richer sounds怎么翻译
richer sounds怎么翻译
09-10-12 &匿名提问
Forgive, sounds good. 宽恕其实是一种痛楚 Forget, I'm not sure I could. 又不敢确定我能去淡忘 They say time heals everything, 人们说时间能愈合一切 But I'm still waiting. 我却还在痴痴等待 I'm through, with doubt, 始终不敢去确信 There's nothing left for me to figure out, 还剩下什么让我去捉摸 I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying. 为何付出了代价仍旧要继续 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 I know you said 知道有什么你想要说 Why can't you just get over it, 但为何你不能自己面对去淡忘 It turned my whole world around 我的世界已经颠覆 and I kind of like it 我却已爱上这几许 I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby, 在床边像孩子一样入睡 With no regrets and I don't mind saying, 不带一丝懊悔，也不介意这样去说 It's a sad sad story 这是一个过度伤感的故事 That a mother will teach her daughter 也许有个母亲会这样讲给她的女儿 that she ought to hate a perfect stranger. 对那个完全陌生的人，她丝毫不感怨恨 And how in the world 但实际上我该怎么 Can the words that I said 去说出那样的话语 Send somebody so over the edge 能让远远角落里的人们 That they'd write me a letter 也写给我一封信 Saying that I better shut up and sing 告诉我停止絮叨而只是唱 Or my life will be over 而另外的选择就是生命的尽头 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 你认为对的路 Forgive, sounds good. 宽恕其实是一种痛楚 Forget, I'm not sure I could. 又不敢确定我能去淡忘 They say time heals everything, 人们说时间能愈合一切 But I'm still waiting. 我却还在痴痴等待
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First you should find a foreign friend and then make your relationship with him close enough so that you can have the chance for him to marry you.But make sure that he is not a slumdog.Good luck to you!
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威廉•••莎士比亚（）--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------十四行诗能不能让我来把你比作夏日？你可是更加温柔，更加温婉；狂风会吹落五月里开的好花，夏季租出的日子又未免太短暂；有时候苍天的巨眼照得太灼热，他那金彩的脸色也会被遮暗；每一样美呀，总会离开美而凋落，被时机或者自然的代谢所摧残；但是你永久的夏天决不会凋枯，你拥有的美丽将会永远绽放，死神夸不着你在他影子里的踯躅，你将在不朽的诗中与时间同长；只要人类在呼吸，眼睛看得见，我这诗就活着，使你的生命绵延。WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ()------------------------------------------------------------------SONNETSShall I compare thee to a Summers day?Thou art more lovelRough winds do shake the darling buds of Maie,And Summers lease hath Sometime too hot tue eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,And every faire from faire some-time declines,By chance ,or natures changing course untim’d;But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that faire thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,When in eternall lines to time though grow’st,So long as man can breath or eyes can see,So long lives this ,and this give life to thee. 约翰•多恩()死亡，不要骄傲死亡，不要骄傲，虽然有人说你强大而又可怖，而你并不真的这样因为你只是威吓害怕你的人们。可怜的死亡，本身无法死亡，也不能将我杀死。休憩与睡眠，这就是你的写照，无数的欢乐，也是从你，涌流出来，我们中的死最优秀的人随你去得越早，越能早日获得身体的休息，灵魂的解脱。你是奴隶，服从于命运、机会、君王和亡命之徒，在毒药、战争与疾病间徘徊鸦片、迷药也可以让我们甜美的地睡去那么你的突然降临又有什么好处呢？你又为什么骄傲？一旦短暂的睡眠过去，我们将永远觉醒死亡再也不会有，死亡，你自己应该去死！JOHN DONNE ()DEATH BE NOT PROUDDeath be not proud, thought some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee,From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,And dost with poison, warre, and sickness dwell,And poppie, or charmes can make us sleep as well,And bet why swell’st thou then?One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,And de death, thou shalt die.威廉•布莱克()伦敦在熟悉的泰晤士河流过的边上我漫游过每一条详熟的街道心中刻画下我遇见的每一张面孔上面都写满衰弱,写满悲哀在每个人的每一声呼喊，在每个婴儿害怕的呼叫，在每句话，每条禁令里，都响着用心铸造的镣铐。扫烟囱的孩子的哭泣震惊着煤烟乌黑的教堂不幸的战士的叹息象血般流下宫殿的高墙但在午夜的街头我听到更多的年轻妓女的诅咒它骇住了那新生婴儿的哭泣它像瘟疫般摧残了婚姻,使婚床变成了柩床。WILLIAM BLAKE ()LONDONI wander thro’ each charter’d street,Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,And mark the every face I meetMarks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every Man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.How the Chemney-sweeper’s cryEvery black’ring CAnd the hapless Soldier’s sighRun in blood down Palace walls.But most thro’midnight streets I hearHow the youthful Harlot’s curseBlasts the new born Infant’s tear,And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.