The Age of Huts (compleat)

Disciplines Literary Studies & Poetry Poetry Collected Works

About the Book

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

About the Author

Ron Silliman is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry. His most recent books include Woundwood, Under Albany, MultiPlex, and N/O.and the weblog "Silliman's Blog" (ronsilliman.blogspot.com).

Reviews

“For readers who have not read Silliman before, The Age of Huts is a fine place to start. It collects some of his best early work, and it also foregrounds some of the major concerns of the Language poets: the relationship between language and politics, the effects of grammar and syntax upon representation, and the function of poetry in a postindustrial society. . . . At a distance of three decades, Silliman’s early work remains valuable not only for its importance within an avant-garde tradition but also for its continuing relevance today.”—David Huntsperger Rain Taxi

“In Silliman’s hands, language—so often manipulated for political coercion and economic gain—is restored to its most mechanical, primal functions, upending our ideas of the poem and of the sentence, and reawakening us to what it is we’re doing when we’re reading, writing, thinking.”—Rob Schlegel Boston Review

“The Age of Huts is a shining example of what the language poetry school has contributed to contemporary letters. . . . Silliman is actively reshaping what poetry means and causing us to rethink the very nature of language. Can you ask for more than that from any artist? If The Age of Huts provides any indication, we're witnessing the development of what is sure to be a defining literary project of the postmodern era.”—Andrew Ervin Baton Rouge Advocate

“The Age of Huts is a shining example of what the language poetry school has contributed to contemporary letters. . . . Silliman is actively reshaping what poetry means and causing us to rethink the very nature of language. Can you ask for more than that from any artist? If The Age of Huts provides any indication, we're witnessing the development of what is sure to be a defining literary project of the postmodern era.”—Andrew Ervin Philadelphia Inquirer

"It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Ron Silliman's Age of Huts; it was ground-breaking when it first began to appear, piecemeal, a quarter of a century ago, and it remains a revolutionary work today. With its proliferative architecture, its encyclopedic arc, and its endlessly inventive methodology, The Age of Huts, with virtually every sentence, renews its engagement with the world."—Lyn Hejinian