"Tjanting" Something Else

Click Here for the introduction and opening pages of Tjanting

Not this.
What, then?
I started over & over. Not this.

So begins Ron Silliman's 2002 release Tjanting, a ponderous intermediate piece of his lifework, Ketjak, which is comprised of several other works published in succession since 1979. Each release functions as a long Language Poem, and Tjanting begins in this fashion with unabashed insistence upon the movement's tendency to disjoin: "Not this."

What follows is a flurry of prose poetry, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness account of the speaker's ruminations. Sentences are fragmented, spelling is perverted, and thoughts spontaneously jump in helter-skelter confusion. But there is order to this chaos, as images and actions recycle, multiply, and progress towards ambiguous ends in slow and agonizing detail.
"Call this long hand," he says amidst a discordant staccato of moles, airports, weathermen, and numerical puns.

The action weaves about in cyclonic fashion, turning over fragments of language, culture, and commentary in an endless (and often tiring) pageant of the unconventional. Then we hear it all again in loose pidgin; the semblance of linguistic integrity that once existed disintegrates into ejaculations of "No thingdis deep. Build an onion. This long hand call," and recollections of the vague become even less coherent.

Even with Silliman's deliberate unpredictability, the long poem fails to surprise after its first page or so. Looking at endless block paragraphs, despite their montaged intrigue, forces his linguistic experiment to blur in the mind. But this may be the point, as the mere reading of the pseudo-language itself stamps abstract impressions of an imagined world into our own. Paradoxically, the abstraction is wrought of concrete signifiers; simple nouns and visceral imagery give us a sense of firm footing inside each sentence, but refuse to provide anything more than fleeting vignettes. We feel we know the lexicon, but its meaning eludes us through its syntax as we struggle to read a new English with an interpretive accent.

It's really quite unfair. Just as we begin to feel solid about something quaggy like "analogies to quicksand," Silliman giggles and chides, whispering "Nor that either."