拜伦()她在美丽中行走她走在美丽的光彩中,像夜晚皎洁无云而且繁星满天。明与暗的最美妙的色泽在她的仪容和秋波里呈现，仿佛是晨露映出的阳光但比那光亮柔和而幽暗增加或减少一分色泽就会损害这难言的美美波动在她乌黑的发上或者散布淡淡的光辉在那脸庞，恬静的思绪指明她的来处纯洁而珍贵。啊，那额际，那鲜艳的面颊，如此温和，平静，而又脉脉含情，那迷人的微笑，那明眸的顾盼，都在说明一个善良的生命：她和蔼地对待世间的一切，她的心流溢着真纯的爱情！LORD BYRON ()SHE WALKS IN BEAUTYShe walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless cliAnd all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes:Thus mellow’d to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impair’d the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with all below,A heart whose love is innocent! 李希•亨特（）珍妮吻了我我们相遇时，珍妮吻了我，当时她一下子从椅子里跳起；时光，这个窃贼，喜欢一路把甜蜜收集，将这也带上！说我疲倦吧，说我忧伤，说健康与财富都以把我冷落，说我已经衰老，不过要加上，珍妮吻了我。LEIGH HUNT()JENNY KISS’D MEJenny kiss’d me when we met,Jumping from Time, you thief, who love to getSweet into your list , put that in!Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,Say I’m growing old, but add,Jenny kiss’d me.罗伯特•赫里克()给少女，珍惜青春蔷薇盛开时，愿君采撷，岁月漫长，但也是在不停飞逝：今天明媚的花朵，明天也许要凋谢。天空中光辉的明灯，太阳，越升越高，一片辉煌；它的路程却将越来越短，很快它就将落向西方。豆蔻年华，妙龄时候，当青春和热血还在；不要虚度年华，嗟叹中，时间又催老了曾青春的面庞。所以不必羞涩，而是珍惜你的青春；能够的时候就追寻幸福欢欣：因为一旦韶华随风逝去，你就将永远失意踌躇。ROBERT HERRICK ()TO THE VIRGINS,TO MAKE MUCH OF TIMEGather ye Rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a flying:And the same flower that smiles to day,To morrow will be dying.The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,The higher he’The sooner will his Race be run,And nearer he’s to Setting.That Age is best, which is the first,When Youth and BBut being spent, the worse, and worstTimes, still succeed the former.Then be not coy,And will ye may, goe marry:For having lost but once your prime,You may for ever tarry. 雪莱（）奥西曼达斯我遇到过一位来自古老国土的旅客，他说：一双巨大的石足，没有身躯，矗立在沙漠中……近旁的黄沙半露着一幅破碎残缺的面孔,它眉峰紧蹙,嘴唇皱起,统率万方鄙夷一切的神色,表明雕刻师对这类情绪曾深有感受。它们，由于留痕于这无生命的物体上，竟比孕育它们的心，仿造它们的手，都存活得更长久；台座上，石足下，这样的字迹依稀可读：“众生之王——奥西曼达斯就是我，看看我的业绩吧，纵然一时之雄也定会颓然而绝望！”残骸的四周，此外再也没有留下什么，寂寞，荒凉，无边的平沙伸向远方。PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ()OZYMANDIASI met a traveler from an antique landWho said: two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘my name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away. 伊丽莎白•••巴莱特••白朗宁()选自《葡萄牙十四行诗集》我是怎样的爱你，说不尽万语千言，我爱你是那样的高深和广远。是我的灵魂所能触及，目光无法看到的真挚直到万物都不再存在，是上帝无边的恩典我爱你就像是每一天的最静谧的渴望，从日出到摇曳的烛光。我爱你如此恣意，就像人们追求正义；我爱你如此纯净，就像他们拒绝赞美。我爱你，用我所有过去的忧伤还有我儿提时纯真的期望我爱你，这爱我本以为早已失落随我破碎的灵魂失落—我爱你用我生命中所有的呼吸、微笑、泪水！--而且，如果上帝允许，在死后，我将只有，比现在更深地，爱你。ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ()SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESEHow do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal GraceI love thee to the level of every dayMost quiet need, by sun and candlelight.I love thee freely, as men strive for RI love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faithI love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints- I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.克里斯蒂娜•赛罗蒂（）歌当我离开人间，最亲爱的，别为我哀歌悲切；我的墓前不要栽玫瑰，也不要柏树茂密；愿绿草覆盖我的身躯，沾着湿润的灵珠雨水；假如你愿意，就把我怀念，假如你愿意，就把我忘却。我不会重见那阴影，不会感觉雨天来临；我不会听见那夜莺一声声仿佛哀鸣；我置身梦境，在朦胧的黎明，它从不升起，也永不沉沦；也许我会记得，也许我会忘记。CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ()SONGWhen I am dead, my dearest,SinPlant thou no roses at my head,Nor shady cypress tree:Be the green grass above meWith showAnd if thou wilt, remember,And if thou wilt, forget.I shall not see the shadows,I shaI shall not hear the nightingaleSing on,And dreaming through twilightThat doth not rise nor set,Haply I may remember,And haply may forget.鲁伯特•布鲁克（）士兵如果我死了，请这样怀念我：在一片异域的一角那是永恒的英格兰。在那里富饶的大地中藏着一片更富饶的土地；那是英格兰赋予生命、形体和意识的土地；曾给过她喜爱的花，她漫游的道路，英格兰的身躯，呼吸着英格兰的空气，受着河水的沐浴，受着家乡阳光的佑护。想想，这颗心，所有的邪恶都已离散，永恒的思想的脉搏，不再还给我英格兰曾给出的想法；她的视野和声音；梦如白昼一般快乐；欢笑，与友相知；还有温和，心静如水，在英格兰的天空下。RUPERT BROOKE()THE SOLDIERIf I should die, think only this of me:That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn that reach earth a rA dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England’s, breathing England air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back to the thoughts by EH drAnd laughter, and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an England heaven.