A Prized Conversation with Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written and edited over thirty (30) books and has had his poetry and criticism translated into twelve (12) languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Silliman has worked as a political organizer, lobbyist, ethnographer, newspaper editor, director of development, and executive editor of the Socialist Review (US). Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.

I had the pleasure and honor of asking Ron about what makes a great writer or poet, also would he change anything if he could do anything in his career or life, and so much more.

U: What is your writing routine like? Has it changed since you first started writing? How is your writing ever-evolving?

R:  It varies with the poem. For the section of Universe with which I am spending the most time of late, I write fairly soon after I get up in the morning, sometimes quite early, like 6:00 AM. I was doing my first draft on a tablet in the app Evernote and then saving each day’s accumulation into a Word file, but recently that tablet died, and since then, I have been writing in Word on a PC and saving that accumulation into Evernote. But as recently as three or four years ago, I always began with a notebook and pen. That has changed as I have an evolving essential tremor that has made my handwriting – always problematic – gradually become unreadable even to me. Learning to write my first drafts with a keyboard has been a challenge, given that I am over 75. Another section of Universe, Now, Here, This: Half-Sonnets, really is where I taught myself that. But those were short paragraphs, which is a very different kind of poem than something lineated like River, the current project.

When I was a youngster, literally in high school, I used both notebooks and a typewriter, but using the latter in my house meant waiting until the dinner was complete and all the adults had retired to watch television in the living room. Then I could carry my grandfather’s manual typewriter to the small table we had in a kitchen nook and type away. A couple of years later, when I had my first real job as a shipping clerk for an energy company, I spent my very first paycheck on a lightweight manual typewriter. That lasted me for about five years or so until one day – I was by this time a student at San Francisco State – when I dropped the machine on the floor of my apartment and suddenly had not a typewriter, but 6,000 typewriter parts. The man in the local repair shop informed me that reconstructing my bag of parts would be much more expensive than buying a new one, but as I didn’t have the money at the moment for a new one, I was back to writing by hand. That enabled me to write places that I had not previously used before, such as on buses and trains, but when I first got a new machine and typed some texts I had written on legal tablets along my way from North Berkeley to SF State, I was surprised to learn that they came out mostly to be one page single-spaced on the typewriter. I had thoroughly internalized that terrain. But from then on, I began to use notebooks more and more. Most of The Age of Huts, Tjanting, and The Alphabet were composed in notebooks. As were many of the first ten or so sections of Universe.

U: In 1976 and 1977,  you co-curated a reading series with Tom Mandel at the Grand Piano, a coffee house. How important are these types of gatherings still to this day?   What are your thoughts that some of the poets who participated in this series were still collaborating on a work based on these readings?

R: We are talking about nearly one-half century ago. In 1976, I don’t believe that Tom or I had ever used a computer. David Melnick, another San Francisco poet, had, but only to feed punch cards into a machine that was literally the size of a building at the edge of the University of California campus. Maybe Jackson Mac Low was starting to try out mainframes as compositional tools, but he would have been the only one. Nowadays, most of the young poets I see read their texts off of cell phone screens. I still prefer to carry a book or sheaf of papers up to the podium myself, but I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer venues are designed with paper in mind.

In the mid-1970s, San Francisco had only two regular reading series that pre-dated The Grand Piano on Haight Street. The Poetry Center series at San Francisco State on Thursdays around noontime out at the SF State campus, which was a distant remove from the City’s inner neighborhoods where most poets actually lived. And at Intersection Coffee House on Union Street in North Beach, an arts venue nearby the San Francisco Art Institute. State had “name” poets who were usually in their fifties, some good, some pretty blah, but its timing and location meant that only students could get to the readings with any regularity. Intersection’s curators at the time tended to have local poets, but they favored a nostalgic mode of surrealism that pretended to be avant-garde while really being quite the opposite. Barrett Watten, who started the Grand Piano series, made a point of having the readings on Haight Street at the exact same time as the readings at Intersection so that readers would have to choose which to attend. Within a year, the Piano was having audiences of 50 or more attendees, more than double the size of the readings at Intersection. For the reading that Tom and I hosted of George Stanley and Ted Berrigan, we had an audience of 110 people, pretty evenly divided by followers of Stanley, an SF ex-pat who had been a vital part of the Spicer Circle and who was often considered by many as the best poet in the City, and Berrigan, the unquestioned leader of the second-generation NY School poets. We had other readings that were nearly that large, such as Robert Glück paired with Robert Duncan.

