Systematic rule-governed violations of convention: The Poetics of Procedural

Constraint in Ron Sillimans BART and The Chinese Notebook

Poetry generated according to rule-governed procedures, pre-determined to allow into the

act of composition such things as chance, found-text, limited vocabularies, and real-time
events in order to violate the consensual rule-governance of mainstream free verse with
its emphasis on intention, mimesis, organicism, spontaneity and expression, has come to
be a significant component of contemporary postmodern poetics. The recent award of the
2002 Griffin Poetry Prize to Christian Bk for Eunoia merely confirms a trend noticeable
for some four or more decades so that for a certain strand of contemporary poetics,
procedurality has become almost conventional.

While it is hard to name the first

procedural poem and give anything like a full history here, three key periods of its
development in modern English-language poetics are worth considering. During World
War I the experimentation of Dada leading to the automatism, games and theorising of
objective chance by Surrealism established the first systematic attempts to bring together
the paradox of pre-determination and chance as a generative poetic procedure. This has
ramifications for much poetic and literary experimentation to follow of course but, I
believe, procedurality returns self-consciously to poetry in the work of Jackson Mac Low
in the early fifties with his 5 biblical poems composed 1954-55. This work is based on
a chance operation, the roll of a dice, and a found text, the Bible, and thus establishes
these as two core elements of post-war procedural poetics. One can add to this Mac

Lows use of limited vocabularies such as one finds in The Bluebird Asymmetries, and
his increasing emphasis on the composition existing in the time-bound moments of its
performance in such works as Night Walk and Stanzas for Iris Lezak, and thus isolate
the elements of much of the procedurality that was to follow. At this point then we can
describe the activity of procedurality as involving chance, the recombination of existent
texts/vocabularies, and an emphasis on the performance of the text as its first, but not
sole, manifestation. Mac Lows stated intention in using systematic chance in his
poetic and musical compositions was one way in which you can avoid making choices,
and the reasons for this are involved with the illusoriness of the ego & the wish to
dissolve or at least de-emphasize the ego (172).
The final date in our time line is perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic in that poet
Kristin Prevallet names 1976 as the key year for practitioners of procedural poetics, such
as herself, due to two publications. The first is of Ed Sanders essay Investigative
Poetry which advocates a compositional technique based on the recombination of
existing historical texts, the essence of Investigative Poetry: Lines of lyric beauty
descend from data clusters (368). The second is an ongoing correspondence between
Language poets Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman on their common
interest in data, collage, appropriation, and cut-ups (Prevallet 120). Prevallets work is
important for reading Silliman in that she identifies two strands of the politicisation
inherent in procedurality, to be found as readily in Dada as Mac Low and John Cage. For
Sanders, Prevallet contends, investigative poetry was a means of taking control of the

documents around us and recombining them within a poetic assemblage in a manner that
would resist hegemony and generate alternative meaningsthe poet as witness. For the
Language poets, she argues, it was rather a direct, avant-garde resistance to the very
institutions behind the idea of meaning. Prevallet concludes with a neat distinction that
becomes a powerful synthesis of the two political positions as regards the materiality of
the signifier: Language used to witness is simultaneously a witness of language. (121).
This partial history, in both senses of the word, only touches on the diversity of
procedurality.

More than a mention of course must be given to OuLiPo, the key

innovators of a post-surrealist procedurality to whom I will return shortly explaining why

I have partially omitted them from the list of influences on Silliman.

In addition,

numerous other modern poets use forms of procedurality in their major works such as
Cage, early Ashbery, Koch, Mathews, Bergvall and so on. As I cannot possibly do justice
to this rich tradition here, and as a historical survey is not my intention, I have
concentrated rather on examples that speak to key features of procedurality in Sillimans
work including Prevallets apparently more off-kilter observations. Of these features, the
first to register is a sense of method involving chance, pre-existing text/vocabularies and
performativity. Added into this is the avant-garde intention of applying procedure to
dominant norms so as to destabilise them. All of this struggles constructively through the
straits of a paradox detailed by N. Katherine Hayles in her reading of Cage of developing
operations or procedures, which are determining and controlled, to let in chance which is

indeterminate and random.1 All the poets I have referred to here seem fairly united in the
belief of the critical capacity of procedurality, the one thing they significantly do not
share with Oulipo, which is why I will deal with the movement separately. However,
there is a divergence of opinion here as to what dominant structure of modern existence is
actually being undermined by procedurality, the category of art (Dada), subjectivity (Mac
Low), ideology (Investigative Poetry) or structures of meaning and truth (Language
poetry). These four themes, art, subjectivity, ideology and truth, speak not only of the
significance of Sillimans procedural poetics but more widely for this author at least of
the lasting importance of procedurality in modern poetics, which I hope in part justifies
the truncated partiality my historicization necessarily entails.

Poetry and Procedurality

Ron Sillimans formulation from his procedural-based book Tjanting, which I have
chosen as my title, raises an interesting problem at this stage over the definition of the
rule within poetry. As all poetry is composed according to procedures governed to some
degree by the rules of prosody, including non-lineated and prose poetry, it may, therefore,
be hard to differentiate procedural poetry from other forms based on the idea of rulegovernance. In this circumstance Marjorie Perloffs differentiation of the constraint and
the rule is invaluable:

See Hayles 226-241.

What has been called constraint or procedurality is not equivalent to the concept
of the rule in traditional metrics, where the choice of, say, ottava rima sends a
definite signal to the audience that every stanza will have eight lines of iambic
pentameter, rhyming abababcc.

Rather, a procedural poeticsis primarily

generative, the constraint determining, not what is already fixed as a property of

the text, but how the writer will proceed with his composition. (Perloff, Radical
Artifice 139)

A rule, as Perloff conceives of it, suggests some sort of dominion, a power structure, and
this has been the case in what has been termed modern poetics from at least the
fifteenth century onwards. The development of rules from iambic pentameter and the
sonnet all the way to free verse and open form has been based on a contract between
reader and writer that is overseen by institutions of various forms, ingrained hermeneutic
practices, a sense of aesthetic appropriateness, and a certain ideology of the author as
craftswoman, genius or maverick.2 I will call this, referring to Richard Rortys work, the
vocabulary of the discursive community of poetry. This strict vocabulary, with which we
are all familiar, presents a historiography of constraint and rebellion within the arts well
documented from Enlightenment debates between the ancients and moderns, to
contemporary avant-garde and postmodern practices.
2

Rules are developed, honed,

A good example of this phenomenon is the dominance of iambic pentameter in English prosody. While
historically attempts have been made to suggest that English most easily falls into this metric form, as
Anthony Easthope has argued, the truth resides in a more complex node of various causalities of which the
natural rhythm of English is only one factor. See Easthope 51-75.