威廉••巴特勒•叶芝()当你老了当你老了,头白了,睡思昏沉，炉火旁打盹,请取下这诗歌，慢慢读,回想过去眼神的柔和，回想它们昔日的浓重的阴影；多少人爱你年轻欢畅的时辰爱慕你的美貌有假意的有真心的,只有一个人爱你那朝圣者的灵魂,爱你衰老的脸上痛苦的皱纹。垂下头来，在红光闪耀的炉子旁，悄然地诉说，爱情的消逝，在头顶的山上它缓缓踱着步子，在一群星星中间隐藏着脸庞。WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS()WHEN YOU AGE OLDWhen you are old and gray and full of sleepAnd nodding by the fire, take down this book,And slowly read, and dream of the soft lookYour eyes had once, and oHow many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty witBut one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows oAnd bending down beside the glowing bars,Murmur, a little sadly, how love fledAnd paced upon the mountains overhead,And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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Forgive, sounds good. 宽恕其实是一种痛楚 Forget, I'm not sure I could. 又不敢确定我能去淡忘 They say time heals everything, 人们说时间能愈合一切 But I'm still waiting. 我却还在痴痴等待 I'm through, with doubt, 始终不敢去确信 There's nothing left for me to figure out, 还剩下什么让我去捉摸 I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying. 为何付出了代价仍旧要继续 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 I know you said 知道有什么你想要说 Why can't you just get over it, 但为何你不能自己面对去淡忘 It turned my whole world around 我的世界已经颠覆 and I kind of like it 我却已爱上这几许 I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby, 在床边像孩子一样入睡 With no regrets and I don't mind saying, 不带一丝懊悔，也不介意这样去说 It's a sad sad story 这是一个过度伤感的故事 That a mother will teach her daughter 也许有个母亲会这样讲给她的女儿 that she ought to hate a perfect stranger. 对那个完全陌生的人，她丝毫不感怨恨 And how in the world 但实际上我该怎么 Can the words that I said 去说出那样的话语 Send somebody so over the edge 能让远远角落里的人们 That they'd write me a letter 也写给我一封信 Saying that I better shut up and sing 告诉我停止絮叨而只是唱 Or my life will be over 而另外的选择就是生命的尽头 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 I'm not ready to make nice, 还没来得及粉饰优雅 I'm not ready to back down, 还没来得及学会放弃 I'm still mad as hell 我还痴狂一如过往 And I don't have time 而我已经无暇自顾 To go round and round and round 仅仅在原地转圈圈 It's too late to make it right 爱太深哪来得及改 I probably wouldn't if I could 力能所及，心更难听命 Cause I'm mad as hell 只因为，我还痴狂一如过往 Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should 即使如你所愿，又怎能忍心 勉强自己去选择那样的路 你认为对的路 Forgive, sounds good. 宽恕其实是一种痛楚 Forget, I'm not sure I could. 又不敢确定我能去淡忘 They say time heals everything, 人们说时间能愈合一切 But I'm still waiting. 我却还在痴痴等待
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Manuel Brito
Questioning the limits of language:
The New Sentence in Ron Silliman’s poetry and poetics
One of the technical aspects most emphasized by American poet, Ron Silliman, is to write a new poetry where participation is allowed and space given to multiple identities. The sentence for him presents a clear readiness for use in narrativizing numerous relationships and as used by the author, it can avoid description and obvious compromises. Within these dynamics, Silliman does not write sequentially and of course does not dramatize the narrative. This first exposure of his intentions has a lot to do with the style he uses, characteri where apparently nothing is incorporated but ordinary things are manifested in such a simple way that we cannot help but get to know them and reflect further. If we pay attention to Bob Perelman, when he classifies the techniques or genres the Language poets were attracted to, we find that the Language poem is made from sentences of the notebook itself:
1) a high degree of syntactic and verbal fracturing, often treating the page a 2) use of found materials, cutting- 3) a focus on rhythmic noun phrases, bop rather than incantatory, with semantics definitely soft-pedal 4) a hyperextension of syntactic possibilities, more S and 5) philosophic lyrics.
