would like to propose
something even more radical. I would read Tjanting as a 19-line lyric, taking each
sentence as a syllable in the line, each full stop the invisible division between
syllables which, a point rarely made, remains materially invisible in speech and is
only present in writing.71

Recurrent sentences, meaningful sentences, striking

28

sentences, these are the stressed syllables; the vast array of banal detail, these are
unstressed, although the degree to which they remain so is mostly dependent on the
readers engagement with them. If this were true the seamlessness of prose, all prose,
would be like the Whitmanic song of the lawn, a false surface made up of many
singular blades rendered invisible by the overall desire to see only the lawn.
The final sentence of the work, What then? remains radically openended,
but one reading asks the question of paragraph 20/0 or the empty space that follows
the last syllable of the last line of the work. Agamben has noted the dangerous
moment this marks for the poem, which exists in the hesitation between semiotics and
semantics, and disappears in their resolution. 72 Silliman too can hardly bring himself
to end here, but he must, the metre of the paragraph/line dictates it. What is next in
prose is how I, in the final analysis, would read this final sentence, meant in two
ways. How can prose take on its material limitations, the This of paragraph 0 and
the radical emptiness of paragraph 20/0, and remain prose? And, after the radical
instability introduced into prose by the new poets prose, what will happen to prose in
the future?
While Silliman seems to have unlimited sentences, I do not, and I must finish
here by concluding first on the convention of the prose conclusion. If poetry founders
on the moment that the total semiotic presence of pure space diverges from the pure
semantics of the end of the work, so prose also must face the aporia of ending. If
prose is, as I have tried to show, a deictically autonomous, automatised mode of nonimpeded writing that relies on the integration of its units into a larger structure of
cohesive sense that admits to no semiotic technique to establish its meaning,
especially the technique of enjambment, then how can it end? The conclusion of
prose is the moment where its immateriality, paradoxically, becomes present to us. It

29

is not just saying, that was a good book, and thus changing prose from objectless
discourse to an object of commodification, although Silliman is one of the first to
make this connection.

Rather, the end of prose points to its dependence on a

materiality, the book, the body, the reader, and reveals it to be different to the world it
claims to absorb. You can close the book but you cannot close the world. If the lack
of conclusion in reality reveals proses deixis to be a mere rhetorical technique, it also
brings in the greatest impediment that any serial, cohesive writing can endure: it is
literally stopped. What is more, the arrest of prose is far more disastrous than that of
poetry.

Prosaic anaphora demands that one go on, while at the same time its

exhaustible instrumentality means re-reading is, in theory, pointless, although in

reality quite common.

In contrast, poetic cataphora and its complex semiotic

pleasures almost demand a second reading.

If sentences move towards syllogistic integration one would think the
conclusion to be the apotheosis of coherent prose, instead it is its nadir. While a
possibility of presupposition, integration remains an immaterial promise, but the
physical imposition of an ending by way of conclusion means that integration must
then be secured by that final full-stop. What is more typical are the questions that
remain.

Looking forward integration is pure potential and can always happen,

looking back one is faced with all the material that did not integrate, a particularly
daunting task with a long, complex work such as Tjanting. If the end of the poem,
therefore, separates poetry from prose, the end of prose brings them back together
again, a truth Silliman forces on the reader by, in paragraph 19, making them see
prose not only as a semiotic presence, but also one which is destabilised by the
semiotic absence that precedes every work and proceeds from it. Paragraph 19 may
not only be the longest line in poetry, but, in the unfolding antagonism between poetry

30

and prose which, at times, has threatened to eradicate poetry once and for all in
contemporary culture, it may, in time, be seen as the most important line in
contemporary poetics.

It not only renders prose visible, but also contributes to

making poetry less invisible to that large number of readers caught up in the
automatised ideological processes of prose.

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Sunset Debris. www.ubu.com: /ubu editions, 2004

---.

Tjanting. Cambridge: Salt Press, 2002.

Toolan, Michael. Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics. London:

Arnold, 1998.
Watkin, William.

Poetry Machines: Repetition in the Early Poetry of Kenneth

Koch. EnterText 1.1 (Dec. 2000): 83-117.

33

---.

