The Alphabet
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The Alphabet--decades in the making, continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments first appeared in the 1970s. Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared--in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes--its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry.
Ron Silliman, a founder of the language poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in The Alphabet the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.
The Alphabet is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices--historical and private--that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He has worked as a political activist, editor, and market analyst. Among his honors, Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize, from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit centre of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
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