Ron Silliman and the victory of the closed comments stream: a reply

 Ron Silliman, young poet-radical

Ron Silliman in his Thursday, October 14th blog post (2010) has claimed to have lost no significant readership as a result of his decision in late July (2010) to shut down the comments stream: in fact, his famous  "Silliman's site" is poised to welcome its "3 millionth visitor", clear proof that disgruntled free speech advocates (like me) have not stopped visiting. And I haven't because I am, after all, a Silliman reader.The most influential contemporary American poet and theorist is brazenly crowing victory (at least here), even going so far as to momentarily "open up the stream" (but without accepting new comments) so that contributors to his blog can retrieve old posts out of the archives. It's as though Silliman's blog were an extended manor, and to relieve some of the growing frustrations among the peasantry the most prosperous of the gentleman-poets is opening his doors to them, just this once (after the manner of the medieval 'Lord of Misrule' ritual), for a day or two of permissible conviviality and even laughter at his expense. Perfectly harmless fun until, of course, the doors shut tight and workers are returned to their lives of quiet anonymity.

This momentary relaxing of the restrictions on free speech is interesting posturing on his part. (It reminds me of the "mutuality of the oppressed" idea developed by Marxist critic Raymond Williams). And all this after a post on the demise of the bound book and large "brick & mortar bookshops", & a good inquiry into the causes of a shrinking reader-to-title ratio. Besides the obvious condescending tone of the piece, it's also  incredible to me how unaware Silliman is of the inconsistencies (and incongruities) between his own theory & practice. He condemns himself (as they say) out of his own mouth. To begin with, he praises the democratizing effect of blogging, saying it's been "a means of communicating with one another without the funneling process of the academy", and is changing the nature of poetry itself, presumably for the better, and yet he's resorted himself to a similar academic type of vetting whose outcome is to turn the clock back on literary development. That's an inconsistency on an obvious general level.

As for the particulars, Silliman also doesn't recognize in his description of the e-book the same post-avant impetus of most of his own poetry theory.If he had, he couldn't have possibly envisaged a case for any sort of freedom of speech restriction. He gives a respectful nod to the advent of Internet publishing, rightly anticipating a new regime of writers no longer subject to the restraints of distribution, warehousing, & pricing. He's right as far as that goes: "E-publishing changes, or will eventually, the entire dynamics of the enterprise of reading & writing", and presumably because of the different ways a networked world frees us from the slavery of "industrial" and academic publishing. Silliman almost charts for us the course a poetry can take once it's been made fully accessible online.

The real task facing poets, beyond the blank page or screen we confront every day, will be in defining how best to set up the networks so that our writing is able to reach the people who will be most apt to find it useful, challenging, even thrilling. This would be an excellent moment for poets not to be like so many tic birds atop the rough dry skin of the industrial publishing rhino. Poetry has been ill-served by 99.9% of all brick-&-mortar bookshops, and virtually all trade publishers. With a handful of exceptions, its treatment within the academic publishing universe has not been much better.

Sagacious analysis, to be sure, from the poet of the quotidian (after Frank O'Hara) who's made it his mission to stand language & poetry conventions on their head, and who sees in this new interchange between the old "book community" and an emerging e-literacy a kind of transforming energy that's very reminiscent of the New American  poetries in which he played such a vital role. Substitute Internet technology for the New Sentence credo of "open-endedness" & "word play" & "the torquing of poetic form" and you have the same post-avant celebration of newness. And how do we reconcile that to the characterizing of free speech at his blog as an "open sewer"?

The disdain for radicalness (of which he once formed part) unrestrained by conventions of old guard literacy, unafraid to offer wildly differing ways to read & write poetry is, to me, still shocking. The distinguished Language theorist, the pariah to every form of "anti-modernist poetics" that he's disdainfully dubbed Quietism, is sounding to me like a mean-spirited academic advisor, editor & critic, ready to cut comments down to a shape & size more to his own liking. The former Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere to whom established & fledgling poets turn for support has turned mainstream, the doors to his house of poetry permanently closed. Silliman gave to one of his sections in the essay "Z-SITED PATH", a clarion call if ever there was one for a new poetry, the subtitle "Why the MLA Can't Read". The last few sentences in the article are worth copying out in full:

From Gertrude Stein to the present, poets have increasingly emphasized that meaning in poetry falls on the side of the signifier—and that it is not deferred to any hierarchic abstraction such as character, plot or argument. It is only through the signifier that the cultural limits of the self, the subject, become visible. It is there, and there only, that direct perception takes place in a poem. This above all else is what still separates the tradition of poets who move into the new form from the rest. More than any other critical text I can think of, Ahearn's book demonstrates just how the hidden agendas of academic training, bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified, rob intelligent people of the ability to read. (The New Sentence, 146 Emphases mine).

Ron Silliman has joined the ranks of the Barry Ahearns, "bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified" when he decided to label a category of free speech as an "open sewer". I'll go a step further and say, with deep regret, that Ron Silliman has taught us now how not to read anymore.