The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Lyn Hejinian was an American poet, essayist, translator, and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life, as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including both poetry and prose.
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.
Michael Davidson is an American poet.
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990 is a poetry anthology published in 1994. It was edited by American poet and publisher Douglas Messerli – under his own imprint Sun & Moon Press – and includes poets from both the U.S. and Canada.
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", according to one of his chroniclers. Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robert Grenier is an American poet associated with the Language School. He was founding co-editor of the influential magazine This (1971–1974). This provided one of the first gatherings in print of various writers, artists, and poets now identified as the Language poets.
Tom Mandel is an American poet whose work is often associated with the Language poets. He was born in Chicago and has lived in New York City, Paris and San Francisco. Since 2004, he has lived in Lewes, Delaware, with his wife – the poet and psychotherapist Beth Joselow.
Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko was a Russian poet, writer, translator, and lecturer. He is considered the foremost representative of language poetry in contemporary Russian literature.
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Aerial is an influential poetry magazine edited by Rod Smith and published by Aerial/Edge, based in Washington, D.C. Aerial/Edge also publishes Edge Books. The first issue of Aerial appeared in 1984. Edge Books began with its first publication in 1989.
Steve Benson is an American poet and performer. He is often associated with the Language poets. Benson lives in Downeast Maine where he is a licensed psychologist in private practice.
Kit Robinson is an American poet, translator, writer and musician. An early member of the San Francisco Language poets circle, he has published 28 books of poetry.
Alan Bernheimer is an American poet, often associated with the San Francisco Language poets and the New York School poets.
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.
Peter Seaton was an American poet associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s. During the opening and middle years of Language poetry many of his long prose poems were published, widely read and influential. Seaton was also a frequent contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the influential magazines and theoretical venues for Language poetry, co-edited by Charles Bernstein. In 1978, Bernstein published Seaton's first book of poetry, Agreement, the same year that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine made its first appearance. Some of Seaton's work from this time has been reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984).
Nada Gordon is an American poet. She is a pioneer of Flarf poetry and a founding member of the Flarf Collective.
