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.
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).
"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
324 pp.6 x 8
9780520250161$28.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2007