This event, in some ways, is very much about community.
And I feel honored to be in this one,
and to be able to thank Chax Press's cosponsors for helping
to make this event happen--
POG, University of Arizona Poetry Center,
Pima Community College, the Tucson Pima Arts Council,
Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Southwestern Foundation.
And I can't thank all the individuals who help,
but I do want to specifically thank Frank Parker,
Josh [? Mettling, ?] and [? Kristy ?] Delgado,
Miranda [? Reybach, ?] Cynthia Miller, Gail Brown,
Roberto Bedoya, [? Ruben ?] [? Rokeney, ?] Leanne
Sotomayor, Tenney Nathanson, Sue Carnahan,
David [? Gittin. ?] And I wish I could think of lots more,
they make this place pretty terrific.
Also want to announce that two of those groups,
POG anyway, has an event on February 27
with the poet Kim Lyons and the performance artist
Denise Uyehara at 7:00 PM at the drawing studio.
And the University of Arizona Poetry Center,
February 4 at 8:00 PM, has a poetry reading with Sanoon--
Sinan Antoon, excuse me.
This work in language, this living in language,
is about community.
I have known Ron Silliman for 25 years,
but I can probably claim him as part of an extended community
in which I have come to know poetry and art for quite
a bit longer than that.
I have known Marilyn Crispell for less than 25 hours,
though I have known her work for 15 years
or so, have hoped to bring her here for about a decade.
And if I wanted to trace connections through community
of listening and thinking about music and art
to her transformative work, that too would add up
to half my life or so.
But I come back to this community this evening.
And again, thank you for coming.
I am torn in my thinking about art, and poetry as language
based art.
I believe, with many, that humans
are distinctive because we are makers of signs and symbols.
That is, we create things that are not strictly utilitarian.
Art in this sense has no use, in a very limited sense.
And to some ways of thinking, that
is its value in a world where we are constantly
pressured to be productive.
Yet signs are essential.
We think in them, through them, and with them.
Too often, we rest in them.
Ideas become chronic frames, fossilized.
Ron Silliman is one of the few artists
I know who has changed the terms of our engagement with signs,
and with the world they indicate, record, and inspire.
His work has at some times been called--
inaccurately, I think-- non referential,
only because it has often not been referentially received
in long practiced ways.
Ways that Ron might once have argued
are diseased, or at least need to be called into question.
Instead, I actually think his work
is a kind of inspired realism, where the real is less framed,
less packaged for consumption.
Or at least, quite differently framed.
And the means of his seeing, language,
as Barrett Watten has said, was a process
of ideological unmasking, an unlinking
of interests from chronic ideas and reified frames.
Ron Silliman's work is the world,
and it is ours, and yours.
All of ours, or no one's.
That is, its own.
All claims are partial, all coherences may just be effects.
Watten also once famously wrote about Silliman's work
that, "a bus ride is better than most art.
To enter the work might be possible anywhere,
as one gets on or off a bus.
It is possible, in fact, to read this book on a bus."
Indicating in part that Silliman's work is coterminous
with the world, or, like that world, not terminus at all.
Ron Silliman's thinking about and writing in
and with signs has taught me to see
the world in a way that has opened it up to me,
opened me up to it.
I find and feel that accomplishment
in the work of this poet to be a wonder.
The Alphabet may be la divina commedia
of our time and language.
Please help me welcome Ron Silliman.