Ron Silliman has written and edited 25 books to date, most recently Woundwood. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. Buy some of his books here. There are many links to work online (as well as lots of other info) here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I keep getting asked this question & the answer’s always the same. William Carlos Williams’ “The Desert Music,” which I first discovered in the Albany Public Library when I was 16. By the time I finished reading the poem at a table in the library’s two rooms – it’s subsequently been replaced by a new facility a block away the size of a hospital – I knew I had to be a poet. The poem mixes direct statement with descriptive narrative and the first instance of sensuous form that I instantly “got.” 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I’ve been a reader of the Baseball Register literally for decades & a deep reader of baseball statistics since the Giants moved to San Francisco when I was 11 years old. I love baseball rather the way I do comic strips in the newspaper – because I live a reasonably stressful life & it’s valuable to have some interests that patently “mean nothing,” even tho they really do. Both connect me to habits from my childhood – and that in itself is also a worthy justification. Baseball statistics have been a more conservative field even than School o’ Quietude poetics, yet in recent years stats – especially the “major” widely recognized stats – have been undergoing dramatic change. Were he to return to life, my grandfather would be startled to see pitchers being gauged by their WHIP numbers – walks plus hits per innings pitched – or to discover that on-base percentage has become nearly as important as batting average, which it may soon eclipse. Not to mention OPS, which is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The new stats for hitters only accentuate how much better a hitter Barry Bonds has become than any other player since at least Ted Williams. These new numbers come out of the sabermetrics, the use of statistics to analyze anything about baseball that might be counted & measured. While sabermetrics has been around for over 20 years, it has only been in the past five years or so that some baseball teams have actually begun to use the new methods to make key decisions as to personnel. Although sabermetricians like Bill James are sometimes treated in the media as supernerds seriously in need of a life, their application of some basic analytic tools to something like baseball strikes me as the sort of thing we ought to be thinking about with many endeavors in contemporary life – and I definitely include poetry. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? By philosophy do you mean the academic profession or the study of what thought & knowledge is possible and how we might think & know this? If your answer is the former, then my answer is not at all. If the latter, then the answer would be quite a lot. Often I think of philosophy as poetry’s evil twin, although once in awhile I think I have those roles reversed. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Among contemporary poets: Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Alexei Parschikov & Ivan Zhdanov from Russia. Nicole Brossard from francophone Canada. Heriberto Yepez from Mexico. Anne-Marie Albiach from France. The Slovenian Tomaš Šalamun. All are writers I think of as peers who are struggling with many of the same issues in their poetry as I am in my own, positioned differently for age (I’m quite a bit older than Yepez, for example), location and the specifics of their own situation. I learn a great deal from each of them. Historically, the list is too long even to imagine. Lorca, Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ponge, Vallejo, Hikmet – who should be read more widely – but also critics such as Benjamin & Shklovsky, to pick very different discourses. Each such writer is a node in a network or web of connections that I am constantly exploring. What I find perhaps most exhilarating about these poets is just how much of the world each reveals that I never could have gotten to in any other way. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I’ve tried to read some poetry, even if only a couple of lines, every day for the past 40 or so years. I think it’s vital. A poet who doesn’t read poetry is like somebody trying to play baseball who has never tried to hit a curve. You can spot poets who don’t read poetry by how arid their work is, and by how self-satisfied they tend to be, even those (especially those) whose professional stance is one of self-torture. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? It’s impossible for me to know what my peers may assume that I’ve read. I haven’t read Henry James or Thomas Wolfe. Why? Because I haven’t gotten around to it yet. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? It’s something that makes your dad pretty crazy. But beyond that, all art forms are extensions of our senses, how we see, feel, touch, hear or otherwise interact with the world. If dance is the art of your body in time, and music is the art of sound, and painting & photography arts of vision, then poetry is the art of language. Anything that language can do is appropriate as the material of poetry. Poetry’s role, in turn, is to fully explore what its medium can tell us about itself & the world. The role of any art is to explore what its medium can tell us of the world. When a dancer says of the Hokey Pokey, “That’s what it’s all about,” they aren’t necessarily kidding. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? See 7 above. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**meringue Chiseled**abs I**is an other Of**about to within which what Form**wild 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The simple answer is that, over time, both are getting larger. But that’s not the real answer because the body’s relation to the act of writing is invariably intimate – one cannot write without extending the body in some fashion, whether scribbling by hand, typing away or reciting spontaneously (or not) into a microphone or before a crowd. A poet who composed by cutting words from weekly magazines and pasting together “ransom note” style texts would have the process of cutting & gluing, but also of arranging and of browsing or scanning the magazines for appropriate text in the first place. What is your process? I do a lot of work on my Palm Pilot these days, but I also write by hand into notebooks. If I don’t have the energy to work in my Palm Pilot, whose “handwriting” system, which it calls Graffiti, requires some concentration, then in fact I don’t have the energy to write. I must be some kind of Projectivist because for me writing is not only speech (or thought) but is also always the dance of the hand.