Ron Silliman at Robins bookstore Philadelphia, 19 October 2008, photo Pam Brown
Ron Silliman speaks of a new sentence as a form, which brings us to the problem of representation underlying this author’ for example, its autonomy, non-fixed relationships, dissolution within the text and its metaphoric function that casts light on the differences and similarities between those who approach the text. These are but samples of the intellectual problems of representation, reference and mediation mechanisms that he has posed, as have his colleagues of the same generation. When David Antin straightjackets Silliman’s style within the description “collage technique” it is precisely Silliman who rejects such a classification, because that technique is of little interest in re-examining the relation of objects with the world they are produced in. That is, it has no political aim to criticize the role of these objects, while this is in fact one of his main intentions. Apart from this, the fragmented sentence is a worthy representative of our modern society with its complexity and multitude of possibilities on offer, making a linear perception of it almost impossible. So why not celebrate juxtaposition and ambiguity, letting them take the place they deserve in our way of seeing and creating the world around us? The sentence cannot be codified either, and therefore is not compatible with predetermined forms because of the poetic tradition whose instrumental function is a response to something imposed on the author. Thus the variety of forms becomes an obsession about using a line more than twice in a row. These details can frequently be seen, showing constant verse transgressions, which formally and diaphanously establish the impossibility of definition. Each uncompromising line and text function as an exploration of the diverse social questions intrinsic to our modern age, involving each individual.
We may often feel perplexed at the disorder in these sentences that seem to obey random techniques. However, among Silliman’s intentions we see the poem does deal with specific contexts like a plot or architectural reference, in order to attract the reader’s attention to what is directly in front of their eyes. Few of his sentences do produce abstractions, despite their clashes giving this impression, since they usually refer to the present, to reality, and as he affirms in his interview with McCaffery and Gregory: “[… ] and to that extent my works are indeed autobiographical.” Starting off from reality, the appropriate form can then be generated. This would be a response to one of the most famous “dictums” of the “New American Poetry” coined earlier by Donald M. Allen, and exemplified by Robert Creeley’s “form is never more than an extension of content.” Silliman reformulates this maxim well-rooted in the American poetry of earlier decades, adapting it to connect reality with form: “the intervention of forms into the real, the transformation of the real into forms.” We return to the importance of how social questions are reflected in literature. As he conceives of them as discontinuous, unstable
the paragraph, verse itself and especially the sentence fit mimetically into that elementary level of decomposition of narrative meaning that attempts symmetry, regularity or simple certainties. Meanwhile all around us there only exist possible meanings under constant reconstruction. The sentence allows flexibility of registering contextual reference and carries out multiple combinations within it in order to seduce, not to impose but rather to oppose convention. We must also remember that in Silliman’s poetic language it is difficult to find symbols or tropes worth the perceptual effort of checking. The reason for this attitude once again lies in the writing technique he has used since apparently the beginning of his career. We could take up the example of his poem, “Sailboat,” published in the mythical magazine This back in 1976, composed of stanzas whose line sequencing numbered one to five is repeated page after page and where sentences are only the starting point or witnesses of day-to- i.e. they document his notebook-based writing technique:
1) I don’t believe this. Meaning moves, whereas a process stands still
2) The word “odd” designates a property of numbers. What I am attempting
3) The reasons for the predication of art work may be radically distinct
4) Photographs are the most extreme contradiction because they reduce
5) Intellectualism does not talk about the senses because for its sensations
Most of his poetic production displays this tendency to take notes reflecting his immediate reactions, in sentences taken down at a penstroke. Some of these numbered verses contain more than one sentence, some do not complete what he meant to say to himself, others reveal more profound reflections. The numeration itself would involve schematics if it weren’t for some of the later numbers lacking sentences altogether. We thus see experimentation, transgression, a going beyond what literary behavior is supposed to be. The final impression is that we are left with a selection of the paradoxes that pass by unnoticed in our daily lives. The poem as space is not just a projection of endless sentences with which to engineer categories or equivalences, nor even wholly surrealist—I again draw attention to their close attachment to reality—nor of course a reductio ad absurdum despite their disconnectedness. It is all much simpler if we realize that Silliman returns over and over again to the minuscule, to the little details that pass by inadvertedly, with the clear intention that the sentence should appear as a stimulus where the subject is shaken, to become more aware of the fallacies of predetermined meanings.