Rule-governed violations of convention: Ron Sillimans Poetic Procedures

(forthcoming).

Watten, Barrett. Introduction in Tjanting. Cambridge: Salt Press, 2002. 1-11.

ENDNOTES:

34

Sillimans career can be divided into two streams of work. The procedural prose works such as Ketjak (1978), Tjanting
(1981), Bart (1982), Sunset Debris (1986), The Chinese Notebook (1986) and 2197 (1986) are all prose works. The many
sections of the project called The Alphabet, begun with ABC (1983) and still ongoing as I write, are often written in prose
although line-broken poetic sections can also easily be found.
2
Steven Fredman. Poets Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 2nd Edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990) 2-5. Fredman coins the phrase poets prose to avoid the oxymoron of prose poetry resulting in a term that can cover
all poetry written in sentences and without versification. Ibid. xiii.
3
He says: If readers of prose poetry have been or become less aware of the genres constraints, it is perhaps because so
much of the rhetoric surrounding the prose poem has to do with its formal freedom. Or it may be that the illusion of no
constraints is itself one of prose poetrys generic traits. Steven Monte. Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in
French and American Literature. (Lincoln Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) 8.
4
Margueritte Murphy. The Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) 63.
5
To manythe prose poem is a piece of prose that wants to be a poem and derives at least part of its meaning from its
ability to defeat our generic expectation. Seen from this angle its subversive potentialappears as only one example of
what postmodern aesthetics diagnoses as the arbitrariness and instability of generic boundaries. The current popularity of
the genre can thus be seen as resulting, at least in part, from its self-proclaiming hybridity and the ensuing sense of freedom
afforded to prose poets. Michel Delville. The American Prose Poem: Poetic form and the Boundaries of Genre.
(Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1998) ix.
6
Murphy maintains that the prose poem is an inherently subversive genre as well as a historically subversive one.
Because of its marginality, its situation on the borderline of prose (T.S. Eliots phrase), it must continually subvert prosaic
conventions in order to establish itself as authentically other. I see this necessity to subvert not just the conventions of
verse, but also of prose, as a basic distinguishing feature of the genre, that has few, if any, conventions of its ownThe
prose poem, then, may be seen as a battlefield where conventional prose of some sort appears and is defeated by the texts
drive to innovate and to differentiate itself, to construct a self-defining poeticity Murphy 3. Delville agrees that the
subversion inherent to prose poetry affects equally prose as well as poetry in that it attacks the very concepts of generic
division and definition: one of the most challenging features of the prose poem is its potential for reclaiming a number of
functions and modes usually considered to be the privilege of prose literatureAs for the prose poems discursive and
formal hybridity, I read it as a clear indication of poetrys capacity to challenge the power of genre as a gesture of authority
and to transgress accepted rules and boundaries, perhaps forcing us to contemplate those rules and boundaries. Delville x.
7
The new sentence ostensibly is a shift in the location and semiotic marking of what Silliman calls torquing or the choice of
diction based on its placement within the poetic line rather than primarily for its semantic aptness. Speaking about Bob
Perelmans prose work a.k.a he says: This continual torquing of sentences is a traditional quality of poetry, but in poetry it
is most often accomplished by linebreaks, or by devices such as rhyme. Here poetic form has moved into the interiors of
prosethe torquing which is normally triggered by linebreaks, the function of which is to enhance ambiguity and polysemy,
is moved directly into the grammar of the sentence. Ron Silliman. The New Sentence. (New York: Roof, 1987) 89-90.
8
See Fredman 8-10 and Keffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich. The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Pres, 1987) 192-3. Indeed the whole of Montes definition of prose poetry is based on what he
calls the negative differentiation (Monte 31) central to genre theory which results in the logic that: Prose poetry, like any
other literary kind, has to be understood as constituting itself against or in relation to other kindsProse poetry must arise
in a milieu in which prose and poetry exist in some sort of opposition. Furthermore, the continued existence of prose poetry
as a literary kind would be predicated on such and opposition Monte 23.
9
Kittay and Godzich 17.
10
Working towards a differential definition of prose, again based on its dissimilarity to poetry, he states: a work may be
either created as prose and experienced as poetry, or else created as poetry and experienced as prose. This points out to the
fact that the artistic quality of something, its relationship to poetry, is a result of our mode of perceptionThere exist two
types of imagery: imagery as a practical way of thinking, that is, as a means of uniting objects in groups, and, secondly,
imagery as a way of intensifying the impressions of the sensesThe poetic image is an instrument of the poetic language,
while the prose image is a tool of abstraction. Viktor Shklovsky. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Il.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1990) 2-3.
11
This definition is abstracted by Kittay and Godzich from the work of Emile Benveniste, Kittay and Godzich 18-19. For a
detailed and provocative account of deixis see John Lyons, Semantics Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977).
12
As Fredman explains: Once a poet feels free to make a statementto interrogate the realm of truth, rather than merely to
present an aesthetic objectthen the way is clear for a union of fact and imaginationAmerican poets ask their prose to
articulate a shared world in which experience vouches for truth rather than for individual genius. Fredman 10. Indeed,
Language poetry is in part defined as being statement making, rather than world-creating, poetics and so is, by definition,
always already prosaic. This is often achieved in the work of contemporary poets, and Tjanting is no exception, by a self-

