Analyzing "VIII" from YOU by Ron Silliman in reference to "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice" by Bob Perelman from the book Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics edited by Christopher Beach.

An essay with a long title.

By Eric Rosenfield

Ron Silliman coined the term "the new sentence". The new sentence, in his view, was an attack on traditional narrative – as the "narrative suppresses immediate attention". As Perelman points out at length, the concept of the "new sentence" parataxic: the arranging of sentences one after the other "without indicating their connection or independence"¹. In other words, the new sentence is a virtual non-sequitur: it is placed next to other sentences without overt indication of how it relates to them, so that it can be taken out and viewed as a language unit unto itself, and the relation to the other sentences must be implied by the reader. Traditional narrative (eg. novels, epic poems, etc) suppress "immediate attention" through hypotaxic statements (ie. Not parataxic) by giving the reader the relation of the sentence rather than forcing the reader to consider each sentence (attentively) on its own, as its own mini-narration. The Ron Silliman poem "VIII" (from the longer poem YOU, which is actually part of an even longer poem called The Alphabet) begins thusly:

Readers of the lost art. Monster with an eye in its mouth (body of a rocket

ship). Stuffed wildcat perched over the 

mouth of the cave, across from the miniature gift shop.

The second sentence would seem to have no relation to the first, nor the third to the previous two. It forces the reader to look for the connections herself – indeed, it challenges the reader with the question, is it possible to string to sentences side by side without the reader instinctively forming her own connections between them? Can someone read that sequence of sentences without beginning to imagine a united scene of a monster with a rocket ship body, a stuffed wildcat, a giftshop, a smattering of readers of the "lost art", all together?

Perelman suggests that the "New Sentence" is, in fact, a symptom of our culture. We live in a culture in which we are assaulted by parataxis all the time, a constant barrages of small units of unconnected mini-narratives: 30 second television commercials placed one after the other; rows of ads in the subway, each conveying a different story; sets of movie previews²; etc. etc. The atomization of narrative is also suggested by the atomization of fields – where once there was "the medical Doctor" there are now thousands of specializations, where once there was the "the Artist" of the renaissance, everyone now is expected to find a cultural niche and concentrate on it: lyrical poet, crime novelist, neo-classical composer, video artist, and so on. If, then, the world is atomized, why not too the sentence? Each sentence in a "New Sentence" poem is considered to have equal weight, equal independence, as every other sentence.

Perelman states several times that the "New Sentence" is also a political statement, though he never succinctly explains what the political statement is. From what I can garner, the idea is that capitalism created a culture of "broken integers"; that is, our materialist society creates an abundance of material: objects cast off, thrown away; narratives coming at us from every direction only to be forgotten about in a week, an hour; people homeless, people lost, people desperate, people everywhere, unconnected to one another, perhaps even unconnected to themselves (that is to say, without self-knowledge - or, to be less pretentious, self-reflection). So Silliman's form becomes his content, echoing the MacLuhanism "the medium is the message". His poems are not just about the atomization of our society, they are the atomization of our society. Thus, in "VIII":

Nothing rots like an old suburb, strip malls abandoned, tattoo artist in

the medical suite, house with dark dirty 
curtains drawn, in front of which sandwich board displays huge hand: Palm
Readings. On television, cyborg frogs 

croak out the name of a cheap beer.

This is a perfect example of the subject matching the form: the strip mall described here is itself a parataxis – a collection of unconnected businesses, discrete integers of hopes and dreams – and nothing "rots" like them.

Perelman argues that this approach to poetry is "defiantly unpoetic". The traditional poet finds voice in a "incantatory lyricism", full of sensitivity and little social context. That is, the traditional poem is about what the poet feels. Consider, as an easy example, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day/thou art more beautiful and more temperate, etc" a poem which explains precisely the relationship of the subject to the summer's day, how they both make the narrator feel, and then ends in the declaration of the its own immortality. Silliman is known to be a great admirer of William Carlos Williams, and its easy to see why, with Williams' detached description of everyday objects, and frequently sentence-long poems. Williams' description of a wheelbarrow beside white chickens would fit nicely next to Silliman's stuffed wildcat and cave.

Let's look at another excerpt from XIII:

Stein to Hook: when this you see, remember Smee. Spine to book: bleed into

my gutter. Spin and look: 
	This is self-referential word-play, which seems to be intrinsic to most of Silliman's writing. Why? Perelman gives no answer other than that the writing is "personal", and thus about the act of writing as much as the writing itself, which strikes me as weak logic. I would argue that because the form of the sentence is so intimately related to the meaning, the form necessarily refers back to itself as much as it would refer to any subject; because the form is as important as the meaning, the form is as worthy of discussion within the work itself. "Stein to hook," "spine to book," "spin to look", this is the act of the writer writer, playing with words, sounds and meanings, putting them next to each other to see what meanings they invoke – which is part of the power of the "New Sentence" to begin with, that you can put anything next to anything.
lying down, 
feeling anxious, is not the same as sleep. In Livermore, underneath the
suburban big lawn culture of the Rad Lab 
and Sandia engineers, there remains at core a small valley cow town, a few
dark Main Street bars in which Harry 

Dean Stanton is thought of as an intellectual.