perfected, become tedious, are broken to some degree, and new rules developed. It
matters not, in fact, that old rules are replaced by new ones, as long as the idea of ruledominance, its dissemination and structures of implementation persist.3
The role of the rule in procedural poetry is, in this light, complex. The qualities
valued by critics and poets alike of procedural work, its non-intentionality, its refusal of
mimesis, and its negation of ideas of spontaneity and expression, 4 are all dependant on
the imposition of strict rule-governance. Yet, at the same time the role of chance also
undermines the governance of any rule allowing indeterminacy into the mix so as to
upend the rule of law.5 In addition, as Perloff argues, there is more than one kind of rule.
Aside from being generative rather than proscriptive, procedural constraint differs from
the conventional rule in that it does not hold dominion over the reader through her
participation in a consensual acceptance of the governance of poetic vocabularies. Its
purpose, instead, is to be generative of text and so while there is still rule-governance
here, as Silliman suggests, the figure governed is the writer not the reader, and the
structure of governance is not vouchsafed by a consensual community of like-minded
individuals, but is merely a voluntary and temporary action on the part of the writer. The
procedural and constraining rule, in this manner, breaks the contract assumed between

As Derek Attridge states: The history of English metrical verse is often thought of as a series of waves in
a rising tide: accepted norms of regular verse being repeatedly swept away by currents of freer writing that
increasingly approximate the English speaking voce, followed by returns to new kinds of strictness. (167);
although he also warns of this as an oversimplification.
4
For more on the detail of these qualities ascribed to procedurality see Osman 258 & 274, Osman 255 &
257-8 and Prevallet 122 and finally Watten 35-6.
5
For a full consideration of the ambiguous effect of such context-less rule-based constraints can have on
the reader see Retallack 267.

writer and reader and overseen by the institutions and practices of literature, and in doing
so questions the vocabulary of consensus at large over what constitutes acceptable
aesthetic practices.

Notably, the newly imposed constraint is not sanctioned

institutionally or historically, indeed usually occurs at the expense of culturally accepted

rules, and as a result the relationship between author and reader is complicated in a
manner that can be liberating but which can also be disturbing.6
As we have seen, central to the procedural constraint is its generative nature.
However, in addition to being generative, these constraints differ from traditional
prosodic conventions in terms of their frequency, (most procedural poems are the result
of the procedure taking place only once), the origins of their rules (primarily from fields
other than poetry using very different vocabularies), 7 and their aims, (which are nearly
always a form of critique of the conventions of poetry). Thus a procedural constraint can
be defined as dissimilar to a conventional prosodic rule by its being generative not
proscriptive, strictly limited in use so that it can never become a convention, based on
rules which do not stem from the vocabulary of the poetic community, and critical of
conventional rule-governance in intent. One of the implications of this definition is that a
specific procedural constraint cannot easily, if ever, become a conventional rule,
governing a community involved in the production of poetry, although procedurality as
6

As Kristin Prevallet notes: The obvious critique of this kind of procedure is that it denies the readers
desire for meaning or analysis, and simultaneously demands a sophisticated, privileged reader who knows
beforehand that process and procedure in themselves are ways of reading (124).
7
As Silliman explains in The Chinese Notebook: 136. To move away from the individualist stance in
writing I first began to choose vocabularies for poems from language sources that were not my own,
science texts, etc. (19).

such could conceivably become a general convention for such a community, as is

arguably the case for postmodern poetry at present.
Since Romanticisms emphasis on spontaneous expression and everyday speech
patterns, conventional poetry has, as we know, slowly moved towards making transparent
its artificiality so as to mask its constructed nature. This is indeed the very basis of a
conventional rule: that one ceases to see it as strange and so succumbs easily as a reader
to its peculiar governance as if this were natural. In other words, as a reader you give
your consent to the governance of this rule in advance. With the development of free
verse from the end of the nineteenth century and its being taken up by avant-garde
modernists between 1910 and 1920, this tendency became, indeed, a new, apparently
unruly, rule of the abandoning of a large proportion of the consensus as to which rules
constituted the poetic, most notably regular metrics and rhyme patternation. In fact,
contemporary voice poetry, or non-metrical, intonational verse composed around the line
break,8 is the result of a historical context wherein the success of free verse as a constraint
of the renunciation of constraint-dominance promulgated by certain members of the
historical avant-garde, coupled with modern poetrys emphasis on spontaneity and
seeming natural, and a misinterpretation of the term free in free verse, (Pounds idea of
free, for example, being most definitely governed by strict rules), has meant that much

This is a compound definition of contemporary free verse poetry culled from the work of Easthope,
Attridge and Perloff. Of these three, Perloff is perhaps best placed to overview the varied attempts at
defining free verse around ideas of metrical freedom, speech patterns, and lineation and for her clearest
crystallisation of these debates see Poetry on and Off the Page 141-153.

contemporary poetry, traditional and innovative, has become what Marjorie Perloff has
called lineated prose (Perloff, Oulipo Factor 30).
Instead of being a constraint within a wider set of rule-governances relating, say,
to superfluity of diction or non-metronomic rhythm, contemporary free verse has actually
made the lack of rule-governance, beyond an atrophied retention of the line-break, its
primary convention. At the same time, that strand of contemporary poetics which, on the
whole, traces its antecedents back to European and American avant-gardism and can be
seen as carrying on the traditions of avant-garde questioning of rule-governance in the
institutionalised realm of the aesthetic, has, through the retention of a radical reinstitution of poetic constraint most notably through a widespread use of procedurality,
made governance/constraint the core of its practice. Not a rule-governed constraint
strictly speaking as one finds in the metrical rule as there remains no general, readerbased consensus as regards the validity of these rules, which in any case keep changing
work by work, but a rule-governance of a different order that from now on I will simply
term, agreeing with Perloff, procedurality.
For so-called traditional poetry to abandon conventional rule-governance
altogether would seem to be a disaster so there must be a rich prize on offer for it to take
such a risk and indeed there is. This prize is the voice, reified as a means for the retention
of ego and subjective presence in the lyric. At the same time, as Perloff explains, this
means that the confrontational element of contemporary procedurality, its utilisation by

the contemporary avant-garde to question the dominance of aesthetic norms in our

culture, is reducible to an attempt to destroy the voice:
One of the cardinal principlesperhaps the cardinal principleof American
Language poeticshas been the dismissal of voice as the foundational principle
of lyric poetry. In the preface to his anthology In the American Tree (1986), Ron
Silliman famously declared that Robert Greniers I HATE SPEECH manifesto,
published in the first issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), announced a
breachand a new moment in American writinga rejection of simple ego
psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the
human as unified object. And the reader likewise. (Perloff, Language Poetry
405)