conscious, critical investigation of the referential capabilities of language.

13
Linda Renfield notes in relation to Language poetry: The focus of this new American writing has been not simply on the
word as such but on the structures and codesthe languagethrough which both word and world come into meaning; thus,
it is frequently referred to as language-orientated or language-centered writing Linda Renfield. Language Poetry:
Writing as Rescue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) 2. George Hartley calls this quality attention to
the materiality of the signifier resulting a situation whereby Language poets often structure their poetry so as to draw our
attention to the politics of the production of reference, the subject, and the closed text. George Hartley, Textual Politics
and Language Poets (Bloomington Ind.: Indiana University press, 1989) 34.
14
Godzich and Kittay 19.
15
Ibid. 20.
16
If one takes Althussers classic definition of ideology as the imaginary relationship of a subject to their material
conditions, proses perceived invisibility is clearly an ideological function. Prose allows a reader an imaginary
relationship to a material exteriority in which they may have invested numerous beliefs, not least that they have a
subjectivity discernible from objects and that an objective world out there can be accessed by referentiality. In fact, what
prose hides in hiding itself is the challenge of both a subjective and objective alterity. A being and an object, neither of
which can be defined through prosaic referential acts and remain categorically separate, cease to be available to knowledge
through transparent, instrumental language (prose). At this point they only become accessible through a language of opacity
and uselessness (poetry).
17
Godzich and Kittay 209.
18
Ibid. 198.
19
I am grateful to Thomas Fink for much of this factual detail provided by his article No Other Sentence Could Have
Followed but This,: Ron Sillimans Tjanting published in Titanic Operas: Poetry and New Materialities at
www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html
20
Silliman Interview, The Difficulties 2.2 (1985) 34.
21
Ibid. 35
22
Ibid.
23
Silliman himself does not always take his procedures too seriously once they have generated a poetic work and we should
heed his warning in this regard: I have no idea how many times Ive heard that I wrote Ketjak using Fibonacci when, at the
time I began that piece, I had not the foggiest idea what that might be. Im not a very mathematical person, or at least I
dont think of myself as one.
Gary Sullivan and Ron Silliman.
Ron Silliman Interview
(http://home.jps.net/~nada/silliman.htm) 4.
24
See William Watkin. Rule-governed violations of convention: Ron Sillimans Poetic Procedures (Forthcoming).
25
Ron Silliman, Tjanting. (Cambridge: Salt, 2002) 15.
26
Parallelism is a term used first in this context, I believe, by Russian formalism to denote how once a discernible texture if
patternation has been established, for example abab rhyme scheme in iambic tetrameter, a line could be omitted and while
the semantic content would remain unknown, the semiotic element could be determined by the parallel semiotics of prosody
surrounding the line. This is the poetic version of cohesive presupposition typical of prose wherein the meaning of sentence
2 is interpreted by a presupposition that it follows on semantically from sentence 1 and proceeds to sentence 3. For a
detailed analysis of parallelism as a feature of contemporary poetry see William Watkin, Poetry Machines: Repetition in
the Early Poetry of Kenneth Koch. EnterText 1.1 (Dec. 2000): 83-117.
27
Discourses can have margins, be assigned subjects, be positioned. But signifying practices, as they deal in deixis, have
no margins. Prose, like the real jongleur there then, is connected everywhereProse sees position not as dependant on
presence but as the result of a process. It abstracts process and can thereby put it all on paper. It can contain all margins
and manipulate them but is itself untouched by them. Kittay and Godzich 137. This is a complex differentiation of a
signifying practice from a discursive instance. Of course prose has margins imposed by the material limitations of
pagespace, use of chapter headings, and the material entity of the book. However, the dominant signifying practice of prose
and its attempts towards naturalisation mean that the localised semiotics of prose in action, if you will, is rendered invisible
by the attempt the make all prose a part of a seamless, transparent and instrumental whole.
28
Fredman notes in the long poem there is a kind of heroism of ego and ambition, while the prose poem presents a heroism
of negation and receptivity. Rather than endeavouring to master reality, the American poet who writes in prose more
properly confronts the times by a heroic accommodationa scrupulous surrender to language and to the world. Fredman 8.
Murphy, speaking about John Ashberys highly influential prose poem Three Poems talks of is being part of the
expansionist mode of American poetics, Murphy 169. However, the most significant theorist by far of contemporary
postmodern American poetry and inclusion remains Charles Altieri, mapped out in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in
American Poetry during the 1960s (Lewisburg Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1979) and Postmodernisms Now: Essays
on Contemporaneity in the Arts (Pennsylvania: Penn. State University Press, 1998).
29
Barrett Watten, Introduction in Tjanting 3.
30
David Bromige, A Note on Tjanting, The Difficulties 2.2 (1985) 69.
31
Hank Lazer, Education, Equality and Ethnography in Ron Sillimans The Alphabet. Quarry West (34) 71.

