Performing Ketjak: The Theater of the Observed

When in the spring of 2005 the moderators of the Buffalo Poetics listserv banned posting poetry to the board, poet Mairead Byrne asked, “How will you know it’s a poem and is there an honor code?”–an inquiry that points out the elusiveness of the poetic itself. In order to appreciate fully the thrust of her argument, it is necessary to reproduce her entire letter:
 

Dear Editors,
 
With regard to your recent decision that poems will no longer be allowed on the Poetics List, I realize you do not intend to address this matter further but I have a question. How will you know it’s a poem and is there an honor code?
 
For years I have been trying to free myself of conversation in favor of conversing only in poetry. I have made major strides towards this goal. I feel success is within my grasp. The answer is not to import found language into poetry but to send poetry out into everyday discourse like so many platelets or Frisbees or oases of calm government. To that end I have produced thousands of poems. I am close to having at least one for every eventuality. They can be quite subtle. Almost indistinguishable from real conversation (to me of course they are much realer than conversation, hence my endeavors to begin with).
 
How will you know if my messages are poems? How will you know they are not poems? Do you want me to self-declare? Do you want me to throw away years of work and start ham-fistedly attempting to communicate “normally” again?
 
What is the power of *about*? Why is it alright to talk *about* poetry but not alright to talk poetry? How will you know? What will you do?
 
Are there grey areas? Will you notice if too much attention is paid to spacing or a bit of alliteration creeps in? Even avoiding the obvious, what if a piece has all the devil-may-care casualness of prose but the bold gestalt heart of pure poetry? Even impure. Is your rule enforceable?
 
Why would you want it to be?
 
I will sign this so you know it’s not a poem. Next time I may be trickier. Or maybe I’m being really tricky now.
 
Mairead
 

(“How will you know”)

According to Byrne, her experiments have led her to a point where she can converse in poetry, rendering her poems “indistinguishable” from everyday conversation. Far from the hushed and sacred space of the poet’s reading, poems circulate, for Byrne, like vital “platelets” in the bloodstream. They are playful “frisbees” flung outward from the poet in the game of life. Considered as such, Byrne’s work in language (suddenly “poetry” seems too narrow a word) is an unrepeatable and continuous performance, a Heraclitean flow of utterance that is constantly dancing with and determined by the particularities of its context. For Byrne, poetry is a sustained and sustainable mode of being in the world, and not an occasional irruption of aesthetic language into an otherwise dull and alienated existence in which words exist as mere instruments, tools we use to chisel out our desires.

 
If we take Byrne at her word (and there is no reason not to), then the boundary between the poetic and the non- is not merely blurred, but dismissed utterly. There is no difference between the vernacular and the poetic: Wordsworth, Whitman, Eliot and O’Hara have all found their apotheosis here. We needn’t even look to Byrne’s published work, nor subject it to close reading or analysis in one of a hundred theoretical frameworks; rather, all we need to do is have a chat with the poet about any subject we wish, and in so doing, we will be bathed in a poem crafted for just the occasion, customized to work in that particular context. Such an attitude towards artistic production and reception resonates with much of the thought expressed in Continental European modernisms, inaugurated by the Futurists, and culminating in Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculpture. This dynamic interplay between the average and the aesthetic came to the fore in North America in the 1950s with the Black Mountain experiments in performance, where events like the carnivalesque productions orchestrated by John Cage (like the “untitled event” that took place in 1952) formed the crucible from which sprang Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Guerrilla theater, and the catalogue of Fluxus and Conceptual art in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
 
This is a brief sketch of a renegade band of practitioners in the history of sculpture, art and theater. Their exploits and repercussions have already been well documented.¹ Rather than retread these avenues, it is my concern in this essay to examine the point at which the theatrical avant-garde intersects with the poetic, specifically in the case of Ron Silliman’s public reading of his long poem Ketjak in 1978. Given Language poetry’s insistence on the material status of the word–those “language particles” that, when manipulated, result in “new aggregates of meaning,” which in turn allow for the perception of “(as yet unseen?) physical states of matter” (Coolidge 502)–it becomes possible to inquire into the activities that those language particles manifest in the world. Under the special circumstances of Language poetry, reading a poem is not simply a recitation or re-hearse-ing of the words on the page, but a loosing of matter into the plane of experience: it is a rare opportunity to watch language perform independently on the stage of everyday life.
 
