Ron Silliman, Revelator

Self-described as “the first degree of Universe,” American poet Ron Silliman’s Revelator (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013) composes the opening of a project that threatens to rival the scope of his large-scale project “The Alphabet.” Composed from 1979 to 2004, and produced as smaller titles over a period of years, “The Alphabet” was eventually produced as The Alphabet (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), a trade work over a thousand pages large. How big might Silliman compose his “Universe”? Composed as a single, ongoing stanza. Silliman’s Revelator exists as an accumulation of overlapping movements, each of which open a series of threads that somehow all connect, eventually, as all in the universe does (as far as we’re aware), I suppose. The reveal of Revelator, “a poem of globalization and post-global poetics” (something that exists in the multiple languages within the trade poetry works of , for example, Canadian poets Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure) exists as a kind of cultural catch-all, woven together in an intricate array of observation, critical commentary and ephemeral travel-notes, and manage to compose an elastic work that blends both the complete opposite of local with something immediately and specifically local. The connections and the overwhelming ongoing stanza of Revelator were obvious during his recent Ottawa launch through the AB Series, listening to the waves and ebbs and flows of a poem that, in many ways, deserves very much to be heard aloud. Of the nearly eighty pages of text, here is, picked almost arbitrarily, the entirety of page eighteen:

water pouring in, I knew

we were under attack”) attempt

to reconstruct the sequence, build

narrative bridge, classic Bob, air

syntax out, neighbour waddles out

to fetch paper, hard copy

is old copy, cold stone

atop which to scoop even

colder cream, white chocolate kisses

battered in, the maple reddens

while the oak goes yellow

all the others already leafless,

lifeless on the street, yellow

tarp atop the torso, hollow

lung hollers for help, envision

this all without sound sung

deep in glade, inaudible oriole

aria as an arch aches

stretching across its trestle, test

the tree stand’s strength before

adding tinsel, glass balls, small

ornamentation, avoid clusters, clutter, dis-

in distribute understood, but tribute?

That is harder, I hear

wheels across the gravel wet

with a dense fog hushed

then digging in to turn

then softer, the newly paved

Goat Hill Road, river makes