The reading series was thus a place to meet with friends, to identify yourself as part of a larger progressive literary tradition. When the poet Stephen Vincent’s first child was born, he called the Piano – it was reading day and crowded – to let everyone know he was a father. We tried to get the best available readers – my biggest regret at the time (probably now as well) was that George Oppen was too frail to read, already withdrawn into his dementia. He did do one reading in those years, but a neighborhood coffee house was too much effort for too little return. By the time the Piano had run its course, San Francisco had seen many other reading series spring up: several associated with the art galleries around San Francisco’s conceptual art movement, the best known being 80 Langton Street. Canessa Park on the far end of North Beach began in the lobby of some architect's office, up a long flight of stairs that saw poets carry Larry Eigner in his wheelchair into the reading week after week. Intersection changed its curators and became more diverse and active. And New College of California on Valencia in the Mission held readings growing mostly out of the poetics program there that Robert Duncan headed up. So by the late 1970s, it wasn’t a noon reading on Thursday and two on Tuesday anymore. It was “Which reading do I want to go to tonight”? The schedules that appear in Poetry Flash for that period list maybe 150 readings per month. The sheer volume of readings changed the literary reputation of San Francisco – much the way Philadelphia has changed its reputation in the past two decades.

I think Covid has transformed this in ways we don’t fully understand as yet. There are far fewer readings, but Zoom and its imitators make it possible for poets in far-distant places to read together. You can be in Montana or Romania and read together because why not? But that also means that poets don’t pair off after the readings to go home and f@ck or to go to a bar and have the sort of deep gossip conversations that really build a scene. When Bob Perelman started the talk series in San Francisco, he basically asked everyone who was part of the soft reading scene that had grown up out of that informal community. And later, in 1980, at Robert Duncan’s urging, the Zen Center of San Francisco invited me to host a poetry series at the bakery they had in the Haight, which I did with Perelman and Whalen biographer David Schneider. Interestingly, I’m much more involved with the Buddhist community now in the Philadelphia hinterlands than I was then.

U: Can you give us a glimpse of what it was like to write in the 60s and '70s and be a political activist?

R: Even more than the poetry community, political work evolved rapidly, so what it was like in 1972 when I first started working with the Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice (CPHJ) was quite different from what it was two or three years later, let alone three years after that. In 1972, I was a caseworker for CPHJ, writing to the likes of Charles Manson, whom you can look up on the internet. In 1975 I shook hands with Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, and I still worked for CPHJ, but they had now loaned me to a coalition of prison reform groups to function as their lobbyist. In 1977, the new governor, Jerry Brown, signed a bill I had helped to draft that changed the sentences for several thousand felony statutes so that prisoners would know on day one when they might be returned to the community. I had been interviewed by the FBI about my phone number being in the book of a would-be presidential assassin and had met with another member of the Manson family who herself took a shot at President Ford. But by 1978, I was working on an ethnography of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a neighborhood with many former felons, and by 1980 I had helped to write a bill that preserved over 10,000 units of residential hotel housing (most of which exists to this day) in order to keep the poorest San Franciscans from becoming homeless. I served on a fire department task force to identify landlords who used arson to oust tenants (as happened at the Hotel Wentley more than once). My own landlord was on that list, which required fire department investigators to treat every fire in such a person’s building to be treated as suspicious. Then, after a six-year hiatus, I became the executive editor of The Socialist Review, a publication that grew out of the anti-war movement of the 1960s. I remained as executive editor for three years and remained on the editorial collective for another three until the arrival of twins in my life forced me to step down. I was a member of the New American Movement, an outgrowth of SDS in the ‘60s, when it merged in 1981 with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form the Democratic Socialists of America, and I am still a member today.

But mostly, it has hard work and long days. I remember coming back to San Francisco late at night from the state capitol in Sacramento and going immediately to meet Kathy Acker at a reading or performance. There were times when she literally held me upright to stay awake.

During all this, I wrote all of The Age of Huts and much of The Alphabet. My ability to print by hand into notebooks while riding buses became a major asset, and I tended to write every morning before other people in the house were awake. I still do that, although now I use keyboards of various sorts as I have a tremor that has wiped out my printing by hand.

U: In your role as an ethnographer, you studied cultural phenomena. How did examing others during a specific social situation impact your poetry?

R: I worked one block from the Greyhound Bus Station where poets from Robert Duncan to David Gitin had worked, literally typing up daily schedules for riders on a mimeograph. By having access to that mimeo, many books of poetry had been produced going back pretty much to the end of World War 2. I got to know an even broader range of people, from ex-cons and drag queen sex workers to two mayors of San Francisco, even being at a lunch for Philippine President Corazon Aquino, curiously in the same building where President Warren Harding had died several decades earlier. I learned that you could be an old heroin addict, but rarely did you find old street alcoholics. I taught a writers’ workshop that had a no-guns-in-class rule because we needed it. And I had to enforce that. One day Bob Holman (New York’s Bowery Bob) was visiting the class when two practitioners of Santeria had a literary disagreement and concluded by putting hexes on one another. One of my students shot and killed a high school kid who had stolen his cowboy hat and was tossing it to his friends. Another, a schizophrenic, bought a car and killed a pedestrian because he thought a herd of horses was chasing him. One was the most well-known Inuit fiction writer in the Lower 48 states. One of them had been a student of Louis Zukofsky and only wrote totally pornographic sonnets. Another’s lover was a caretaker in the board-and-care home in Berkeley where Larry Eigner lived. There was a brothel in the neighborhood that dated back to the Second World War and had never been busted because an important politician was a regular there. That place still exists. The local Mafia mostly used the neighborhood to launder money. Two gay schoolteachers, one a former roommate of mine, opened up two residential hotels that housed many of the transexuals who’d been ousted from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift. Somebody tried to kill my wife once – his reasons had nothing to do with her – and I stopped him. One woman waited until she qualified for Social Security, then left her husband and drove with a son in a VW van and lived in the neighborhood for the rest of her life. She would knit during the writers’ workshop – if she wrote, I never saw it – and make comments like, “I think all heroin addicts should be shot. Present company excluded, of course.”  