Perloff further sees this not just as a localised poetic tiff between Jerome McGanns
poetics of accommodation and antithesis, convention versus constraint, but as part of the
larger poststructuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject (407).
Procedurality applies a process to the composition of the poem that forces the reader to
confront the fact that the poem is not another form of naturalised speech performed by
what linguists call competent speakers, but a use of language that emphasises linguistic
materiality, strangeness and constructedness. The rules themselves, coming as they do
from another discursive framework, stand out as being other. In addition, wresting the
rights of composition from emotional, expressive, communicating monads like ourselves,

10

and giving power instead to mechanistic procedures, reminds us that language is after all
a mechanistic rule-governed procedure resulting from a generative grammar, not a tool
for us to use to express our inner selves to others or ourselves.9
Perloff is backed-up by Bernstein who, reading the procedural works of Silliman,
interestingly draws direct connections between Sillimans poetry of shape, which
emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule-governed, everywhere circumscribed
by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed,
organized, & so an artifice and the way in which this attacks the myth of voice in
poetry as proof of a coherent, expressive, communicable subjectivity at large:
Work described as this may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of
personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a
natural rhythm of life, lived daily. Perhaps the conviction is that poetry not made
by fitting words into a pattern by the act of actual letting it happen, writing, so
that that which is stored within pours out (39)

Procedural works, therefore, in general, always remind the reader that what they are
reading is made, not expressed, and their function is to reveal their made-ness, not to
communicate truths. Poetry is revealed as a machine that produces the effect of the
voice, no different essentially from the tape recorder or MP3 file, the only difference

The opening salvo of Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to which I will return in detail
later, sets out just such a view of the utility of language when he differentiates between the tools of
philosophical and creative/poetic language in terms of what they are used for (see xiv-xv).

11

being that within modern poetics the voice is privileged precisely because it is seen to
precede all techn, all technologies. To be shown the workings of the process by which
the myth of voice is constructed delegitimises all ideas of subjective authenticity in
poetry. Procedural poems become, in this reading, machines for killing the voice.
While convincing and suggestive, the idea of procedural poems as automatically
deconstructive of ideas of subjective presence is rather too generalised especially taking
into consideration the history and diversity of poetic procedurality. Instead, we might
agree that procedurality in postmodern poetry is a means of succumbing to constraints in
advance of composition so as to expound a generative poetics that undermines certain
ideas about poetry that still persist: that a single idea of art exists, that the poem expresses
the poets being, that poetry cannot change history, that meaning should be transparent,
and that the voice is the true medium of the poetic. Autonomous, transparent, expressive,
voice-based poetics commencing with Romanticism and reified in much recent free verse
is the quarry of the procedural poem, it would seem, a poetics typified by the
hypostatisation of the voice in free verse but not entirely limited to the voice.

Ron Silliman, Keeping the Problem Manifest

A picture is emerging of procedural poetics that suggests it is dominated by chance and
found-text and that automatically, because of this, it is a political attack on the monologic
norms of our culture, reiterating a well-worn mantra of the avant-garde that if one is able
to disrupt the institutionalised conventions of art, social change will follow. This picture

12

is aided by the early poetics statements of many procedural poets and the many writers
and critics who have been willing to equate immediately procedure with a radical
political agenda.

The early materialist politics of the Language poets is now well

documented, Mac Low immediately locates his use of chance within a Zen-inflected
political anarchism, and Sanders investigative poetry is actually more concerned with
invective against the state than actual descriptions of what investigative poetry actually
might consist of.10 I want, in the pages that follow, to undermine this loose consensus on
procedurality in the arts by reading two rather different procedural works by a central
figure in contemporary procedural poetics, Ron Silliman. My intention here is first to
track the movement away from the use of chance and found-text towards a more
intentional means of bringing in poetic non-intentionality, thus demonstrating a
development from Mac Low in the fifties, which tackles the issue of chance and
vocabulary in a self-consciously critical manner. Secondly, I want to question the easy
leap from a radical poetics, through a radical politics to a radicalisation of our social
conditions, with the concomitant assumption that every instance of procedurality is
immediately deconstructive of categories of art, being, ideology, truth and voice. Instead,
I want to propose a politics of the local, the singular and the event.
Silliman has, to my mind, produced the most varied, accomplished, sustained and
complex body of procedural works to date with a string of book-length works spanning a
10

This utopian/revolutionary strand, while context-determined, has leaked-out into the criticism of the work
so that Jena Osman feels comfortable in 2002 in comparing procedurality to Brechtian dramaturgy not
intended to instigate immediate action; instead they are meant to teach strategies for altering society
through a shift in attitude on the part of the spectator. (Osman 257).

13

period of less ten years: Ketjak (1978), Tjanting (1981), BART (1982) The Chinese
Notebook, Sunset Debris, 2197 (all 1986). By the very fact of being procedural, each of
these is potentially an example of Perloffs deconstruction of the subject and a political
event, but Sillimans own comments on why he uses procedurality in his work reveal a
deeper fund of purposes that requires that one read each work in terms of its specific
procedure as a site of critique and confrontation, away from the given that procedural
poetry enacts the death of the author, subjective certainty, and the logocentrism of the
privileging of the voicealthough the specific critique is often founded on these
assumptions in the first instance. Of the chosen procedure, Silliman says, the potential
is the main thing, the potential which I sense a particular method will have to enable me
to get at whatever I want to investigate or work on at the point of the composition. So the
factors change radically from work to work. (Silliman Interview 34). Thus the idea of
procedurality is always there, but the generative constraint as such is the result of
responding to a particular situation resulting in something one might call site-specific
procedurality. The first thing to note about this is a distinct movement away from chance
towards determination, thus breaking a sixty-year-old tradition of chance-dominated
procedurality originating in Dada and Surrealism. Silliman is strongly intentional as
regards what he wants the procedure to be able to generate and makes a determined
choice of procedure based on this.

Indeterminacy does play a role in the act of

composition but it rarely, if ever, forms a part of the procedural constraint itself. This
site-specificity and strong intentionality is also where the real politics of Sillimans work

14

comes through, not as mass ideology critique but at this local and singular level.
Procedural constraint is, for him, a one-off response to a real situation allowing a poetics
of formal relevance irrespective of the theme or situation in play.
Not that Silliman is averse to making his own generalised, politicised claims for
procedurality. For him, as for many other procedural poets, procedural poems stress the
constructed nature of language, revealing poetry to be a product of the very same material
conditions as all other consumer products.11 It must be noted, however, that innovative
form of any order, procedural or no, is not enough for the work to be social, the work
must also respond to or be the result of a particular content, which is itself political. In
Sillimans case, while procedural constraint does not automatically provide a critique of
voice, its radical aesthetic does emanate directly from the abandoning of voice that most
procedurality insists upon:
The problem which confronts any writer, once they have broken with the received
tradition of a writing that presumes and imposes a stable voice is how literally to
proceed. Without persona, narrative or argumentwhat motivates the next line,
the next sentence, the next paragraph or stanza? Without syntax, what justifies the
existence of even the next word? (34)

11

This is a view which supports Sillimans early commitment to a more consciously modernist orientation,
towards the idea of how literature functions socially, (Silliman, Interview with Blumenreich and Marks
90) which is work still adheres to, and his view that there is no outside to society: even the hermit serves a
social function (Silliman, Silliman Interview 42).

