Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is one of the founders of west coast "language" writing, though he now lives just outside Philadelphia. His 30plus books include works of poetry, prose essays, and intergenre classics. His early books, Ketjak and Tjanting, pretty much defined what might be possible in long prose poetry works characterized in part by mathematical processes, seemingly dense, even impregnable, yet gradually revealing themselves as works of both autobiography and lenses taking in the world in which we live. A key theorist of late 20th Century American poetry, his most famous essay is "The New Sentence," which has become necessary reading if one wants to understand the period and its great innovators. Silliman's work joins poetic innovation with deep social/political commitment, and he is correctly thought to be one of our great poets of the last 50 years.