Ron Silliman Discussion - Language of Contemporary Poetry Series

• Tue, 03/13/2012 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm

Boardroom, 2nd Floor

Language-Centred Poetry & Grammar

English graduate students coordinate a public discussion with visiting Philadelphia poet Ron Silliman. The discussion will focus on the role of grammar and syntax in contemporary poetry, and in particular in language-centred poetry and Silliman's poem-sequence, "2197" (in The Age of Huts (compleat)).

Ron Silliman

2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, Ron Silliman (Philadelphia, PA) has published over thirty books of poetry and criticism, including the long poem, the Alphabet, and the collection of books, The Age of Huts (compleat).

Silliman engages poetry’s relationship to the social dimensions of language and to linguistic theories (including Noam Chomsky's).

His editing includes the important collections “The Dwelling Place: Nine Poets” for Alcheringa: A Journal of Ethnopoetics (1975), “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject” for Socialist Review (1988) and In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry for the National Poetry Foundation (1986).

Language of Contemporary Poetry / Discussion Series

"Language-Centred Poetry & Grammar" is the third of four discussions in the winter 2012 series Language of Contemporary Poetry.

The series is coordinated by graduate students in Louis Cabri's course "Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously": Poetry & Linguistics and is generously supported by the Humanities Research Group and the Deparment of English.