15

What is interesting here is that the rejection of a stable voice is, for Silliman, not
so much an avant-garde aesthetic stance as the necessary result of trying to write a poetry
that interacts with the real, for which read social, world at large. He didnt want to kill
the voice, society made him do it. Silliman is, after all, for all his experimentalism, in
many ways an objectivist poet interested in direct treatment of the thing, testified to by
his descriptive, and sometimes rather dry, denotative works. Thus, he states:
all poetry is procedure. The tangible rule governed behavior of the sonnet is no
more constructed than the work whose devices efface such governance in the
name of voice or realism... All poetry is formalist, the intervention of forms
into the real, the transformation of the real into forms. But the real is social,
discontinuous, unstable and opaque.

Against that, any fixed poetics (any

valorized, codified set of procedures) is necessary a falsification. It is the moment

at which the real generates new forms that the real itself becomes visible. The
problem with procedures is how to keep the problem manifest. For methe
question of procedure is not one of seeking a correct. or valorized devicebut
of taking a stance toward language, the activity of composition, and reality, which
will call forth strategies and structures that are both generative and unconcealing
of their constructedness. (34)

This is a dense and controversial statement but I want here to concentrate on the
final point that situates Sillimans work as central to the cultural materialism of much

16

procedural poetry since Mac Low, and distinguishes his procedurality from that of other
groupings also interested in rule-governance, in particular the composers working around
Cage in the forties, New York School poets dalliance with forms of constraint and the
members of the French group Oulipo. In Sillimans poetry, the existence of the procedure
is not the relevant issue, as he says all poetry is the result of a procedural constraint of
some sort. Rather, for him what matters are the reason for the procedure and the reason
for ceasing to use the procedure.

For Silliman, the materialist, political and social

elements of his use of procedural constraint are not inherent to the aesthetic technique, a
common criticism of Language poetry being its assumption that all forms of aesthetic
resistance are by definition political, rather they are the result of a work which wants to
be political by addressing the real as it is, as constantly changing. Conventional rules are
not, by definition, part of a politics of assimilation. Instead they simply stop the poet
from keeping the problems of the real world manifest in form and so cannot be effective
politically once they have become conventional. Here we can clearly see the divergence
of opinion between Perloffs idea of procedurality as a form of rule-governance that is
generative rather than conventionally proscriptive, and Sillimans idea that all rulegovernance is generative until it becomes conventional.
These two differing conceptions are perhaps best illustrated by comparing
Sillimans idea of procedurality with that of the Oulipo group, the unchallenged masters
of modern procedurality, as it is through analysis of their work that Perloffs ideas are
presented.

For Oulipo, as Jacques Roubaud argues, a text written according to a

17

constraint describes the constraint, (42), a feature Perloff argues as central to Oulipo and
the return of constraint they partly instigated in contemporary poetics. Roubauds
credo addresses two issues. The first is that the constraint employed is generative but not
necessarily visible in the reading of the text. As he says of the use of constraint,
Oulipian textsbecome the literary consequences of these axioms, (41) not an index of
them designed to be decoded. Yet, in making the constraint thematic within the work
for example if a letter is missed out as one finds in Oulipo texts then loss and language
might be the theme of the resultant workthe procedure in play comes to be known by a
reader albeit in a modified form. If this is true, then any work composed in this manner
will make manifest thematic issues of literary and linguistic power such as restriction,
omission, governance, and automatisation that must always be radical comments on
current literary conventions.
In Sillimans work, the difference is that the constraint is not made thematic, but
rather a thematics is generative of a form of constraint, which may or may not be
transparent to a readership. Sillimans poetry allows a theme to make manifest to him a
generative procedure without any concern as to whether the constraint is obvious or
hidden, whereas Oulipo use constraint as a way of opening up a potential general literary
thematics, while keeping the original constraint hidden from view. For the writers of
Oulipo, the act of constraining generates a basic thematics whereas for Silliman a set of
thematic interests necessitates the development of procedural constraints.

For one,

procedurality is foundational, for the other strategic. Differences aside, it is still the case,

18

I would argue, that it is a typical feature of Sillimans work to make thematic the
constraint in play. Only, due to use strategic use of constraint what is thematised are not
general properties of constraint, such as omission or excess and restriction, but specific
issues related to the avant-gardes ongoing commitment to constraint as a means for
killing any vestiges of the voice in their work. If, then, we return to my tripartite
definition of contemporary procedurality in addition to the critique of voice poetics,
single usage, imported rules and application of linguistic materiality as a form of critique
of aesthetic convention, we can observe three central thematic concerns that should be
manifest in Sillimans work.

Concentrating on BART and The Chinese Notebook,

although other works such as Tjanting and Sunset Debris would also form useful points
of reference, I will try to map the themes of singularity, rule systems, and aesthetic
critique as made manifest by the differing procedures in play. At the same time, I will try
to show how these two works engage with what have threatened to become the
conventions of procedurality, its use of chance and found vocabularies, not so much
rejecting these procedures as re-locating them within a site-specific poetics which dictates
that the procedure used must be dictated by the problem being addressed.

