Ron Silliman's poetry, essays, and anthologies have become essential front-running documents of poetic experiment for the late twentieth century. Usually associated with the school of writers that has come to be called the Language poets, Silliman has helped to form that group's identifying contributions by publishing steadily since the early 1970s. In 1994 his writing was recognized by inclusion in two important anthologies: Douglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990 and Paul Hoover's Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.

Silliman's works have extended American poetic traditions in useful new directions. His poetry follows directly from the questions raised by writers in the 1960s when Silliman was a young and up-and-coming poet. The Beat and other "New American" poets, as defined by the Donald Allen anthology New American Poetry in 1960, did much of their innovative work with poetic voice. They concentrated on the...