"Tjanting" has More to Say

The hard copy of Ron Silliman's "Tjanting" has a secret to tell. Unlike the pdf sample of the book's introduction, the printed pages feature seemingly random words and punctuation in bold type, which when strung together form another poem. The lines are stylistically removed from the jumbled chaos of "Tjanting"'s linear read-through, revealing both the softer side of Silliman's poesy and a sense of linguistic irony. Despite the assumed logistical barrier of constructing a poem from prearranged words, the encrypted poem is in fact much less cryptic than the body from which it was culled:

Cry into the night, the Dark, an endless search, a past entombed and doomed to human confusion. The whole damn thing is just so subjective, like everyone is breathing and copulating and praying in their own grimm fairy tale and writing their own words and forcing others into it sometimes without realizing. A flash. A winter vignette. Around the edges we are all snowblind. Snow is not an outlandish sex fantasy. The crack of the real whip on real flesh is mortifying, painful, demeaning. The thrill is in escaping, and laughing at yourself for once craving that raw and rosy flesh. But snow is always beautiful, moreso than its image in the mind, moreso than Monet and his oil magpies, moreso than Christmas lights or pillow fights, moreso than cocaine. I have seen lights in dark places and a fresh crest of snow is one, like turning the page of a moleskine and crying for the cleanliness; the virgin blanket waiting to be ravaged and stained, erected, defended, carved, trampled, balled up by toddler warmongers and catapulted with a laugh into the blustery fray. I have seen people smile at their own tracks in the snow, while others just hurry to the hearth and collapse with grateful skin. I have seen the sun burn away the page, and underneath is a new one, a bit soiled, silently beseeching another turn.

The decoding process took a long time. Was it worth it?