In a way Silliman makes the task of reading a poem like "Blue" easier by framing it as a narrative, although obliquely so:
The Marchioness went out at five o'clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon's brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression.
The first line is an allusion to Paul Valery's asservation that he could never write novels because he would be compelled to write sentences like this one. The rest of the paragraph humorously completes the first paragraph of Valery's unwritten novel, while also establishing "Blue" as a narrative of sorts without explicitly identifying it as a first-person narrative related by the speaker. In effect, this first paragraph invites us to consider the poem unified through a loose narrative structure (completed by the final paragraph, in which the Marchioness arrives at her destination), and thus perhaps the poem can be read as an account of a walk through the Lower East Side, as Silliman's note informs us, but we should not expect it to tell us its story through hypotaxis or outright signs of narrative development.
In fact we are free to make connections among sentences in a way that arguably enhances the narrative beyond literal events and perceptions:
If challenged, its first response is to spit. This took place at the museum. Wires slope from the pole to the house, where they gather, entering a narrow pipe along its side. This conveys motion. I am writing in shadows. Don't you worry about accessibility too?
The first line of this paragraph is perhaps a direct reference to a cat or some other animal encountered on the walk, perhaps just a general reference to such an animal. "This" tempts us to link back to the spitting animal, but of course such an encounter would not take place in a museum. Or would it? Line three seems to bring us back to the walk, a sentence of pure description, but the setting of course contrasts greatly with the (memory of?) the museum, although the contrast may be exactly what Silliman is after. (Still, what the poet is after in a poem like this both can't really be determined and is probably irrelevant--if making "purpose" clear was a priority, the "new sentence" approach would be self-defeating, to say the least.) "This conveys motion" might in this instance actually refer to the wires, but our previous encounter with the demonstrative pronoun suggests caution in making the connection. The last two lines apparently bring us out of the immediate scene of the walk into the scene of the composition of the poem (something Silliman does frequently in many of his poems). What are "the shadows" in which the poet writes? Literally the shadows forming the environment in which the poet was writing this line? (Probably.) The figurative shadows cast by the environment of the Lower East Side as the poet composes his poem? (Possibly as well.) To whom is the question in the final line asked? Another poet? Silliman, by another poet? The reader? All three are plausible, and a different layer of connotation is added depending on which auditor you choose and what answer to the posed question they give.
While the kinds of sequential paragraphs featured in "Blue" or the following poem, "Carbon," are more or less the central device of Silliman's poetics, there is variety of form in The Alphabet. "Demo" is essentially a sequence of single sentences (or combinations of clauses punctuated as a sentence), "Force" seems structured as a medium-length verse poem (although with an occasional paragraph embedded therein), but the lines unfold in recognizable new sentences, part of "Jones" is composed in what seem like quatrains, "Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect" is one 84-page paragraph, etc. "Non" employs stanzas of various lengths, "Quindecagon" is a series of 15-line stanzas the final words of each of which are repeated throughout the poem (in different orders, end of first line in one stanza going to the bottom in the next), somewhat in the mode of a sestina, while Silliman himself calls "VOG" a "collection of "ordinary" poems."
In other words, the reader will find a great deal of manipulation of form in The Alphabet, even if the result is "form" of a type not really found before. As also revealed in the Notes, form in many of the poems is derived from Oulipo-like restraints, especially mathematical, as in "Lit," in which "every section is predicated on the number 12," or in Silliman's use of the Fibonacci series, which structured Silliman's previous "Tjanting" and which in The Alphabet appears in modified version in "Ink," "Lit," and "Oz." However much Silliman at some level was motivated as a poet by political beliefs about the commodification of language, his poems are a formalist's delight, at least if formalism is defined as an interest in the malleability of form, and the extent to which Silliman's work, as exemplified in The Alphabet, attracts future readers unschooled in the origins of Language Poetry will greatly depend, it seems to me, on the interest its considerable formal achievements continues to provoke and ultimately to satisfy.
Although the formal experiments of Silliman's poetry are their most conspicuous aesthetic attribute, they also offer other, more immediate rewards. While many of the sentences are ordinary declaratives and descriptions, some are quite striking in themselves: "A shift not in light, but to light, as day's first illumination floods the room so that colors exist, however muted. . .Mockingbird gargles a whole new song." If most of Silliman's paragraphs and stanzas work through disjunction and discontinuity, sometimes they have an evocative if obscure cohesion of their own:
Before dawn, a kitchen light casts its full glare out over the snow. Sense of panic in a dream. In the bank, a large woman hands me my money stapled together in an envelope. I'm pulling my children through the streets on a sled, waiting for the street lights to come on. I wave and realize I'm alone in my bed, then see her asleep wrapped in some blankets on the floor. "Brittany," he shouts when I ask him what breed his dogs are. More snow begins to fall. ("VOG")
Perhaps the most consistent pleasure the poems in The Alphabet provide is their humor, in particular Silliman's inveterate punning:
When in the course of cumin events. . .The unbearable whiteness of being. . .Thirteen ways of scratching at a blackboard. . .Note to the typesetter: you can't always get what you font. . .Rhyme and punishment. . . .
That each of these puns is taken from a poem, "Under," that contains some of the most obvious "political" discourse in The Alphabet (much of it is composed during and is a running commentary on the first Iraq war), and that they to a significant degree undercut the seriousness of this commentary, indicates to me Silliman's ultimate allegiance after all is to poetry, and to the verbal play that is its most fundamental characteristic, not to external political goals. Even if the "tangibility of the word" to be found in such puns, as well as other kinds of wordplay found in, for example,"Lit," does call attention to the "transparency" of ordinary discourse, that is because poetry (good poetry) always call attention to the inadequacies of ordinary discourse.
However imposing The Alphabet might at first seem to the casual reader, it is accessible given time and the alternative reading strategies I have mentioned. It could even be read sequentially, provided the reader can be tolerant of inevitable obscurities and confusions, which are best left for later when the alternative strategies don't apply. Eventually the poems teach the determined reader how to read them. Speaking for myself, I found the later poems much more satisfying for the effort, although I now recognize my appreciation of the earlier ones was incomplete. All the more reason to read them again.