One of the dominant critical tropes of Language poetry lies in the dialogic character of the work. Of Steve Benson’s early work in the 1970s, Geoff Ward writes that the poem (“As is”) “may be on permanent vacation from literature’s traditional functions,” and that the resultant hash of language–which mixes images of pubic hair, a freeway accident, unidentified shards of metal, dictionary definitions of “adjudicate,” and “treetop birds swing[ing] out from/ nylon hose flung out the window in mild abandon”–is Benson’s call to the reader to “sort it out – if you want to” (Ward 9-10). Language poetry teases the reader out of a passive readerly stance, and demands a more active approach to the invisible and assumed processes of interpreting words on a page. This is not to say that reading work other than Language poetry does not require such an “athletic” approach, but in the specific case of Language poetry, soliciting the reader’s participation is an explicit part of the work. The text is designed to achieve this effect as an end in itself. Silliman’s street rendition of Ketjak carries on this participatory dynamic, but transmutes it into a performance. In print, the Language poem challenges the aesthetic codes of reading; gone from the poem are the familiar markers of sustained narrative, meter, rhyme, and often (especially in the early Language experiments) words themselves, as the text explores the limits of “diminished” or blatantly “non-referential” language. When language’s obligation to represent an exterior reality transparently is thus abdicated, the reader becomes a co-conspirator in the production of meaning, and must improvise a series of responses to the text as it continually undercuts and complicates its status as a “representation.” In short, Language poems tend to foreground the experiential nature of reading, above and beyond any nominal content that may (or may not) appear in the work itself.
 
This much is clear: we are to read as though we are writers. But how, then, should we listen? Instinctively, we might hew to the traditional format for public performances of poetry:
 

A person stands alone in front of an audience, holding a text and speaking in an odd voice, too regular to be conversation, too intimate and too lacking in orotundity to be a speech or a lecture, too rough and personal to be theater. The speaker is making no attempt to conceal the text. Signs of auditory effort in the audience are momentarily lost in occasional laughter, tense silences, and even cries of encouragement. Sometimes the reader uses a different, more public voice and refers to what it is being read, or to some other information of apparent interest. No one talks to the reader. No one proposes a second take. No one reflexively discusses the ritual itself.
 

(Middleton, Distant 25)

This ritual is also the form preferred by the print poet, as a kind of advertisement for poetry disseminated via the “book tour.” (Margaret Atwood has even gone so far as to develop the LongPen, a device that allows her to avoid the tedium and effort of physically travelling to book readings, and instead allows her to autograph her fans’ copies from the comfort of her home.²) Anyone who has attended even a single such contemporary poetry reading will be immediately familiar with the milieu of silent reverence and repressed coughing that Middleton describes in the passage above. It is my sense that Middleton has isolated a kind of metanarrative built into the poetry reading itself. The subject of this metanarrative is not so much the structure of the poetry reading as it is the model it provides for the consumption of poetry: a blueprint for the audience members when they leave the event and “perform” the poem for themselves, silently, internally, and alone. The poetry reading is a metanarrative that provides the reader with an “insider’s” perspective on the poem; it points up the gravity of a specific line break, it gives the silent reader cues to the varieties of tone and voicing implicit in the words, and most importantly, it highlights an awareness that the poem on the page is being directed (always and already) at an audience, that is, the reader. In this sense, the poetry reading trains the audience to bifurcate itself, to be both the performer and the listener at the same time, to mime the “original” author’s initial performance of the poem for her own entertainment/edification/education later. The event of the poem performed by the author hovers over any subsequent interaction with the poem, informing its interpretation and reception.

 
This is not an unbreakable cycle, however. Current practitioners have reacted against the structural metanarrative of the poetry reading and its disabling corollary of trained consumerism, as we saw above in Mairead Byrne’s effort to actually talk poetry rather than talk about it. David Antin’s work since 1972 is one historical precedent for Byrne’s model. Essentially, Antin’s chosen form (the “talk-poem”) leverages the sacred space of the poetry reading and declares that, if the contemporary poetry reading is the space-for-poetry, then whatever is said on this platform must, by extension, be poetry.³ The collected body of Antin’s work, both in print and in performance, can be read as a sustained effort to answer the question that stands as the epigram to his first book, Talking: “If someone were to come up to you and start talking a poem at you, how would you know?” Like Byrne’s poetry for every situation, the act of talking (at least in the protected sphere of the “event” of an Antin performance) is co-extensive with poetry.
 