BART, Poem as Event

On the sixth of September 1976 Ron Silliman embarked on an epic journey into the
underworld like so many great poets before him: Begin going down, Embarcadero, into
the ground, earths surface (BART unpaginated). It is Labor Day, a national holiday,

19

labor day, day free of labor, (BART) but Silliman, in an act of supreme sacrifice, is
going to spend the day working which in this context means writing. Taking advantage
of a special offer on the Bay Area Rail Transport system or Bart, Silliman has decided to
ride the commuter trains of the bay area recording his thoughts and impressions there and
then as they happen: its an event, ride Bart for a day for a quarter, labor day is a day of
rest, of description, is a relationship of words to place (BART). This becomes a simple
but remarkably effective procedural constraint: ride the BART for the duration of one
day, write in real time only what you see separated by commas, and if you reflect on what
you are doing use only brief phrases.
BART is not about anything. Typical of Sillimans poetic oeuvre we have a
denotative work written in simple prose that depicts the street life of San Francisco. In
fact, of all his procedural works, this one is perhaps the closest to the work that makes up
the long, non-procedural sequence of works he calls The Alphabet to which he has turned
his attention in the past two decades. What meaning there is in the poem centres instead
around the procedures governing its creation namely to write a poem in real time. This is
a procedure that is, in accordance with Sillimans own rules, generative in that everything
written in the poem is a direct, there and then observation of the event of riding the Bart.
Finally, the work is not concealing of its constructedness, indeed the poem gives
numerous insights into the difficulty of making the poem. Instead of a theme, then, one
must ask what the reason for this procedure was, and if it is designed to keep a problem

20

manifest what is that problem?12 These are the questions one finds oneself asking in
response to all of Sillimans procedural works of which BART is perhaps the most
accessible.
The problem made manifest in the poem is work. Work is to be taken in all its
possible meanings in the poem: the world of work, working, labour as commodity, labour
as struggle, the work of art, poetry as work/ergon, and the process of working so as to
make a poem. Choosing Labor Day to write BART the poet notes the ambiguous social
status of his fellow passengers: these arent tourists, theyre locals riding around as if
they were, travel plans of the working class (BART). The people around him are
workers on holiday pretending to be tourists, although on every other day of the week
they may take the same train but this time for purposes of work. In fact, the only person
working is the poet who labours for hours over a poem that raises questions as to the
nature of work, paid and unpaid, time restricted and apparently free. For example, early
on he notes where he used to work: Military Ocean Terminal, postal station for incoming
foreign mail, where Id be if I hadnt quit, 8 years ago this month, every cell in body
different now (BART), suggesting the freedom he experiences now that he does not have
to work at a regular job. Silliman is not a professional poet. He has to work for a living,
meaning he too is on holiday suggesting that the work of art cannot be counted as work;
you do not work on Labor Day. Yet this particular project is work, hard work: an act of
12

I have written extensively about how process poetics are central to postmodern poetry in my book In the
Process of Poetry. McGann makes a similar point in relation to Language poetics specifically: In the first
place, writing is conceived as something that must be done rather than as something that is to be
interpretedMeaning occurs as part of the process of writingindeed, it is the writing. (636).

21

endurance, hand writing, hours without letting up, to see if one can (BART), and the
constraint chosen here seems designed to ask questions of poetry as physical work as well
as poetry as a public versus private taskthere is something of Cages commitment to
the work of being an artist here. While the poet is aware of the personal nature of what
he is doing, how can you describe people when you can only see surface featuresIve
only talked once all afternoon (BART), he increasingly becomes conspicuous on the
crowded train, not because he is working on his day off but because he is writing in
public.
Silliman is certainly acutely aware that poetry is a form of work and thus subject
to commodification but that, at the same time, it is not quite like other forms of work:
Poems both are and are not commoditiesAny commodity is necessarily an
object and has a physical existence, even if this aspect is no more than the
vibrating vocal chords of a sound poet. But not all objects are commodities
only those which are made for exchange (and specifically exchange for money)
become commodities (Perrier). (New Sentence 20).

Accordingly, poetry is work that may not actually be exchanged for money, making it
work that escapes the capitalist system until that moment that the poem becomes reified
in book form and exchanged for money. There is a pre-commodity, pre-capital moment
of the word, which Silliman calls the gestural nature of the poem or the physical
activity of doing something for a particular reason that is not to do with exchange value.

22

This is supported by the time lag between BARTs composition, 1976, and publication,
1982, in a flimsy paperback that almost certainly never made anyone any money.
While openly a social, if not political, poem about work, as I suggested in my
opening comments, it is the aesthetic nature of the problems of the procedural work that I
am looking at here. Thus, it is the nature of poetic work and, more specifically, the work
of art, that really relate to the significance of the poems procedurality. Due to its use of
constraint, BART, ends up a curious aesthetic entity in terms of its objectal status. It is
not a work of art by virtue of the fact that it is a finished artefact of auratic value as
Benjamin might put it, both because it is a process poem, indeed barely even a poem, and
because it is procedural and thus negates the values of voice, expression and authenticity
needed to attain aura.

Nor, Silliman argues, is it actual work towards making a

commodity. So what is it? I think the poet answers this early on in the poem when he
describes the 25c special offer: its an event.13 Neither a work of art nor real work,
instead, BART is a happening; it is a one-off event, a situation that naturally occurs due to
the singularity of the procedural constraint in his work and in contemporary poetics at
large. The singularity of the use of a constraint here allows the poet to make central this
very thematics: the value of working as an occurrence rather than a repetitious, regulated,
and ultimately commodified action.

13

Again McGann is instructive by isolating the issue of the event within the vast body of Language poetics:
Writing is an event, a praxis, and in our day one of its principle operations involves the dismantling of
ideology, reified in so much that passes for writing (636).

23

The event is an increasingly important topic for contemporary critical theory

exercising some of the greatest minds of our age, Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, but
it is the work of Lyotard that I want to concentrate on here.14 Lyotards formulation of the
event is mapped out in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, The Differend and the
essays in The Inhuman. The event is the it happens that occurs moments before we
reflect on this happening and start to encode it in language and enslave it to ideology.
The event is not reality, the real or truth, as these are now concepts too overburdened with
cultural signification. Rather it is the undeniable existence of a moment as truly other to
the human, the it happens that we can experience and conceive of, but cannot give a case
of without destroying its essential eventhood.
What is of particular interest here is the way that Lyotard regularly talks of the
event in terms of language, revealing that the event is not a return to realism but an
attempt to theorise the material presence of language as an occurrence, before one thinks
of it as a mode of representation or communication:
As an occurrence, each sentence is a 'now'. It presents, now, a meaning, a referent,
a sender and an addressee. With respect to presentation, we must imagine the time
of an occurrence asand only aspresent. This present cannot be grasped as

14

Lyotards investigations of the event since The Postmodern Condition have influenced much of the
debate which followed, his work is known by the poetic community I am investigating here as well as more
widely known of course, his formulations of the event bisect directly with the Romantic aesthetic project
which is the background to the development of procedurality, from The Postmodern Condition on he sees
the event as a mode of disrupting consensual communities, and finally he attempts to keep the event as a
quality of the potential alterity of language as such, which is of course essential for the aesthetics of postwar procedural poets such as Silliman.