Apart from the importance of the sentence in Silliman’s poetics, to “methodologize” and find the fundamentals of its use also serves to avoid both the obvious and the vague emitted by the many pseudo-critics who have approached his work. Simple arbitrariness or randomness and the vital role of the reader, are noticed by all of them, without realizing for example that despite the mathematical form given by using the sentence under the Fibonacci series method, an apparently formless structure is created. This leads to a different perception of form as an organism where all elements tend towards a common end (or ideology), as popular in the Black Mountain poets, and in Modernism itself. Such a work without form that must be reconstituted by the Other. To be more practical, we could outline the mode of sentence interweaving and composition in his texts, that contradicts the apparent arbitrary nature of many of his poems and exemplifies an almost mathematical articulation in sentence use.
The method I am referring to is not always adopted by him but rather was used as an experimental medium to explore the enormous possibilities offered by what he calls the “new sentence,” most particularly in Tjanting. In this case, as he himself would say, “the intervention of forms into the real” really began in an earlier book, Ketjak, where the sentence acts as a nuclear unit with each paragraph having twice the number of sentences as the previous one and where, despite the repetition of sentences that simulates an atmosphere of cohesion, we are really made aware of the present immediacy of each sentence or paragraph we read rather than its linear development. In Tjanting, Silliman uses a Fibonacci series and begins with a few sentences that are propagated into the following paragraph and become mixed with others. We could almost speak of a spiral sentence arrangement, giving rise to a series of paragraphs, progressing: 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 21, 34… where each paragraph contains the sum of the sentences in the previous two. In this way, what began with only two sentences will end with extremely long paragraphs whose most obvious feature is the recovery of what h playing with factors like memory and multirelationships or the obvious fact that there are too many gaps between words.
Silliman builds up a structure mathematically which then progressively breaks up, since by the end of the book the reader will be incapable of handling all the units—words, sentences and paragraphs being the most evident—of this textual discourse that multiplies the references. It is paradoxical that mathematics (an exact science) has generated so many confusions (at the very least, non-linear ideas) and forms with meaning but without precise references. This is nothing strange in Silliman, as he is always exposing his desire to play with microcosm and macrocosm, the individual clashing with the collective. With this method in particular, the author is able to assemble new elements on to those shaped previously, thus the flow of information comes to illustrate more and more the impossibility of unifying human discourse and appreciate it as an unrefutable fact intrinsic to human existence. Let us take the fifth and sixth paragraphs of Tjanting:
Of about to within which. Again & 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 thumb’s 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, desfigurd. I sat in an old chair out behind the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.
Ron Silliman writes sentences in these paragraphs without apparent connection, plays with several words by omitting a few letters, and informs us of an experience peripheral to us. One of the rooms is supposed to be yellow and unlit, that he has been cooking something and lacks skill in handling the knife and fork and then ends up with a glass of anise in the porch of his house. But these sentences can also be interpreted as “ghosts of evidence” as he himself calls them in another part of this book, to draw attention to the nature of language. Why bother to debate if the hot fat is connected with the meat and slicing it has given him the pain in the thumb, if at the end of these two paragraphs everything changes and leaves us with a new perception on observing that “I cld have gone about this some other way.” The experience of reading Tjanting is unlike the detective role necessary from Modernism to the seventies in order to find out an ultimate final meaning, which usually revolves around the subject-author. Now as Barrett Watten states clearly in the introduction to Tjanting, what we call “error” disappears and the above quoted sentences considered earlier as idiosyncrasies are now essential mediating terms of the text. All this has reached the book by way of his notebook where he had collected momentary realities and thoughts immersed in his daily life.
This method of producing literature as it comes, without caring if realities and discourses are juxtaposed and clash is a clear emphasis on our need to be conscious of being trapped in the serialization, repetition and codes of western society. Fredric Jameson illustrates in Marxism and Form how this sense of uniformity in many characteristic acts of industrial civilization, e.g. waiting for a bus, reading a newspaper or pressing the button at a pedestrian crossing with traffic lights, are acts in which we appear to be alone, but everyone does in exactly the same way in the same situation. Therefore the “I” in this urban conveyor belt is the same as any other “I.” Subverting this offers a technique of re-knowing or re-cognition and liberation that Rob Wilson accurately defines as “habits of silenced structures.”
