Another hero of poetry! Ron Silliman lived in the Bay Area from 1947 until 1995, including 17 years in San Francisco spent variously in the Mission, Bernal Heights, the Haight, Potrero Hill and "Baja Pacific Heights." He's now living in an oak wood twenty miles west of Philadelphia, but he always finds his way back to the Bay Area, just as swallows are said to return to Capistrano and salmon to swim upstream. The University of Alabama Press will publish his poem, The Alphabet, in its entirety if he ever finishes writing it. Silliman is currently a Pew Fellow in the Arts. Quarry West is devoting an issue to his writing sometime in the near future.

October 30, 1998