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Ron Silliman has written and edited 24 books to date, including
the anthology In the American Tree, which the National Poetry Foundation
has republished with a new afterword. Since 1979, Silliman has
been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus
far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit,
Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. Silliman is
a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and
was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a
Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania,
with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the
computer industry.
Question #3: Regarding differentiation between flash
fiction and prose poetry, Tony Leuzzi wrote, “If the writing
contains a compressed plot, with character and motive, then I
am inclined
to think, ‘flash fiction.’ If the reading experience
forces me into unexpected directions, where a loss of control is
expected, then I am probably in the realm of a prose poem.” Peter
Johnson also noted, “I agree with Todorov when he says that
all genres come from previous genres, but that doesn’t mean
Schlegel was wrong when he said, ‘Every poem is a genre in
itself.’” What criteria do you use to distinguish between
prose poems and flash fictions? Is Schlegel correct in his assessment?
If so, is there any point in designating genre?
Unspoken within that question is one of the deeper & more misguided
presumptions about the nature of the prose poem – what I
think of as Jacob’s fallacy – that a signature feature
of the prose poem is its brevity. Thus “flash fiction,” which
by definition is characterized by its length, might be something
that requires differentiation. But this is like trying to identify
the border between, say, Korean & Portuguese, similar insofar
as each is a language.
One way to read Aloysius Bertrand’s
Gaspard de la Nuit, the first volume of what will evolve into the
prose poem, is as
a series of short pieces, but it also can plausibly be read as
a book-length serial poem. Lautréamont’s work in the
1860s should have resolved once & for all the idea that length
had nothing to do with the nature of the prose poem. Yet for some
reason, the impact of Bly & Edson on the poetry of the 1960s
was to generate an almost monolithic model of the prose poem cast
largely from the mold of Max Jacob’s little prose confections.
Even as a reading of the French prose poem, that approach erases
the work of writers such as St.-John Perse, Victor Segalen, Edmond
Jabès, Francis Ponge & Marcelin Pleynet.
If anything, “flash fiction” as a theoretical concept
rescues soft surrealism from the trough of predictability into
which it had devolved. Fiction has been perhaps the most challenged
of all the writing genres over the past century, as much of its
social rationale as the “logical” medium for creative
narrative was drained, first by cinema & later by television.*
Flash fiction transforms the issue of time in narrative – frankly
a far more interesting dynamic than plot.
A work without genre makes no sense – not simply because
the term is derived from genus, the root for kind, but because
to achieve such a state a work would have to cancel out or erase
its own sense of form & integrity as it proceeded, constantly
dissolving before the reader, & that of itself would constitute
its genre. This is not the same as works that are merely muddy
or confused.
Of greater concern is the degree to which genre in writing itself
has served for nearly two centuries as a surrogate for the social
divisions in our society. The appeal to convention at the heart
of the School of Quietude represents a profoundly held worldview
that extends to all facets of life. Thus soft surrealism permits
disruptions at the level of plot & character, but never at
the level of poet-reader relations, where the power relations of
writing remain unchallenged. In sharp contrast, the post-avant
world, which Bill Knott recently called the School of Noisiness,
offers a far messier, more participatory, pluralistic vision of
life as a process of constantly becoming.
*Which is why the best novelists over the past 50
years – Burroughs,
Kerouac, Pynchon, Acker – have shown so little interest in
narrative-as-plot.
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