Nearly all the books of poetry written by Ron Silliman are made up of long poems and a succession of prose stanzas we might rather consider as paragraphs. Both the language and the images or reflections become juxtaposed, progress and break up. I accept that this technique can get close to “collage” but in Silliman’s work this combination of prose and verse is not intended to approach fiction, as he is not interested in inventing, but in initiating discussion, in order not to appear as a simple consumer of conventional repetitions. As Marjorie Perloff notes while extrapolating Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy: the result is a discourse that leads towards the limits of language and is always subject to revision. The poetic prose he uses is without the conventional references of Aloysius Bertrand or Baudelaire but has the deep roots of an autobiography that tries to train and awaken language itself. For Silliman, style is no more than a name for strategies adopted in placing a key term inside the sentences around which the others revolve. With the superimposition of sentences he finds the form capable of uniting synchronic with diachronic, of transforming themselves into paragraphs, stanzas or lines always facilitating contrasts and connections within the writing itself.
Ron Silliman has coined the term “new sentence,” precisely one of his most emblematic books of essays is titled thus, and he is not alone in practising it. Poets of the same generation and associates of the “Language poetry” movement like Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian or Bob Perelman, join him in it. In all of them, we can see recourse to the sentence as a simple structure that can include both the simplest fantasy and the most sinuous intellectual operation. Sentences for a dialogue, communication representative of language itself in which to delve into the singularities of its nature, or even through its very organization show us key facts about the social system that surrounds us. One always returns to language since it is conceived of as a form mediating between knowledge and social matters. We have plenty of examples of it in Silliman’s wide ranging poetic career in Ketjak, Tjanting or The Age of Huts, where he transforms the sent the vocabulary of one sentence is superimposed on to the syntax of another, producing aphorisms, reflections, small conclusions, statements of his individual experience. The final impression after reading a conglomerate of sections like &#” in The Age of Huts is that we have re-contextualized t perhaps the most important, that we have been paying attention to the writing process and by extension to the role performed by us as individuals with respect to the text and the Other, i.e. to the social world. Taking this into account it is difficult to accept the concept of history as we have understood it up to now, as a linear discourse totally open to study, since neither complete meaning nor the final absolute state exist, but rather a return journey from recognition to the most personal revelations. Attention to the process implies the awareness, on reading Silliman’s work, that it is being built up in a constant progressive way as much to complicate as to deconstruct it. I would like to give an example taken from Manifest, a book included in the series “The Alphabet,” that consists of 100 paragraphs/stanzas varying in the number of sentences employed in each:
Any conjunction denotes caesura. Gulls
dip mid-flight into the valley. Big sun sizzles & spits.
These three sentences, as with all the others in Manifest are decontextualized and serve to question the importance of the meaning or our and the author’s intentions. Therefore, more than looking at an epistemology in use we will pay more attention to recognizing that we are faced with a formal structure (paragraph / three sentence stanza) that disseminates the urgencies we are accustomed to. In fact, when Silliman speaks about prose in his essays (“New Prose, New Prose Poem,” “Towards Prose,” “The New Sentence,” “I Wanted To Write Sentences”) he is not only suggesting a form of discourse that adheres to narrative, but that he always tries to get over or erase that threshold set by literary genres, favoring a “prose poem [which] merely reconstellates, redistributes, interiorizes those features by which we know poetry when we see it.” What is more, Silliman warns in ‘The New Sentence’ about the difficulty of defining the sentence, because areas like linguistics, philosophy and literary criticism have all made incursions into this withou one only has to refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, to find nine entries. As a radical curiosity he also makes reference to Milka Ivic, Trends of Linguistics, published around the thirties, who found that 160 different senses had been proposed by linguists. Parting from these difficulties he works with the sentence to question or elucidate not so much the role of the ‘I’ as the writer-reader relationship, as reflected in ‘Sunset Debris.’ Before referring to the concrete definition Silliman himself offers for the ‘new sentence,’ let us say that the reifying character of language, where established human relations now appear as immutable laws due to habit and time, is what Silliman wishes to transmit to us to illustrate that the poetic text or material has a use and exchange value in society, i.e. they are subject to power relationships. In both poetry and prose, the sentence subverts convention and takes up responsibility towards the connection literature-society. Consider his rhetorical question formulated at the New Poetry Colloquium in Vancouver: ‘What is more deadly than a poem which seeks to be told that it’s beautiful?’ Poetry for him, responds to and gives rise to enigmas like the role of subjectivity, directions to be taken by decontextualization, the social context of poetic material and ruptured rules of grammar and syntax which otherwise normally operate in favor of the political system.