32

Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, Volume 2: Readings. (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996) 168.
Lazer, Education, Equality and Ethnography 79.
34
This is the thesis of Delvilles work on prose poetry: By testing the validity of our assumptions concerning the nature
and function of both poetic and prosaic language, the prose poem inevitably leads us to investigate a number of specific
postulates underlying the act of defining genres and, above all, of tracing boundaries between them Critics confronted
with such an elusive genre as the prose poem will cease to rely on the claims to universal validity of traditional generic
distinctions. Instead they will seek to account for the rhetorical gesture(s) involved in the act of composing and labelling a
piece of prose as a prose poem Delville 10-11. As a theme this can also be found in Montes idea that prose poetry may
help us rethink theories of genre, (Monte 4), Murphys description of the way in which prose draws in and alters other
genres (Murphy 3) and Fredmans definition of poets prose as the last genre (Fredman 5).
35
Watten 5.
36
Shklovsky 5.
37
Kittay and Godzich 198.
38
I am indebted to Peter Nicholls for the observation that the embodied elements of Sillimans poetry tie him to the
philosophical tradition of phenomenology a point also made by Marjorie Perloff, Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject:
Ron Sillimans Albany, Susan Howes Buffalo. Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999) 420.
39
For more on Sillimans relation of the materiality of the book with the materialism of consumption and exchange see the
short essay Re Writing Marx (Silliman, New Sentence 19) in addition to his comments on the means by which a poem
becomes a book which in turn becomes an object of exchange and consumption in Silliman, New Sentence 20-1.
40
Where do words come from? What if we drained them of their meaning to see what remained? What if we said that we
had done this thing? Can you give a yes or no answer? Can you say it in a few short words? How is it with all this
language there is still this thing so vast that we have no name for it, even if we use it as a thing we have seen? Were the
words trapped in the pen, just waiting? Did they burst, sperm-like, into meaning in our mouths? Can you taste it? Can you
feel it? What about it? Ron Silliman, The Chinese Notebook. (www.ubu.com: /ubu editions, 2004) 34. For more on this
see my discussion of this work in Watkin, Rule-governed violations of convention.
41
In this work the choice of notebook determines, for Silliman, the nature of the poem he comes to write in it: 18. I chose a
Chinese notebook, its thin pages not to be cut, its six red-line columns which I turned 90 [degrees], the way they are closed
by curves at both top and bottom, to see how it would alter the writingimpact of page on vocabulary? Ron Silliman, The
Chinese Notebook. (www.ubu.com: /ubu editions, 2004) 6.
42
Perloffs famous phrase in her now classic definition of postmodern poetry as a form of radical artifice of which she says:
Artifice, in this sense, is less a matter of ingenuity or manner, or of elaboration and elegant subterfuge, than of a
recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing contrived, constructed, chosen Marjorie Perloff,
Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991) 28.
43
Shklovsky 5.
44
Ibid. 5-6.
45
Ibid. 13.
46
In differentiating absorptive, or automatised writing from anti-absorptive or impermeable texts such as those to be found
amongst the works of Language poets Bernstein says: By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing completely
Impermeability suggests artificedigression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated,
fractured Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29. The description of
impermeability with its references to a lack of integration and various elements of impediment is in some ways the missing
link between Shklovsky and Sillimans ideas on prose.
47
Ron Silliman, Disappearance of the world, appearance of the word. In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Eds. Bruce
Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,1984) 127.
48
Shklovksy 6
49
Ron Silliman, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book 131.
50
Bob Perelman. The Marginalization of Poetry. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) 61.
51
Cohesion is a stylistic term to refer, not to how a sentence or grammatical phrase holds together, that is the task of
generative grammar, but how sentences and phrases cohere into a structure of semantic sense that we call a text. For a text
to cohere the sentences must be tied together based on the following functions: a presupposition about the relation of one
sentence to another that is satisfied, the use of internal deixis to produce ties of reference and repetition, resulting in a
cohesion of interpretability where, for example, he of sentence 2 refers to Adam of sentence 1. The ties that bind sentences
at a local level through presupposition, pointing and interpretation, slowly come to form the texture of the text based on
issues of diction, tone, limited subject matter and so on. This occurs by the sentences unfolding in a dynamic, temporal and
spatial series, one sentence after another presented in a wider situation or textual context, what Silliman calls the level of
integration. This definition is a compound taken from M.A.K Halliday and R. Hasan. Cohesion in English (London:
Longman, 1976) and Michael Toolan. Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics (London: Arnold, 1998).
33

