The New Sentence

This book with its innovative range of essay/poems and poems/essays marks a huge break in US counter-poetics in the, say, Jack Spicer mode of counter-hegemonic languagings and transnational westcoast imaginary. The 'break' occurs somewhere in the Reagan era of political amnesia and neo formalism and petunia-poetry poetics of David Lehman et al; but for readers like me schooled in the Whitmanic sublime canon and US cultural poetics, never would US lyric poesy be the same after the 'new sentence' came down from on high or, better said, from the streets below the exclusionary lyric apparatus: I read the "Alphabet" work sentence by sentence clotted, dazed, dusted, displaced, amazed at the sheer syntactic inventiveness and learning. Ron Silliman has renovated the syntax and linear formation of US poetics discourse from inside its white heat dead man walking/talking core.