Somewhere between Middleton’s model and Byrne and Antin’s avant-garde interventions lies Ron Silliman’s performance of Ketjak in San Francisco in 1978. In a written reflection on his performance, Silliman succinctly summarizes “the act”: “On Saturday, September 16, 1978, between noon and 4:30 pm, I read, without amplification or intermission, the entirety of Ketjak, at the corner of Powell and Market streets in San Francisco” (“Reading” 195). A four and a half hour long performance might exhaust even the most avid connoisseur, but the simple reason for the amount of time required is the length of the text. Ketjak proceeds from its initial line whose duration is a single two word sentence–“Revolving door”–and roughly doubles the number of sentences per line until the twelfth line, which in its original printing appeared as a line “45 pages long, containing more than 10,000 words” (“Reading” 194). Not only does the poem double in length from one line to the next, but it maintains the order of sentences from line to line. The best way to describe this technique is to watch it happen in the poem directly. For instance, lines three and four of Ketjak read as follows:
 

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.
 
Revolving door. First flies of the summer. Fountains of the financial district spout. She was a unit in bum space, she was a damaged child. Dark brown houseboats beached at the point of low tide – men atop their cabin roofs, idle, play a Dobro, a jaw’s harp, a 12-string guitar – only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. I want the grey-blue grain of western summer. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the bookcase to indicate Home. A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.
 

(Silliman, Age 3; my emphasis)

I have italicized the four “new” sentences in the fourth line to make clear the additions that Silliman has made, and to show that he maintains the order of the sentences that previously made up the third line. The sentences of the third line are (with minor adjustments) recognizably and sequentially preserved in the fourth line. This new line, now eight sentences long, is created by inserting sentences into the spaces between the sentences of the line previous. The fifth line will repeat this technique, and so on until the gargantuan twelfth line (which in the 2007 edition of the poem runs almost fifty pages in length).

 
One effect of this form on the reader is a constant renegotiation of the syllogistic connections among sentences. For instance, the sixth line of the poem ends with these two sentences: “Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.” This “couplet” (so to speak) coerces the reader into imagining a horrifying tableau of cannibalism. But by the eighth line, now 108 sentences long, these same elements recombine into a different and disjunctive narrative and reads as follows:
 

Look at that room filled with fleshy babies, incubating. Points of transfer. A tall glass of tawny port. The shadows between the houses leave the earth cool and damp. A slick gaggle of ambassadors. We ate them.
 

(Silliman, Age 9)

Where earlier we ate the babies, now they incubate peacefully, removed by a distance of four sentences from our threatening teeth. In fact, several new “points of transfer” have been placed in our way, shuttling us between appreciating a glass of port, the space between two houses, and leading to the prospect of eating a “slick gaggle of ambassadors” (perhaps a bit more palatable menu than a room full of innocent cherubs, but disturbing nonetheless). As Barrett Watten observes, the text “makes for an evaluative mode of thinking – values of the sentences are revealed in how they interact with those around them” (271). But these subtleties are best available to the reader of the poem, and are accessible through a sustained act of scanning the text, all the while flipping back and forth in the book in order to register the shifts and consistencies between lines. They are also partially present to the listener, as the text echoes itself from line to line–however, as the lines grow and the interstitial additions from one line to the next grow in number, the real time that passes between the echoes might diminish the effect. Yet the “listener” that I have invoked is a very special person–she is a dedicated, knowledgeable and motivated audience member who has chosen to attend the “event” of Ketjak, and most likely brings with her a set of expectations (of varying levels of accuracy: she may find that this reading is entirely not what she expected at all, feel disappointed, and leave).

 
These are precisely the special category of listeners that Silliman attracted to his outdoor reading of Ketjak. In his report on the reading he writes:
 

A lesson I’d learned from a year’s work at the Tenderloin, which served well during the reading, is that psychotics & most street alcoholics respect an aggressive assertion of presence. Only one person tried to jam a toothbrush down my throat as I read.
 
I did want the presence of some support, not only for such contingencies as that & to combat the general alienation of any streetcorner speaker (I after all was hardly to see anything beyond the borders of my page), but because I intended the event as a communication to other poets, concerning their work as well as mine. I sent out a flyer & listed the reading in Poetry Flash.
 