24

such, it is absolute. It cannot be synthesized directly with other presents. The other
presents with which it can be placed in relation are necessarily and immediately
changed into presented presents, i.e. past.Because it is absolute, the presenting
present cannot be grasped: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon
or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and
paradoxical constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence,
means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression 'it happens that...' is the
formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self incapable of
taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially
passible to a recurrent alterity. (59)

My reason for choosing this long passage from Lyotard is that one of the most significant
features of BART is the way in which the procedurality of the poem forces the poet not
only to think about the event of language, but also to demonstrate it through the act itself.
The poets decision to write in real-time all that happens over several hours focuses his
attention on the fleeting nature of the event, the gap between it happens and the phrasing
of its happening, and also the event of phrasing in general, while allowing us to be
witness to the poet struggling with the eventhood of the poems coming into being as he
works on it. While ordinarily the poet would do whatever he could to emphasise the
strangeness of language and the constructed nature of the poem, here he does not have
time for that and instead he finds events and acts, what happens and what he says about it,

25

blurring. This is reflected in numerous statements about the procedure of writing in the
poem which echo exactly Lyotards description of the way in which the event of the
sentence disappropriates the mind and makes the self other to itself through the use of
language: the world is foreign to me, an act of description, what I describe is what
comes to me in words as I look out of the window, miss all the rest, cant even write it
all, and my writing is a scrawl, an act of description, Im describing these people who
watch me. (BART).
Can one write the event or make claims for procedurality as a kind of poetics of
eventhood? Mac Low seems to believe so in his description of an eventual verse where
in place of the foot or syllable, one uses the event (174). This ambitious prosody of
singularity results, in theory, in a form of measure based on the present now-ness of
random happenings recognisable in BART and made more transparent by the use of
commas to separate each happening/thought.

Yet Lyotard warns: It would be

presumptuous, not to say criminal, for a thinker or a writer to claim to be the witness or
guarantor of the event, explaining that, it must be understood that what testifies is not at
all the entity, whatever it be, which claims to be in charge of this passibility to the event,
but the event itself. (75). Poets, like philosophers, often aspire to mastery, yet of all the
arts poetry is the one most opposed to being master of the self. The inherent strangeness
of poetic language brought about by the way it sacrifices semantics for the sake of
semiotics means, philosophers have argued, that language is never more an event than

26

during the writing of the poem. Yet, as Lyotard explains, one cannot testify to the event
or capture it in writing, which is not to say that writing itself cannot be an event.
The dilemma of the eventhood of poetry is perhaps best demonstrated by
Bernstein when he says: A sign of the particularity of a piece of writing is that it
contains itself, has established its own place, situates itself next to us. We move up close,
stare in, & see the world.But can I actually experience it? Yes. But it reveals the
conditions of its occurrence at the same time as it is experienced. (40-1). Silliman
discovers the dual presence of poetic writingboth an occurrence, and a description of
that occurrence somehow at the same timeduring the writing of BART as he tries, and
fails, to get it all down in language. Midway through the work he begins to realise that
what he is transcribing is not a description of the experience of the day, but the
experience of description itself, which is the work he is undertaking: 1:59, Im only halfdone, is that it, an act, something done deliberately, of description, which means place,
but of travel, meaning place shifts, alters, speech chain Moebius Strip (BART). The poet
senses the alterity of the world he is describing, its foreign-ess, only when he tries to
render it for us through describing it. He sees that description is not a representation of
what one sees but of what occurs to one during the act of perception, as Bernstein
suggests. Finally, at the poems end, he encounters the Moebius Strip of the impossible
logic of an eventual verse: describing the people who watch him describing them not in
terms of who they are and what they look at but in terms of being the people who watch
him describe them as the people who watch him describe them. The poets work is

27

reduced here to describing description itself.

Meanwhile the reality of the thing

happening remains, significantly, outside of the language of the poem.

Through a

procedure designed to make the activity of working on the poem manifest, Silliman
harnesses the randomness of events within a determinant and intentional procedural
practice, and in doing so comes close to a poetics of the event reflected in Lyotards own
formulation as to how, impossible though it may seem, occasionally the event is
presented to our consciousness: in the event, the ungraspable and undeniable 'presence'
of a something which is other than mind and which, 'from time to time', occurs... (75).

The Chinese Notebook, Incommensurable Poetic Vocabularies

If BART makes thematic the singular usage of a procedure as a means of commenting on
poetic work and chance events, then The Chinese Notebook, written around the same time
as BART and published in the 1986 collection The Age of Huts, is more concerned with
the way in which rules are imported into the conventional vocabulary of poetics or a
means by which whole systems can be made strange, not just singular instants.
Consisting of two hundred and twenty three numbered sections each a self-contained
axiom on the subject of language and poetry, The Chinese Notebook is an example of
what I have elsewhere called thetic poems.15 Perhaps the most significant precursor to
this work is Isidore Ducasses Poetry (1870), although at the same time that Silliman was
writing The Chinese Notebook, Kenneth Koch, a poet with whom Silliman has much in
15

See Watkin 35-64.

28

common, was writing the axiomatic poems that make up his collection The Art of Love
(1975). Critics, however, have found other sources for the work with George Hartley
noting its similarity to Sol LeWitts Sentences on Conceptual Art (86-7) and, more
significantly, Perloff identifying the influence of Wittgensteins Philosophical
Investigations (Perloff, Wittgensteins Ladder 201). In addition, we must note that in its
own way this could be termed, after Mac Low, vocabulary poetics although to do so when
the poem lacks one single source, does not rely on the application of chance and operates
in an intentional but not systematic fashion would mean a radical reappraisal of this term.
Each aphorism in the work is concerned with the semiotic and/or semantic
properties of language in various material forms, speech, writing, naming, philosophy and
poetry, and as such has much in common with LeWitts conceptualism and Wittgensteins
influential theory of language games. However, as the opening of the poem suggests, this
is clearly a work of poetry: 1.

Wayward we weigh words. Nouns reward objects

for meaning. The chair in the air is covered with hair. No part is in touch with the
planet (Chinese Notebook 4). Hartleys analysis of the opening makes it apparent that
Sillimans aim here is as much to differentiate poetry from conceptual art as it is to
suggest similarities of interest: His attention to the materiality of wordsin that only
the words on the page can help one distinguish between wayward and weigh word
immediately complicates the conceptualist claim to have finally got beyond the material
by turning to language (87). One could also add that Silliman mocks the positivistic
element of Wittgensteinian linguistics in his comments on the chair. The poet weighs

29

words and relates to the world of things, the positivists classic choice of office furniture
as an object of investigation, through language. In contrast to the (h)airy fairy conceptual
chair, which places itself in the classic aufhebung of the thinker above and beyond the
real world, the poet places himself in the world and sees language not as a means of
describing realities but a reality of its own.
Language is material and the foregrounding of linguistic materiality in the poem
is what sets it apart from the philosophical discourse imported into this work, a discourse
that famously pays scant attention to the material presence of the language used, often
these days to describe the material presence of language. In the hands of the poet, the
procedure of the poem, to write in an axiomatic, philosophically interrogative and
positivistic style, becomes a form of prosody. This is determined by certain rules such as
numbering each proposition, using quasi-formal philosophical language and sentence
construction, taking writing as a single object of enquiry, and presupposing syllogistic
argumentation as overall structure, although the axiomatic mode of thinking does not
provide such an argument. Rather, it only presupposes its potential existence. It could
not be more dissimilar to the denotative vocabulary and breathless staccato rhythm of
BART, presenting a greater elegance and sophistication, but lacking BARTs dynamism
and directness. Of the two works The Chinese Notebook is clearly the more mature and
complex, reflecting the poems basic theme, which is to expound the prosody behind
philosophy at the expense of the communicability of categorical thinking.

