Charles Bell, Gumball Fragment #1 (1976)
In
PN Review, Jeremy Noel-Tod on Ron Silliman’s “Definite Sentences”:
Silliman’s new sentences tend to a kind of literary Photorealism: focused description of a fragment of the modern American city—‘Types of pipe atop rooftops’, Tjantiing—the very vividness of which calls attention to the artifice of its realism (here, through close alliteration and rhyme, and also that slightly archaic put precisely prepositional ‘atop’, one of Silliman’s trademark words). Like the American Photorealist painter Charles Bell, who spent hours arranging coloured gumballs in the dispensers he then portrayed with exaggerated Kodak, clarity, half of Silliman’s art is in the editorial composition of small, concrete pieces into larger, more enigmatic masses.
Remarks, too, amongst much else, on Silliman’s Blog’s “neglect of other poetries in English” besides “Stateside poetry.”