(“Reading” 198)

In the cloistered space of the contemporary poetry reading, the poetic is readily and easily distinguished from the chatter and white noise that bookends the “event” itself. The presence of an emcee who “introduces” the speaker, a publicized starting time, dimming the lights–all of these are rituals designed to focus our attention on the specialized use of language that is, after all, the reason for gathering in the first place. Middleton writes elsewhere that the poetry reading is “awash” with precisely those “distracting noises” that are forbidden from, say, the cinema. This may appear contradictory, especially given the “ritualized” atmosphere of the contemporary reading that I described earlier. A gathering of film-goers for even the worst Hollywood dreck is ostensibly spared the conditions of the poetry reading, a scene endlessly compromised by “[p]oor acoustics, outdoor noise . . . comings and goings of drinkers, coughs due to poor ventilation, encouraging remarks and heckling, lack of sight-lines”–in short, a relatively poor forum for the appreciation of the spoken word (“How” 14). Middleton argues that there is a miniature drama being staged in the contemporary poetry reading, as poets in smoky loud bars all over the world raise their voices to be heard over the collective clinks of bartenders mixing drinks and the clatter of coins as they make change for a clientele immune to the charms of art. He calls it “a drama of poetry’s struggle against the conditions of a modernity that does not value poetry much alongside many other arts, especially those of advertising or with enormous commercial potential” (14). Up to a point, Middleton is accurate, and his interpretation of the poetry reading as a beleaguered art-form should be welcomed by those artists and audiences who labor for “poetry’s promotion to a position of importance” (14). But I am tempted to ask: why should poetry be so visibly and surgically separated from the rest of language? Would a model for poetry reading that resembles the kind of silent attention we give to productions “with enormous commercial potential” actually be a salutary state of affairs compared to Silliman’s street corner?

 
Silliman’s motivation for performing Ketjak on the street becomes quite clear. He writes that he intended
 

to give a typical poetry reading, a normal presentation of a text of unusual length. This required enabling (empowering) the audience to move freely, even to come & go, without disrupting the event. The architectural tradition of such readings tends toward enclosed sites of intimate dimension. While this might be ideal for most readings, it nevertheless imposes limitations which have nothing to do with the text itself. Like the so-called little magazine, most reading spaces militate for the short poem, the eminently discrete (& disposable) affective experience.
 

(“Reading” 195)

Just as the “little magazine” (and its attendant market) prohibits the production of long poems, so too does the typical (or “contemporary”) poetry reading impose a problem for the poet interested in the kinds of experience that only a longer form can provide. It is certainly possible for a short poem to relate (or represent) an experience that might take four hours of time, but it is an entirely different matter to live through four hours directly. In this manner, again, the poetry reading provides a blueprint with which we might (mistakenly) determine the poetic from the non-poetic; poems appear (both in print and in performance) as short, three minute bursts of specialized language, quick epiphanies that we can consume and just as quickly dispose of before moving on to the next. By pushing the poem out of the private theater of a silent reader, and beyond the relatively more public space of the poetry reading, and instead injecting it wholesale into the experience of everyday life, Silliman’s performance strikes at the heart of these issues. What is poetry meant to accomplish? Is the oral transmission of a poem finally degraded into nothing more than an advertisement for the author, or an instruction manual on how to read the poem without the aid of the author’s voice? Is a three-minute poem (or any “eminently disposable” chunk of time) long enough to say anything significant? And finally, what might poetry look like if loosed from the arbitrary physical and temporal limits of the contemporary poetry reading? Silliman proposes that the fragmented, disjunctive world-view produced by just such consumer-friendly snippets of poetry is actually subject to a much larger unity, one that takes into account the co-extensivity of language with the world that it names, but does not imagine that it can ever reach a point when the two comfortably and finally overlap. When Silliman writes that this particular performance was a “test of his own belief in [his own] work,” he is not only addressing contemporary critics, but he is also committing to a unification of the act of poetry to the life of the poet (“Reading” 198). Reading the entirety of Ketjak is a demonstration of the inseparability of the two, in a manner that Byrne and Antin might appreciate.