This

culminates in a debate with a friend, member of the Old Left, who questions Sillimans

30

aesthetic strategy of to write so as not to communicate? Silliman replies, It is a more

crucial lessonto learn how to experience language directly, to tune ones sense to it,
than to use it as a mere means to an end. The friend wants an example and Silliman
gives him:
Greniers
thumpa
thumpa
thumpa
thump
pointing out how it uses so many physical elements of speech, how it is a speech
that only borders on language, how it illumines that space. He says, I dont
understand (Chinese Notebook 26)

What we are confronted with here is the inability of two men from two different speech
communities, but otherwise with everything else in common, to communicate. How hard
is it to understand the materiality of the word? The answer is it is impossible if it does
not have a place within your own vocabulary. The Chinese Notebooks procedure is
designed to make manifest exactly this problem: what is it that differentiates the
vocabulary of poetry from that which works critically on poetry, or how does the
vocabulary of the poetry-makers get translated into that of the categorical thinkers or
rule-makers?

31

As vocabulary is foundational of contemporary procedurality, and community

germane to my overall argument pertaining to rule-governance versus procedurality, I
want to consider briefly the work of Richard Rorty on the idea of vocabulary based
communities, partly because his work stems from a particular American sensibility of
which Silliman is also an exemplar, and partly because Rortys work is based on, in part,
differentiating philosophy from what he calls poetry. One would suspect that Silliman
has little time for Rortys theory of bourgeois accommodation yet the procedurality of
The Chinese Notebook illustrates a key element of Rortys work outlined in his 1989
book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In this keynote work on postmodernism, Rorty
divides modern culture into two communities, those committed to self-creation and those
who wish to improve justice. The vocabulary of self-creation comes from Romanticism
and is defined by being private, unshared, and not suitable for argumentation; poetry is its
archetype. The language of justice originates in the Enlightenment tradition of bourgeois
liberal humanism and is public, shared and suitable for debate. One might assume
philosophy to be its archetype but Rorty contests this. The great project of philosophy,
and Rorty mentions Marxism in particular here, has been to find a vocabulary that unites
the private with the public so that gains in argumentation will produce changes in
subjectivity. At the same time what goes on inside the subject, thought, can establish
truths about what goes on out there in the world.

These mega-philosophical

vocabularies make the subject the result of objective conditions and the subjective
process of thinking the means by which we can change these conditions to our own

32

advantage. If we think it, we can make it happen out there. Naturally one can find
immediate parallels here with the radical project of avant-garde aesthetics that also
assumes that if one can free art from the rule of conventional norms, then this could have
the effect of actuating a desire for the renunciation of rule-governance within the reader
in a variety of other key areas such as subjectivity, ideology, and truth.
The realisation not only of the failure of this project but its undesirability is what
typifies the postmodern condition, as Rorty sees it, resulting in an archetypal postmodern
figure which he calls the liberal ironist:
This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which
unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation
and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches
a figure whom I call the "liberal ironist.liberals are the people who think that
cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use "ironist" to name the sort of person who
faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires
someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that
those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time
and chance. (xv)

Silliman cannot possibly be a liberal ironist, as he says 5. Language is, first of all, a
political question (Chinese Notebook 4). Perhaps it is better to call him a revolutionary
ironist, yet having said that The Chinese Notebook is about the contingency of

33

philosophical truth claims through its use of a procedure that translates the rules of
thinking into the conventions of poetry. For example, returning to the positivists chair he
asks 30. How is it possible that I imagine I can put that chair into language? There it sits,
mute. It knows nothing of syntax (Chinese Notebook 7).
Rorty says that although one can think of truth claims contained in single
sentences, Red wins, which can be proved objectively, what cannot be proved are
whole vocabularies. Within the game of chess, Red wins is truthful, but how does one
determine which game is more truthful, chess or mah-jongg? 16 One cannot, based on
objective criteria, which means that the world out there does not dictate which language
game one chooses to play. This choice is necessarily contingent.17 He goes on to say:
The realization that the world does not tell us what language games to play should
not, however, lead us to say that a decision about which to play is arbitrary, nor to
say that it is the expression of something deep within us. The moral is not that
objective criteria for choice of vocabulary are to be replaced with subjective
criteria, reason with will or feeling. It is rather that the notions of criteria and
choice (including that of arbitrary choice) are no longer in point when it comes to
changes from one language game to another (6).

16

See Rorty, 5.
Perloff makes the same point in relation to the greatness of Sinatra versus Cage: For one thing, the
two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different contexts. The word great, in any
case, means something different in the two cases Perloff, Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject 410.
17

34

Rortys work is fascinating in relation to The Chinese Notebook because it tells the stories
of two central twentieth century vocabularies. The vocabulary of philosophy tried and
failed to link the game of life with the game the game of self-creation, often disastrously
as witnessed by the abhorrent politics of Heidegger. At the same time, the vocabulary of
poetry has been a great success in finding, with Romanticism, the vocabulary of selfcreation contained in the idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about
this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of
linguistic entities, of sentences (7).
Silliman starts out by showing how poetry is different from philosophy because of
its constructed nature, yet he then moves into the more radical ground of revealing that
philosophy is a form of poetry precisely due to its constructed and constrained nature.
Philosophy is nothing other than the making of rules true for all and for all time. The
poem is littered with references to the construction of difference between the vocabulary
of philosophy and poetry: 7. This is not philosophy, its poetry. And if I say so, then it
becomes painting, music or sculpture, judged as such (Chinese Notebook 4), 16. If this
were theory, not practice, would I know it? (Chinese Notebook 5) More significantly
there are numerous phrases that seem to come straight out of Rortys vocabulary of
liberal irony: A poem, like any language, is a vocabulary and a set of rules by which it is
processed (Chinese Notebook 16) and 127. The words are not out there (Chinese
Notebook 18). Indeed, for a poet who composes almost entirely in sentences the idea that
truth is a property constructed of sentences must be extremely appealing.

