Ron Silliman has been crucial to the changing scope of contemporary American poetry for more than forty years. A founder of the Language poetry movement, Silliman established the concept of “the new sentence,” which Penn’s own poet and scholar Bob Perelman calls “defiantly unpoetic.” “Its shifts break up attempts at the natural reading of universal, authentic statements.” Perelman continues, “Instead they encourage attention to the act of writing and to the writer’s multiple and mediated positions within larger social frames.”

Silliman’s first book, Crow, was published in 1971. His collection Paradise won the Poetry Center Book Award from San Francisco State University in 1985. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, including a memoir, Under Albany (2004), which was named a book of the year by Small Press Traffi. His remarkable and notorious twenty-six part poem The Alphabet was written continuously between 1979 and 2004. He was a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. He was also one of the first to launch a poetry blog, which received its 3 millionth visit in October 2010.

RSVP: seating strictly limited; please rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749

Part of the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
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Location:
Arts Cafe
Kelly Writers House
at the University of Pennsylvania
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA