Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture by Andrew Epstein

Author:Andrew Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Inventing a New Everyday-Life Poetics: The Ketjak Breakthrough

In his own frequent retellings of the narrative arc of his career, Silliman has repeatedly cited the writing of Ketjak in 1974 as a kind of “Eureka!” moment. Indeed, it is one that has taken on almost mythic proportions in the story of Silliman’s work, as well as of Language poetry as a whole. Silliman has described Ketjak as “my first really serious work” (Tursi, interview), and noted that it “in many respects marks my adulthood as a writer” (McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing).14 The centrality of this poem to Silliman’s subsequent work is even more apparent when we consider that he has given the title Ketjak to his entire body of poetry.15 Although the dramatic turning point this particular long poem represents can be (and has been) assessed within a number of critical contexts, I wish to focus on a key aspect of the Ketjak breakthrough: how it facilitated Silliman’s creation of a potent new mode of addressing the everyday, one that managed to fuse form and content in complex, innovative ways.

The question of whether certain aesthetic forms can help render the everyday visible, without unnecessarily falsifying or distorting it, seems to have been central to Silliman’s struggles with his work in the early 1970s. At first deeply influenced and inspired by the avant-garde poets of the previous generation who were lumped together under the rubric of the “New American Poetry” (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, and others), Silliman felt that their work “for a time offered a more fully generative response to daily life” (McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing). But he quickly began to view what the New American poetry had to offer as a “false model,” because it was based on a “speech-imitating poetics” that left Silliman and his peers with a sense of “limiting claustrophobia” (Beckett, “Interview”). In other words, although he found the New American Poetry’s emphasis on dailiness initially liberating, Silliman felt that even the “open” forms pioneered by Ginsberg, O’Hara, Creeley, or Olson “concealed their ‘madeness,’ ” as they fetishized the supposedly “speech-based,” “natural,” and “organic” nature of their poetics.

In a 1976 response to a questionnaire about his writing, Silliman recalls that he “started out as a conventional writer of lyrical poems” in the mid-1960s but “quickly became bored and frustrated” with the “forms I’d inherited”:

the pseudo-formalist approach of the post-Projective writers, with which I experimented for a time, offered no real solution. At best, the equation of the page to “scored speech” was a rough metaphor, & it excluded more than it could bring in. Asserting that such writing exposed completely their inner selves, most of these writers had in fact created elaborate & idealized personae. Their mysticism, like the incessant gossip orientation of the so-called younger NY gang, was simply one way to avoid confronting the fact that, by 1970, there was no content left in anybody’s work. (quoted in

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