 
In the photo that accompanies Silliman’s report on the event, the poet is framed in a manner that makes the task of picking him out of the tableau, if not particularly difficult, at least inconvenient (see Fig. 1 below). At the left edge of the photo is a man shielding his eyes in a manner that might seem dramatic and “pronounced.”⁴ The Mickey Mouse balloon, clearly visible in the foreground, highlights the tourist and transient nature of the capitalist setting Silliman has chosen, a context inflected by a monolithic, highly commodified and easily consumable representation of “play.” The central figure of the photograph, the man with the flowers and rolled-up paper, striding through Silliman’s sphere, is a perfect encapsulation of what Silliman intended to accomplish with his performance: to expose the illusion of aesthetic experience as somehow transcendent by placing it in a context of everyday experience. The man with the flowers, unaware that he is being recorded in the moment of Silliman’s poem, functions exactly like any one of the sentences that make up Ketjak; he is physically “present” and thus connected to the entire mise en scène that is the event, but his trajectory and his relationship to the moment is at the same time separate and disconnected.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Photograph by Alan Bernheimer. Used by permission.

 

If, as David Antin suggests in one of his talk-poems, we are always “standing somewhere […] in this semantic space,” then one corollary of his proposal would cast our bodies as linguistic units within the semantic landscape (tuning 119). The disjunctive relationship between Silliman’s sentence units is then a trope for how our bodies interact with one another in the world–rubbing shoulders, jostling in crowds, sidestepping one moment and impeding a fellow citizen the next, always with varying degrees of orientation as we navigate the ever-changing flux of human traffic. Silliman deploys his lines in a manner that cites reality rather than mimes it.

 
The tool Silliman uses to cut through representation and engage with “reality” more directly is the “New Sentence.” The New Sentence is the basic unit of Ketjak (and characteristic of Silliman’s poetry in general), and is his particular contribution to Language poetry. The need for a New Sentence in the first place is born from the shortcomings of writing under capitalism. In his essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” Silliman argues that
 

[w]hat happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.
 

(New Sentence 10; my emphasis)

Realism, “realistic,” “realist”–all such modes of representation in art (visual or verbal) are participating in a capitalist pattern. Capitalism effaces the human labor and materials that go into creating a “good” for the marketplace, and instead assigns value according to a process of fetishization. Commodity fetishes then operate to stratify society: for instance, by marking the people who can afford highly valued goods (regardless of the product’s functionality) as “upper” class, the fetishized consumer good somehow “represents” and references something authentic about its bearer in a highly codified but tacit discursive web that presents the illusion of an ordered world. Silliman posits that the same process applies in language. I do not wish to rehearse Silliman’s entire argument, but the following passage is worth consideration:

“Correct grammar,” which has never existed in spoken daily life save as a template, is itself thus predicated upon a model of “high” discourse . . . “Educated” speech imitates writing: the more “refined” the individual, the more likely their utterances will possess the characteristics of expository prose. The sentence, hypotactic and complete, was and still is an index of class in society.
 

(New Sentence 79)

In this sense a subject can possess language in the same manner that she can possess a consumer item, and the same illusory economy of reference will apply. Being able to speak “like a book” implies that the speaker belongs to a higher strata or order of society than does someone who cannot. The strategy for the avant-garde writer is now clear: she must write a book that doesn’t operate in an economy of reference, and cannot possibly operate as an index of class–a tactic that will liberate both parties (reader and writer) from the pitfalls of commodity fetishism.

 
Silliman claims that “[u]nder the sway of the commodity fetish, language itself appears to become transparent, a mere vessel for the transfer of ostensibly autonymous referents” (New Sentence 11). The model for his antidote comes from pre-literate cultures. He writes that
 

within tribal societies the individual has not been reduced to wage labor, nor does material life require the consumption of a vast number of commodities, objects created through the work of others. Language likewise has not yet been transformed into a system of commodities, nor subjected to a division of labor in its functions through which the signified overwhelms the signifier.
 

(New Sentence 11)

The main culprit in the fetishization and commodification of language, the form most responsible for diminishing the opacity and tangibility of language, is the realist novel, which delivers a “hypotactic and complete” worldview between its printed covers. Its arrangement of words

derives from the narrative epics of poetry, but moves toward a very different sense of form and organization. Exterior formal devices, such as rhyme and linebreak, diminish, and the structural units become the sentence and paragraph. In the place of external devices, which function to keep the reader’s or listener’s experience at least partly in the present, consuming the text, most fiction foregrounds the syllogistic leap, or integration above the level of the sentence, to create a fully referential tale.
 