Despite the multitude of definitions of the sentence by linguists, Silliman joins them by observing the new sentence has its origin in Barrett Watten’s poem “Chamber Music,” published in Decay, and it is “a decidedly contextual object… is the first prose technique to identify the signifier (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long associated with the tyranny of the signified, and is the first method capable of incorporating all the levels of language, both below the horizon of the sentence and above.” Much later, around 1993, another Language poet—Perelman—defines the new sentence as “more or less ordinary itself but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance.”Perelman follows without doubt the same parameters that Silliman had noted in his essay “The New Sentence” in which to arrive at this proposition, he makes a wide detour. I would like to mention some names as forerunners of, or significant for his concept of prose poetry and its core element, the sentence. The references are quite varied and dispersed through time, beginning with William C. Williams and continuing with Milka Ivic, Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, Chomsky, Volosinov, Wittgenstein, Quine, Wellek and Warren, Machery, Todorov, Barthes, Rossi-Landi, and Gertrude Stein. Together with these are numerous examples of poets who approach or deviate from the new sentence. The most obvious conclusion is that grammatical analysis of any structure greater than a sentence is almost impossible. Within it we most easily recognize the objects, images and their many meanings. There, we are obliged to individually perceive all kinds of combinations produced inside it and also those giving rise to its contact with other sentences. This last is also relevant to prose-poetry. I have already referred to the juxtapositions of words which may arise within the sentence, causing ambiguities and destabilization of the relation between sig it is no less so that a combination of this type of sentences makes numerous possible interpretations for the dislocations and different allusions formulated. Silliman calls this mode of operating with contrasting sentences “syllogistic movement,” by means of which the mind reads immediately and automatically, interpreting new data (with each new sentence) without it having any disjunctive meaning. This technique has a parallel in advertising language and even in journalism, where pains are taken to avoid possible contextual gaps still making isolated allusions or quotes.
Related with this we must not forget that a variation in form greatly used by this author is the long series poem, which connects appropriately with plenty of examples in the American literary tradition. We could mention a few, ranging from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Robert Duncan’s “Passages” or “Structures of Rime,” without forgetting Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Paterson by William C. Williams, Louis Zukofsky’s A, or Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems.Silliman contributes to this tradition with his series generically titled “The Alphabet” containing books published dispersedly (normally by small presses), where the first letter of each title is part of an alphabet still being assembled. The reader’s attitude to this kind of poems has always raised several questions, for instance in the case of many earlier authors the series was truncated by the author’s death and therefore left unfinished. Secondly, their writing corresponded to a whole life and reflects a clarifying of interests and directions taken. Also however, metaphorically, the final impression is that the poem can be completed and will continue to be written by others, thus it is still present with us. Silliman is sure the total series will complete the twenty-six letters and probably all the different sections will be published after his having passed away. His interest is not in producing a poem that will be cut off by his physical disappearance but to try and transmit the textual density produced with the syllogistic movement between poems of the same book, and at the same time the dialogue established between the different books in the series.
Used in its many varied forms, the sentence is thus the starting point in the Language poet tendency. In Silliman for example, many authors agree in classifying it as dislocated but with a tendency to become permanent, while in Bernstein (another paradigmatic poet in the group), sentences and words are more anaphoric. In any case, in the end we obtain a multidimensional text whose antecedents are to be found as reminiscences of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, and nearer at hand in the experiments carried out with the sentence at the beginning of the 70’s by Robert Grenier and Clark Coolidge. As with any author developing a particular poetic technique, Ron Silliman has not been able to resist schematizing the qualities of the new sentence:
1) The paragraph org
2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, n
3) Sentence length
4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/
5) Syllogistic movement is: (a) (b)
6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and
7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole,
8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below. (TNS 91)
For him the emphasis falls on the new sentence as the most significant unit, through polysemy and syllogistic movements that question the limits of language and our identifications (not our identity), by means of deconstructing the poetic material when faced with the impossibility of controlling the multiple references of such a chain of contrasting signifiers. Instead of the accustomed metaphors or meanings we must disentangle, the primary question is the writing process, which brings our attention back to the text and to ourselves. For Craig Watson the dynamic structure of the typical poem written by these poets is a product of the I “tension of the text in which all units are equal… no sentence is more important than any another.” I particularly think that these concepts function at the level of poetics and have generated numerous subsequent definitions that emphasize the instability of meaning. Let us take up George Hartley’s as example, proposing that the so-called new sentence does not exist, rather that the same sentence by itself “functions as the spacing between desire and fulfilment,” however we must recognize that some of the poems produced under these parameters, might rigorously be accused of joining sentences that swallow each other up hypnotically, without aspiring to more than to philosophize abstrusely.