U: What makes a great poet or writer?

R: Letting the world dictate your impulses.

U: What drew you literary-wise to the language poetry movement?

R: I met Barrett Watten when I was just out of high school, and he was still a senior at Skyline in Oakland. I was already trying to write, wavering between very conventional poems (modeled, for example, after Alan Dugan) and much more ambitious open-form works (the models here were Robert Kelly and Robert Duncan). I studied with Jack Gilbert, who himself had apprenticed with Jack Spicer, among more conventional poets. When I won a contest at Berkeley, I met the judge, Robert Grenier, a one-time student of Robert Lowell’s who was then trying to find a middle ground between Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Creeley. Watten showed up in Grenier’s office one day, having gone to study at Iowa City, and we took off right where we had been years before. Hitch-hiking up Solano after a reading by David Bromige, I met David Melnick, who became one of my best friends ever. I would co-edit the collected poems of both Bromige and Melnick. My first wife brought Rae Armantrout home from her class with Denise Levertov at Berkeley. Nobody thought we were the language poets – we certainly didn’t – until Steve Abbott (see the film Fairyland, a biopic written by his daughter) and Alan Soldofsky called us that in Poetry Flash. But the name stuck because names do.

U: Would you change anything if you could do anything in your career or life?

R: There are some people I would have been kinder to and many more questions that I would have asked the grandparents who basically raised me. I would like to know which of my great uncles had been raping their younger sisters and what the broader consequences of that were. My grandmother combined anxiety and bipolar disorders with post-traumatic stress in ways that made her behave as though she were psychotic her entire life. Of the four boys who made it to adulthood among her 12 older siblings, she only let one ever enter our house, although most lived in the same town. Four of her sisters had illegal abortions before World War I, and all had deadbolts on their bedroom doors. There is a story there, and I wish I had not waited until she and my mother were both gone to look at it plainly.

U: What made you want to become a lecturer and professor?

R: I didn’t, particularly. I did not enjoy much of my years as a student during the Vietnam War era, and I did not finish college. Instead, I worked in the non-profit sector at activist-type jobs until I could pass myself off as a nonprofit executive. But I wrote. From the age of ten, I wrote—nearly every day. And in the US, the old academic adage of publish or perish can work the other way around as well. When I moved to Pennsylvania in 1995 to take a job with a joint venture owned by both IBM and Kodak, the University of Pennsylvania began to ask me to come and teach. I didn’t until I retired from the computer industry in 2011. It has been a happy accident, but the fact that I teach at a school like Penn means that I am blessed with excellent students. It is the students who motivate me now.

U: With your extensive experience with political organizing, what do you think of today's activists and their role in current social, political, and cultural affairs?

R: I think that they have a difficult road ahead. The world is biased to favor capitalism, and capital accumulation concentrates wealth more every day. When Bill Gates became the wealthiest person on the planet, he only had $34 billion USD. Today, there are a half dozen people who have in excess of $150B, and unless I drop dead this week, I may well live to see the first trillionaire. Last I looked, all the money in the world was still well below $400 trillion. So we are well on our way to a return to an epoch of monarchs.

The problem with communism, and to a lesser degree socialism, is that it demands perfect human beings. The instant you put your thumb down on the scale to make life easier for you, or more probably, your children, you set the whole Stalinist mudslide into motion. Mao thought he could around that and manufacture perfect people and that was even more of a disaster. And the division of the world into 200 nations just invites capital flight. 

Capitalists think they can innovate their way out of climate disaster and make a profit, but just in case, they are inventing new space technology to take capital flight literally off-world. But what good is a dollar on Mars? Their terraformed cities are apt to look a lot like Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile islands. But at least they will be kings for a day.

U: What is the biggest misconception about socialism?

R: That it is only one thing. Second, that it can work in one country. It's all or nothing. 

U: How would you explain how socialism is impactful to where it benefits society to someone who is opposed to it?

R: This is like the process of explaining why you opposed the war in Vietnam to people who imagined they were patriots. If you asked them what they were defending, it tended to come down to ecological answers that had nothing to do with the conflict there. That same Socratic process can work here, but maybe we would be more successful using other words.

U: Throughout your career, you have worn many hats. Which "hat" are you most fond of?

R: Father, husband. I am a writer – that’s not a hat, more like a spine. The purpose of writing is to write. The other stuff is the other stuff. I can get giddy just crossing a pair of T’s.

For more information about Ron’s poetry, please visit his site.