(New Sentence 79)

In other words, the prose novel dissociates the reader from her presence in the act of reading by turning what was previously an external and tangible formal device into a system of internalized assumptions about the author’s intent: specifically, the assumption that the sentences being read, formed into paragraphs that integrate into the larger structures of the novel, are cohesive, coherent, and universally directed toward the overall monolithic (and highly ordered) “meaning” of the work. It is through the reader’s internalized faith in the hypotactic structure of the prose novel that “capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers” and readers as well (New Sentence 8).

 
In contrast, the New Sentence provides an antidote to the alienated reader, lulled into a false picture of reality-in-print. It makes the sentence itself an “exterior formal device” by limiting the syllogistic play between sentences to its immediate context. In his list of the eight qualities of the New Sentence, four are directly concerned with the dynamics of syllogism in print. The list is as follows:
 

1. 1. The paragraph organizes the sentences;
2. 2. The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument;
3. 3. Sentence length is a unit of measure;
4. 4. Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;
5. 5. Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;
6. 6. Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;
7. 7. Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;
8. 8. The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

(New Sentence 91)

Or, as fellow Language poet and theorist Bob Perelman writes, “[a] new sentence is more or less ordinary itself but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it bears tangential relevance” (61).

 
I have already discussed some of the formal properties of Ketjak, but the significance of Silliman’s New Sentence form requires elaboration. It is my argument here that the ordered (though modulated) repetition of sentences from one line to the next suggests a parallel relationship between sentences and subjects. The clue that has led me to this conclusion is coded in the title of the poem itself; Ketjak is not only the name for the poem that marked Silliman’s “adulthood as a writer” (Interview 255), but is also the umbrella term he has given to the very large output of poetry that he has produced and continues to write. In this sense, then, Ketjak includes The Age of Huts (compleat), the twenty-six books of The Alphabet, the book length poem Tjanting and his current work in progress, Universe. This entire stack of radical text is Ketjak, and as he admits in the preface to the 2007 edition, Silliman does have a penchant for “Russian-doll structure[s],” so it should come as no surprise (as well) that at the center/beginning of the project, we find a poem with the same name as the entire collection (Age ix). Now that Silliman has openly declared his super-title for the project, the time has come to explore the term Ketjak more closely.
 
A Ketjak (or ‘tjak, or Kechak) is a Balinese version of the Ramayana myth in the form of a ritualized dance, performed by troupes that can reach hundreds of members who replay part of an epic battle between the story’s hero, Rama, and the villain, Ravanna. R.K. Narayan’s prose translation of the Ramayana provides us with an interestingly “ordered” portrait of the evil Ravanna. In his court, where the “reigning gods…perform menial tasks,” each is left to employments that suit their particular skills. Vayu, the wind god, sweeps the floors clean with his breath; the god of fire is in charge of domestic illumination, and Death itself is enlisted to toll the passing hours of the day (Narayan 79). Ravanna’s court appears as a nearly perfect image of order. This might seem slightly at odds with Western invocations of the seat of evil (a tradition stretching from Milton’s portrait of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost to Hawthorne’s menacing and tangled forest in “Young Goodman Brown”), where disorder and chaos are the hallmarks of the demonic. The Ramayana neatly flips this dynamic on its head: to defeat the overly ordered Ravanna, Rama and the monkey horde invite and wield confusion as a weapon for justice. The ‘tjak performs this moment in the conflict when the monkey-god Hanuman enlists the help of a horde of monkeys to ward off Rama’s enemy (see this image of a ‘tjak). While the dance and chant retain many of the formal features of the original narrative, it has been decontextualized somewhat to serve now as a generalized rite of exorcism. As Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete note, the aggressive and discordant sonic value of the chant is paralyzing to the rather straightforward demons against whom it is directed (“Indonesian”). The possessed subject, encircled by hundreds of chanters, all repeating the syllable “‘tjak!” eventually has the demon within driven out by the sheer noise of the chant.⁵ This is the source–combined with Steve Reich’s experiments with percussion and taped voices as well as an interest in the possibilities of “choral” arrangements in poetry–that led Silliman to write (and continue writing) Ketjak.⁶
 