52

The four most common means by which sentences are tied together based on presupposition, deixis and interpretability are
reference, ellipsis, conjunction and lexis. A word refers to a previous object or situation, the phrase that links one sentence
to another is eradicated but assumed as it has become automatised from continual use allowing a mental jump to occur, a
word like and is used to tie together two phrases, or a commonality of diction gives the feeling of a cohesive integration
of subject matter and context. Poets, including Silliman with his theory of the parsimony principle, almost seem in wonder
as to how integrated cohesion occurs when in fact it is a rather simple, common linguistic function.
53
Silliman, New Sentence 89.
54
Ibid. 90.
55
See Silliman, New Sentence 79, Perelman 59-71, and the discussion of Kittay and Godzichs ideas on hypotaxis in
Fredman 3-4.
56
As I mentioned through reference, ellipsis, conjunction and lexicon
57
A great example is George Hartleys reading of section of Tjanting which produces a convincing cohesive unit from
seemingly
irretrievable
disjunctive
poetry.
See
George
Hartley,
Sentences
in
Space
(http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hartley/pubs/sentence.html) 4. In addition there is Perloffs meticulous and insightful close
reading of Sillimans Albany in Perloff, Language Poetry 414-422, and Thomas Fink, No Other Sentence Could Have
Followed This: Ron Sillimans Tjanting (http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html).
58
For a detailed analysis of the effects of excessive repetition in contemporary verse see Watkin, Poetry Machines .97-103
59
As James Sherry states: Ron Silliman proposes that meanings are found in the connections between words and between
sentences. The simplicity of his writings forms makes those connections more visible and helps him to position his work
so that the issues raised by each sentence are not overshadowed by formal considerations. He takes this posture in order to
illuminate the particulars of content and the reader determines the nature and meaning of their relations. This happens on
the large and small scalesSince each sentence is presented as a unit with stress on the skeletal relation to the next
sentence, he points to the formal (imposed) nature of the sentence. James Sherry, Taking a Stand. The Difficulties 2.2
(1985) 73.
60
As Not this. has been torqued through the reiterative permutational progession of the poem into Not not this and so
on, Not this here is a new sentence. That it coincides with the first sentence naturally raises issues of repetition and
singularity but it does not stop it from being a new sentence all the same.
61
Anaphora and Cataphora are two central forms of cohesive ties under the heading of deixis. Anaphora is the economic or
varied repetition of a phrase such as replacing the character name Adam with he, or the hero. Cataphora is repetition of
he or the hero in the first instance only to find out they point to someone named Adam at a later date. Prose tends to be
anaphoric, establishing a fact and them using presupposition to allow anaphoric economy along with integrated cohesion.
Poetry tends toward the cataphoric with full the meaning of terms often only available once the whole piece has been read
and re-read. These, however, are generalisations and assumptions such as have occurred in the past that prose, say, is
primarily metonymic to poetrys being metaphoric are rendered ludicrous by the generic subversion of the contemporary,
postmodern prose poem.
62
Sherry also notices the potential for integration within the apparently non-cohesive prose of new sentence poetry: These
unitsforms, sentences, phrasesare linked by prosody, by their social context, and by social theory propounded by
