Barrett Watten

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Barrett Watten reading at the Prague Microfest, May 2011. Photo: Donna Stonecipher BW Prague.jpg
Barrett Watten reading at the Prague Microfest, May 2011. Photo: Donna Stonecipher

Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he teaches modernism and cultural studies. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde; and digital literature.

Contents

Watten is married to the poet Carla Harryman; their son, Asa, was born in 1984.

Early life and education

Watten was born in Long Beach, California in 1948. After graduating from high school in Oakland, California, he studied at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. [1] He majored in biochemistry, graduating with an AB in 1969. [2] At Berkeley he met poets such as Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman and studied with Josephine Miles in the English department. He enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. [1] In 1971 he and Grenier began the poetry journal This, [3] one of the central little magazines of the Language poetry movement, which he edited with Grenier for the first three years and then alone until 1982. [4] He graduated with a master's in fine arts degree in 1972. [2]

Career

After graduation Watten returned to San Francisco. He continued to publish This as sole editor and became involved in the early stages of Language poetry that was developing there. [5] In 1976 he and other poets founded the reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco that ran through 1980. From 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period. [6]

Watten continued to edit This until 1982 and began publishing books under the This Press imprint. The first title was The Maintains by Clark Coolidge (1973), followed by book-length works by Larry Eigner, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, Robert Grenier, Ted Greenwald, Alan Davies, and others. With Lyn Hejinian, he co-founded and -edited Poetics Journal, one of its theoretical venues of the movement, from 1982 to 1998. [7]

In the 1980s Watten worked as an academic editor and then Associate Editor for the journal Representations at Berkeley. In 1989 he began graduate studies at Berkeley and received his PhD in English in 1995. [2] He joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994. [1] In 1995 he was the subject of a special issue of the poetry magazine Aerial . [8] The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. [9]

From the 1970s and 1980s on, Language poetry was a source of sustained literary controversy. Watten was often at the center of it, beginning in 1978 with an encounter with New American poet Robert Duncan over the work of Louis Zukofsky. In the 1980s he was a central figure in what came to be known as “The Poetry Wars,” where debates over literary form and politics, language and lyric expression raged. After his move to academia, these debates continued in online venues and listservs. In 2000, he held a celebrated cafeteria debate with poet Amiri Baraka at the “Poets of the 1960s” conference at University of Maine.

At Wayne State University in 2019, a social media campaign by some students against Watten, alleging hostile interactions, was the subject of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. [10] Wayne State hired an independent investigator, which resulted in disciplinary sanctions in November 2019. [11] Concurrently, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote a legal opinion addressed to Wayne State, criticizing its handling of the speech issues involved. Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed a series of grievances citing a lack of required due process and requesting the restrictions be withdrawn. After their being modified in arbitration, Watten has returned to teaching a full schedule since 2023. [12]

Major work

Watten's early creative work is collected in Frame (1971–1990), which appeared in 1997 and brings together six previously published works of poetry from the previous two decades: Opera—Works (1975); Decay (1977); Plasma/Paralleles/"X" (1979); 1–10 (1980); Complete Thought (1982); and Conduit (1988)—along with two previously uncollected texts—City Fields and Frame. Two book–length poems—Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991)—were republished with a new preface as Progress/Under Erasure (2004). Bad History, a book-length prose poem, appeared in 1998. Chax Press will publish a selection of recent and “recovered” experimental writings titled Zone (1973–2024) in late 2024.

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). He has published three volumes of literary and cultural criticism: Total Syntax (1985);The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003); and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016). His Berkeley dissertation is titled Horizon Shift: Progress and Negativity in American Modernism (1995), which connects form and history in the experimental writing of two women authors, Gertrude Stein and Laura (Riding) Jackson.

With Carrie Noland, he co-edited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009), as well as special issues for the journals Qui Parle (2001) and the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (2020). In 2013, an anthology of essays from Poetics Journal was published (A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998), followed in 2015 by an e-book that republished the entire journal's content (Poetics Journal Digital Archive).

Watten is also co-author, with Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Steve Benson, and Bob Perelman of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006–2010). [13] This work, which consists of ten volumes, is described as an "experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco." [14] The project takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street referred to above. The collaborative writing project began online in 1998, using Web-based software and an email listserv.

Watten's work has been translated in numerous foreign languages, with two chapbooks in French and Italian. Plasma/Parallèles/“X,” trans. Martin Richet (2007), comprises three long poems that originally appeared in a chapbook by Tuumba Press in 1979. [15] A chapbook consisting only of Plasma, trans. by Gherardo Bortolotti, came out in 2010. His poetry provides the text for two works of urban sculpture by Siah Armajani: Six Parts of The Letter T (2003), installed in the courtyard of the Department of History, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio; and Temple Chess and Poetry Garden (2006), at the Des Moines Public Library, Des Moines, Iowa. A bilingual edition of his work in English and Russian, titled Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты, ed. Vladimir Feshchenko, is due to appear from Polyphem press in Moscow in 2024.

Bibliography

Creative works

As editor

Literary and cultural criticism

Edited volumes

Chapters (last six years)

Articles (last six years)

Selected critical discussion

Chapters and articles

Reviews

Literary biography

Edited volume

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "2003 Holloway Series - Barrett Watten". English Department, University of California, Berkeley. 2003. Archived from the original on 29 October 2003.
  2. 1 2 3 "Barrett Watten - Professor". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Wayne State University. Archived from the original on 15 March 2016.
  3. ↑ Arnold, David (2007). "'Just Rehashed Surrealism'? The Writing of Barrett Watten". Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal. Liverpool University Press. p. 138. ISBN   978-1-84631-115-4.
  4. ↑ "Barrett Watten". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Wayne State University. Retrieved 6 December 2019.
  5. ↑ Zeller, Corey (13 December 2015). "A Quick Interview with Rae Armantrout". The Ampersand Review. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
  6. ↑ Harley, Luke (7 February 2013). "Poetry as virtual community. A review of 'The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography'". Jacket2.
  7. ↑ "Lyn Hejinian Books". University of California, Berkeley English Department. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
  8. ↑ Smith, Rod (1995). "Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory". Aerial . No. 8. ISBN   978-0-9619097-4-1. Archived from the original on 29 November 2020.
  9. ↑ "The René Wellek Prize Citation 2004". American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
  10. ↑ Nguyen, Terry (21 June 2019). "'I Was Sick to My Stomach': A Scholar's Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope" . Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 65, no. 34. pp. A26–A27.
  11. ↑ Zahneis, Meghan (11 December 2019). "This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He's Being Banned From Teaching" . Chronicle of Higher Education.
  12. ↑ For student evaluations of Watten & his classes see the website, Rate my Professors
  13. ↑ For additional details, commentary, and links see Barrett Watten's piece How The Grand Piano Is Being Written Archived June 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ in a publicity release at Watten's homepage (see "External links" above)
  15. ↑ Le Quartanier éditeur & revue
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