Ortho-glass forms a cast alas. Sleep as you can, whenever. Refrigerator
roars and shudders, alive with its own anti-
fever.

As we see, Silliman does seem to be constructing a scene, with the repetition of "suburban" from the opening stanza, or the reemergence of sleepless in two non-consecutive sentences. But the point is that the relationships aren't explicit. Whoever is saying "lying down, feeling anxious, is not the same as sleep" may not be the same person who is saying "sleep as you can, whenever;" instead of a direct relationship, what is constructed is an environment. The statement that in the bars of suburban Livermore, "Harry Dean Stanton is thought of as an intellectual" creates an eerily clear picture in our mind of what this town is like, just as the rotting strip mall in the first stanza does. Each statement is an act of creation in and of itself, and together they make a series of pictures that unifies into a landscape. The collected images evoke a mood, rather than telling the reader what mood she should be feeling. We could imagine what effect Shakespeare might have evoked if, instead of telling us his subject was more beautiful than a summer's day, he had instead in one sentence described the summer's day, and then in the next described the girl, and let us draw the connection ourselves.

However, as Perelman notes, we are not used to reading this kind of writing. We have all been long since trained to look for and appreciate traditional narrative. The whole point of the "New Sentence" is to force a new attentiveness in the reader, but it is difficult for most people, myself included, to make ourselves work harder to read. If anything, in our current society, we have been pampered by new forms of media, by television and movies, which offer us predominantly received information which we just sit back and absorb. Perelman and Silliman might argue that the frequent cuts and non-adjacent imagery used in these mediums are a form of parataxis; they might also argue that people today are plopped down in front of the television when they are toddlers and trained to be able to absorb ever more complex visual information. Older people, when confronted with the high cut rates of Mtv and many current movies, often complain that its going to fast, that they can't follow what's happening. But I think this only serves to further blow holes in the argument that the "New Sentence" is the written form most appropriate to our current culture. It would strike me that Silliman's entire problem is embedded in his stance against narrative.

Perhaps Silliman is right to think that a collection of stores at a strip mall is a form of non-sequitar, and it's certainly fascinating to watch him describe the stores in a manner that is just as parataxic as the stores themselves. But to create a written form that encapsulates life today, one would also have to somehow account for the fact that we consume narrative on heretofore unencountered levels. Take for example the oft-quoted statistic that the average American watches 4-hours of television a day. Perelman seems to think that six-month-long build ups of movie hype are a form of parataxis, and perhaps they are in the way that they're scattered throughout our lives in little discrete sentences, but they build to the climax of actually going and seeing the movie, sitting down for an hour and a half, two hours or more to absorb a single, usually cohesive storyline. Television commercials may be parataxic, but I refuse to believe television shows are, at least any more than the average short-story or novella. Silliman poems are written like collages, but television programs, whatever cuts or jumps it may contain, are fundamentally not. The scenes are given to the watcher in a deliberate, cohesive form, which are further, and most significantly, assembled in the brain of the watcher as a single whole, without anything like the kind of forced attention needed for a Silliman poem.

In the essay, Perelman goes on to discuss the use of "New Sentence" techniques in novels. He uses as an example, The Stranger by Camus, which obviously predates Silliman, but uses linguistic collage techniques similar to Silliman's to evoke the disjointed mindset of the narrator. Perelman also brings up the post-Silliman novels by Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian is an interesting case. Take this excerpt from My Life:

My grandmother had been a great beauty and she always won at cards. As for we who "love to be astonished," the ear is less active than the eye. The artichoke has done its best armored, with scales, barbed, and hiding in its interior the soft hairs so aptly called the choke.

My Life has an overarching narrative – that is, it's the story of Hejinian's life. Each chapter represents one year. And yet, since we know from the context that in this passage Hejinian is talking about being a teenager, all the strung-together images reverberate with meaning: an artichoke, say, becoming the emergent sexuality of the narrator - guarded, "armored". The book becomes a study in what can be evoked with how little.

This is a very interesting technique, and both Hejinian and Silliman leave us coming away with pungent images floating around in our heads. I would also argue that Hejinian's idea, to use the "New Sentence" as a means within a larger narrative, is closer to capturing life in our times (if such a thing can indeed be captured) than Silliman's. Indeed, if Silliman is right and our lives are divided up into parataxics, than Hejinian's book would be the perfect encapsulation: a collage of images hung upon the structure of a lifetime.

Perhaps, in truth, Silliman's desire to force our attention on the streams of unrelated non-sequitars constantly cruising past us is an attempt by Silliman to make us pay attention not so much to the words he writes, but to the world we live in. Perhaps by forcing us to connect his disconnected lines he hopes to help us connect the disconnects all around us. The "New Sentence" requires a new kind of awareness. And be that the case, the effort is admirable. However, in the long run I think the "New Sentence" is a useful writing technique that can be used to capture a particular kind of mood or mind-set, and in that respect maybe Camus had the right idea. Parataxis is another clever tool in a writer's arsenal.