Silliman (and others). So although these sentence units are discrete entities, the reader tends to see them as one thingas
facets of existence (work), as Sillimans work, as the readers own thought and lifea unified piece of writing. Sherry 73.
63
Giorgio Agamben. Idea of Prose. Trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (New York: SUNY Press, 1995) 39.
64
Talking of, but also adopting to a large degree, Walter Benjamins idea of prose Agamben reads Benjamins reading of
Valerys statement: the essence of prose is to perish, that is to be comprehended, to be dissolved, destroyed without residue,
wholly substituted by an image or impulse. to which Agamben adds the gloss: Insofar as it has reached perfect
transparency to itself, insofar as it now says and understands only itself, speech restored to the Idea [of prose] is
immediately dispersed; it is pure historyhistory without grammar or transmission, which knows neither past nor
repetition, resting solely on its own never having beenit [pure prose] is the language that, having eliminated all of its
presuppositions and names no longer having anything to say, simply speaks. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. Trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 60. The exhaustibility of prose here is taken to a level of
sophistication we do not have time to trace, suffice it to say it is a language that coincides, if you will, so perfectly with its
meaning, its meaning as language not its semantic content, that it simply speaks its essence and, for that matter, our own
essence. In doing so it leaves behind issues of semiotics and semantics, sign and discourse, and thus exhausts its materiality
and disappears.
65
Speaking generally about the relationship of philosophy to art in the last decades of the previous century Gerald Bruns
notes that: prior to this period there was something like a common understanding that philosophy, whatever else it might
be, was first of all philosophy of science. But by 1981 Arthur Danto, wondering why art should be something that there is a
philosophy of, concluded that philosophy just is, if it is anything, philosophy of art. And this is more true because art,
having reached the end of its history, has turned into philosophy. Gerald Bruns. Tragic Thoughts at the End of
Philosophy: Language, Literature and Ethical Theory. (Evanstion Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999) xi. While

Bruns uses the term art here, it is more common within this debate to speak of poetry as a designation of a use of materiality
for its own sake away from the need to establish meaning, truth or knowledge. Within this vein Richard Rorty bases his
whole philosophical project around the value of poetry for philosophy and society: We need a redescription of liberalism as
the hope that culture as a whole can be poeticized rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be rationalized or
scientized. That is, we need to substitute the hope that chances for fulfillment of idiosyncratic fantasies will be equalized
for the hope that everyone will replace passion or fantasy with reason. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 53.
66
Agamben, Idea of Prose 40.
67
Ibid. 41.
68
Silliman, New Sentence 91.
69
Agamben, Idea of Prose 41.
70
Speaking of Sillimans new sentence Sherry notes: The space and the period are equated. (Sherry 74).
71
While a full-stop may make a material mark in speech through a pause for breath, in effect this is represented in writing
by a comma. While there are many commas in speech, indeed the comma is a material rendition of the reliance of speech
on breath there are no full-stops in speech as such.
72
Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 109115.