This same difficulty in grasping truths occurs not only in the sentence but also in some words used significantly by Silliman for the title of two of his books. The word “ketjak” is for Stephen Fredman a Balinese song recited by the monkey extracted from the Ramayana, whose form pattern would be repetition and variation (in agreement with Silliman’s intentions in Ketjak), and “tjanting” is interpreted as an instrument to draw with in Batik techniques (in this Fredman coincides with Watten). The word “tjanting” obviously also functions as another phonetic spelling of “chanting” and so this oral character would contrast with a text that prefers to return to the written. For David Bromige on the other hand, “ketjak” means a chattering or screeching of monkeys and “tjanting” the same Batik tool. The third version (Silliman’s) suggests that “ketjak” is a Balinese choral music form of the Ramayana legend, recognizing it is also the Balinese word for monkey. The same confusions in meaning are reproduced in another of Silliman’s ambivalent titles: Lit,short for literature, a pun on “illuminated,” “enlightened” or “on fire.” It is clear that there is no homogeneity, but at the poetic level the consequences are clear for our perception of reality and by extension that of language. Its value is not exclusively literary but markedly social, obliging us to value the instrumentalization of language and the reason for a “correct” use of it.
One of the greatest emphases made by Silliman is on the capacity of language to include or exclude individuals and through this social dimension, he distances himself from the modernist writers, e.g. Gertrude Stein, whose play on words within the sentence or the relationship of the words with objects have their correspondences in our mental functioning. In this sense, Silliman’s inclusion of jargon, opaque words, juxtapositions or layerings, palindromes, homophones, neologisms and anagrams involves, uncertainties in meaning but also the awareness of the mediating role it plays in our attitudes to life.
Bob Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” American Literature 65.2 (June 1993): 315.
Larry McCaffery & Sinda Gregory, “An Interview with Ron Silliman,” Alive and Writing(Urbana: U of Illinois P, .
Ron Silliman, “Terms of Enjambment,” The Line in Postmodem Poetry eds. Robert Frank and Henry Sayre (Urbana: U of Illinois P, .
Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, “An Interview with Ron Silliman,” Alive and Writing(Urbana: U of Illinois P, .
Tom Beckett, “Interview,” The Difficulties 2.2 (1985): 34.
Ron Silliman, “Sailboat,” This 7 (Spring 1976): n. pag.
Ron Silliman, Tjanting(Great Barrington: The Figures, 1981) 11.
See Rob Wilson quoting Fredric Jameson on this matter in “Reading Ron Silliman’s Barton Bart: Serial Syntax and Paradise,” American Poetry 5.2 (Winter 1988): 35.
Marjorie Perloff, “Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics,” Contemporary Literature 33.2 (Summer 1992): 196.
Ron Silliman, “From Language Writing,” L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e 5 (October 1978): n. pag.
Ron Silliman, Manifest (La Laguna: Zasterle, 1990) 10.
Brooke Horvath also raises the question of the extent to which the status of prose-poems is due to a poetry that gradually gets to be seen rather than heard. In any case, it is obvious that the prose-poem erases the distinction between poetry and prose as he himself illustrates with examples ranging from French authors to Robert Bly or Charles Simic. “Why the Prose Poem?” Denver Quarterly 25.4 (Spring 1991): 107.
Cfr. Ron Silliman in Julia Blummerich and D. Martin, “Interview,” Paper Air 4.2 (1989): 88.
Ron Silliman, “Statement for the New Poetics Colloquium, Vancouver, 1985,” Jimmy & Lucy’s House of K 5 (November 1985): 19.
Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” The New Sentence (New York: Roof, . Hereon I use the following abbreviation on referring to this work: TNS.
Bob Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” American Literature 65.2 (June 1993): 313.
Ron Silliman, “For Charles Bernstein Has Such a Spirit… ” The Difficulties 2.1 (Fall 1982): 106.
Craig Watson, “The Project of Language,” Credences 3.3 (Fall 1985): 163.
George Hartley, “Sentences in Space,” Temblor 7 (1988): 91.
Stephen Fredman, The Poet’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, . Barrett Watten in the introduction to Tjantingpoints to this sense of the oral in this really long poem which as we saw earlier progresses geometrically through nineteen paragraphs to arrive at the last one that contains seventy five pages.
David Bromige, “A Note on Tjanting,” The Difficulties 2.2 (1985): 69.
See Larry McCaffery & Sinda Gregory, “An Interview with Ron Silliman,” Alive and Writing (Urbana: U of Illinois P, .
Ron Silliman, “I Wanted To Write Sentences,” Sagetrieb 11.1-2 (Spring-Fall 1992): 13.
Manuel Brito is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna. He has extensively published on contemporary American poetry. He is the editor of Zasterle Press and the magazine, Nerter. Currently he is working on small presses of innovative poetry in the United States.
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