35

It is clear, then, that the site-specific procedure of the poem is designed to

foreground a very different issue relating to poetry than BART with the aim of
highlighting the contingency of truth-based vocabularies. The poem also demonstrates
what happens when the vocabulary of one game, philosophy, is transposed into another
game, poetry, an occurrence typical of procedurality, as we know. , therefore, we are
returned, by Silliman, to a defining feature of the procedural method, the use of
vocabularies. Only here Silliman is not so much using specific vocabularies as Mac Low
might, but is instead reflecting on the very concept of vocabularies in the way that BART
did not so much use chance as reconfigure it critically as event. In this instance, by
emphasising the prosody of the vocabulary of thought, Silliman is actually reversing a
process detailed by Rorty of modern thinkers turning increasingly to the vocabulary of
poetry to get to truth. Instead, in a manner reminiscent of Investigative Poetry, the poet
employs the vocabulary of truth to make poetry.
For Rorty, innovation within philosophical thought is not the result of objective
rule making based on argumentation and observation, but merely the slow change from
one vocabulary to another. A vocabulary that had been conventional and benefiting from
consensus slowly becomes ossified and rejected, while another, which was initially seen
as incommensurable and radical, slowly comes to be conventionalised through a process
of consensus making. Taken in this way, therefore, philosophy is indeed a form of poetry
but what he neglects to realise is that just as philosophy is capable of total vocabulary
overhauls, so too is poetry. Rortys characterisation of poetry as essentially a narrative of

36

self-examination and creation committed to finding incommensurable vocabularies which

make the language game of subjectivity dynamic and ever-changing, and his stated
commitment to Donald Davidsons idea of language itself as pure contingency, merely a
tool to do a job with no objective existence of its own, are at odds with Sillimans
procedurality and postmodern poetry.
Throughout The Chinese Notebook, Silliman blurs the difference between two
heterogeneous vocabularies, poetry and philosophy, but at no stage does he lose sight of
poetrys specificity. In the middle of the work he asks: 141. Why is this work a poem? /
142. One answer: because certain information is suppressed due to what its position in the
sequence would be (Chinese Notebook 19). Poetry then is not determined by a
vocabulary per se, but by syntax or ordering of pre-existing vocabularies. This seems to
refer directly to what one might now term traditional procedurality based on found-text
and vocabularies such as is practised by Mac Low and, later, Tina Darragh. Speaking of
her entrance into procedurality, for example, Darragh cites the influence of Ponges Soap:
he had: taken what was at hand, let it refer to itself and then tracked the process as
it would go. So I: take what is to hand (the dictionary), pick a page at random,
use the key words heading the page as directions, find a pattern and/or flow of
the words and write it down (107).

Of this procedure Silliman, one would suspect, would be less interested in the words in
the dictionary itself but the social and cultural structures by which they come to be a part

37

of life or the poem. As he says, 37. Poetry is a specific form of behaviour (Chinese
Notebook 8). It is an activity not a vocabulary, or to be more exact A poem, like any
language, is a vocabulary and a set of rules by which it is processed (Chinese Notebook
16). When the poet asserts, 66. Under certain conditions, any language can be poetry.
The question thus becomes one of what are these conditions, he then answers his
question immediately by referring to the procedurality of the poem itself. 67. By the
very act of namingThe Chinese Notebookone enters into a process as into a
contract (Chinese Notebook 11).
What we learn from all of this is that for Silliman the language of poetry is not a
vocabulary but a vocabulary placed within syntax that is governed by certain procedures
that are active. Therefore, it is not enough for him to write according to chance and
vocabulary, in addition he needs must move beyond that to a more intentional interaction
with the forces that rein in chance and impose vocabularies upon us. It is hard then to
place exactly where Sillimans procedural works stand or if they are indeed procedural in
any easily definable manner. They are not traditionally procedural in that rejecting
chance and vocabularies they are overtly intentional, yet nor are they examples of an
intentional poetics as clearly this form of poetry is not a means of self-expression or selfmaking,

quite

the

opposite.

Nor

does

Sillimans

work

take

on

board

incommensurabilities so as to revitalise the vocabulary of poetry such as one finds in

Oulipo.

Rather it generates incommensurabilites to permanently destabilise the

conventions of the poetry game. The procedural poem in Sillimans hands is unique in

38

this way in that, by foregrounding its constructed nature, it reveals that language is not a
tool but a process, not made up of words but of sentences, not an interior vocabulary at all
but an event, which occurs out there. While it reveals that truth is constructed rather than
found, this does not remove truth from the material world but merely relocates that truth
within a different sense of materiality, not a materiality of found truths but of truths
manufactured from real matter, the graphematic, phonetic, semiotic and consumerist
materials of poetic language. To use Prevallets aphorism Silliman is not a poet-witness
but a poet witness to language. This establishes a contingency of truth such as we find in
Rorty, but a contingency of objectivity not of subjectivity. The Chinese Notebook, then,
in making manifest the question when is a work of philosophy a work of poetry? makes
thematic the very issue of poetic constraint missing from Rortys world-view, that poetry
is not merely another vocabulary, but a material foregrounding of language. In finding
the prosody of philosophy, Silliman does not confirm Rortys belief that philosophy has
become poetry, but reveals once more the radical incommensurability between the two
vocabularies.
To conclude, I want to make three claims for Sillimans procedural poems. First
that they are examples of a site-specific procedurality wherein the dominance of such
agencies as chance and found vocabularies in the field of procedural poetics can be
sacrificed if the problem to hand requires different procedural rules. Second, that in
relation to Oulipos insistence that the procedurally constrained text describe that
constraint within the text, Silliman takes the thematics of contemporary poetic practice

39

and makes them the basis of a procedure, which will then be generative of a poem. Thus,
we find that in the two works considered, themes pertaining to singularity, vocabularies
and poetry as a form of radical critique are made manifest in the procedures devised.
The third, and final, point brings site-specificity and thematically determined
indeterminacy together. In engaging with the idea of the event and the role of controlling
vocabularies, Silliman is able, I believe, to justify the claim that a radical aesthetic
practice can move beyond the text to become a form of radical practice within a
community. While BART and The Chinese Notebook critically engage with, and thus
undermine, the two basic tenets of contemporary procedural poetry, chance and
vocabularies respectively, this is a positive critique. Apart from disallowing two forms of
procedural rule to become conventional, it also locates these two procedures within a
wider cultural debate. While chance and vocabularies were important as means by which
conventional poetics could be undermined, they are perhaps even more valuable as poetic
performances of two of the key ideas of contemporary thought on our postmodern age,
the role of the incommensurable event, and the ongoing debate between poetic, singular,
incommensurable thinking and philosophical, general, consensual thought.

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