Ron Silliman

The grandson of an Oakland Tech grad, a kid who learned to play baseball at Bushrod Park (Field?) & a sometime student at Merritt College, Ron Silliman lived in Oakland at various times in the 1960s & '70s. Tottel's is sometimes characterized as the first language poetry journal, predating Barrett Watten & Bob Grenier's This by something like a month or two.

Silliman is the author of more than 30 books, including The Age of Huts (compleat), Tjanting, and The Alphabet, the three volumes that make up, in that order, the first three stages of the long poem Ketjak. He is currently at work on the fourth stage, Universe.

In addition to his poetry, Silliman is the author, co-author &/or editor of In the American Tree, an anthology of language poetry; The New Sentence, a critical volume; Under Albany, a memoir; and Leningrad, a collaborative memoir with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten & Michael Davidson. He is a member of the Grand Piano collective, and was the executive editor of Socialist Review during the late 1980s when the journal operated from offices at Adeline & Fairview.

Presently Silliman lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and works in the computer industry as a market analyst. He has a blog devoted to poetry and poetics.