The sentences in Ketjak are deployed in the same manner as dancers in a ‘tjak: each member of the crowd is “more or less ordinary” (a circumstance highlighted by their uniform dress), and they only achieve the goal of exorcism by sheer numbers (the bigger the horde of “monkeys” the more confusion they generate for the linear demon). The sentences of Ketjak hover between fixity and flow; the repeated sentences appear to move apart from one another, but their sequential relationship remains, by and large, intact.⁷ In the same fashion, adding more chanters to the ‘tjak would simply be a process of shouldering one’s way into the group, severing any previous contiguity between chanters while simultaneously establishing two new ones (that is, between the new chanter and the two people on either side of him) and all the while increasing the volume and confusion for the malevolent spirit. This much is clear in the mystical economy of the Balinese dance, but if we follow Silliman’s translation of dancers into sentences, what is being exorcised by Ketjak? The demon that is symbolically being driven out by Silliman’s sentences is the commodity fetish in language. Bruce Andrews and Charles Berstein’s comment is pertinent here: the “bothersome and confusing” insistence on a monolithic linguistic economy of one-to-one (word to thing) reference presents a world not unlike Ravanna’s court, where the gods perform their speciality over and over again, mere domestic instruments (ix). To the Language poet, forcing words into such narrow confines is tantamount to the same thing, leaving us in a world ruled by consumption rather than by creativity. Again, Ravanna’s court is best understood through Silliman’s notion of commodity fetishism in language: the moment when “the word – words – cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities…so that words…disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical world the reader can consume as if it were a commodity” (Andrews and Bernstein x). When we replace “word” with “god” and “the reader” with “Ravanna” in the passage above, Silliman’s motivation for Ketjak comes into focus: if commodity fetishism is the malevolent spirit, then the possessed subject in need of purification by ‘tjak is language itself.
 
What is the nature of this purified subject, this restored language? If we assume that the demoniacally possessed subject is initially diagnosed by his penchant for linearity, then the healthy subject must, by extension, be comfortable in a crowd. Where the possessed reader would insist on a one-to-one exchange value in his linguistic economy, the exorcised reader is looser, less rigidly defined. He would be anonymous, multi-pronged, capable of coupling successfully with a variety of people, assemblages. He would be a nomad within himself, continuously in flux, “fitting in” only provisionally, as he goes. His personality, his fixity, his distinguishable singularity in the tribe would only ever be an effect (temporarily and repeatedly) produced by the context in which he finds himself. The successfully exorcised subject, then, is less about returning him to some essential, singular identity, and more about making him better able to deal with the polymorphousness of everyday life. So too with language. In the hands of the Langpoet, language becomes less referential (read: linear) and more experiential; the rebarbative effects of the poetry are meant to remind the reader of the essentially dis-organized nature of organic life. The possibility for confusions, multiple readings, and a lack of closure are not mere poetic innovations, but are fundamental features of existence as we directly experience it. Language poetry, in this sense, is realist. A contingent, environmental language.
 
This is the moment of the poet’s theater. We might cast Silliman’s reading in the terms of guerrilla theater, or draw parallels with Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Fluxus, or any variety of site-specific works of performance art, but Ketjak carries a special valence. It dramatizes the presence of the poet and the poem in the world. Reading Ketjak is more than an advertisement for the poem and the author: it is a staging of the difficulties and successes of poetry-in-action. Steve Benson remarked in a review of Silliman’s performance that he was “reading the reading of his poem” (272), but if we take for granted the Langposition that casts the reader as a collaborator in the work, it is just as reasonable to see this event as a performance of the act of writing. Where the poem manages to grip some aspect of reality, those moments when the poem and the world overlap, when it fails or is ignored as the poem and the poet and the event itself all recede into the white noise of the marketplace in San Francisco–these are the special effects of a poet’s theater.⁸ In these poems and performances, we awaken, like Byrne, to the fact that poetry cannot and should not be bracketed away from the rest of life, relegated to an economy of representations and epiphanies, but is instead a form of art indistinguishable from life. The twelfth line of Ketjak, all fifty pages and ten thousand words of it, is an arbitrary stopping point. It is not the ending of a poem; it is a prolegomenon, an opening flourish that encodes a much larger gesture toward a literature that seeks to encompass a street corner, a city, a world. A theater of the observed.