Bruce Andrews (April 1, 1948) is an American poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name).
Andrews was born in Chicago and studied international relations at Johns Hopkins University and political science at Harvard. His first book, Edge, was published in 1973.
Together with Charles Bernstein, he edited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, which ran to 13 issues between 1978 and 1981 and (along with other magazines such as This , A Hundred Posters,Big Deal,Dog City,Hills,Là Bas,Oculist Witnesses,QU, and Roof) was one of the most important outlets for Language poetry. In 1984 he and Bernstein published most of the contents of the 13 issues in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.
Andrews rejects the classical notion of poetry as the 'direct treatment' of things in language, arguing that the only thing that can be so treated is language itself.
Andrews was a professor of political science at Fordham University from 1975 to 2013. He harshly criticized what he called the US government's policies of oppression and subversion.
Andrews appeared on the O'Reilly Factor in November 2006 after a Fordham student who interned on the program complained about Andrews' leftist views.
Andrews has published about forty books of poetry, either on his own or in collaboration with other writers, as well as a number of books of essays. His books include I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992) and Ex Why Zee: Performance Texts, Collaborations with Sally Silvers, Word Maps, Bricolage & Improvisation (1995). Designated Heartbeat (Salt Publishing, 2006; ISBN 1-84471-068-8) and Swoon Noir (Chax Press, 2007; ISBN 978-0-925904-48-5) bring Andrews well into the 21st century.
The following works by Andrews have been republished in e-book format at Eclipse, which is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of original works by various authors:
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 is 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 ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bovê was published by Duke University Press and ''boundary 2'' in 2021.
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Bernard Keith Waldrop was an American poet, translator, publisher, and academic. He won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.
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.
Ray DiPalma (1943-2016) was an American poet and visual artist who published more than 40 collections of poetry, graphic work, and translations with various presses in the US and Europe. He was educated at Duquesne University and University of Iowa.
Clark Coolidge is an American poet.
Robert Grenier is a contemporary American poet associated with the Language School. He was founding co-editor of the influential magazine This (1971–1974). This was a watershed moment in the history of recent American poetry, providing one of the first gatherings in print of various writers, artists, and poets now identified as the Language poets.
Larry Eigner, also known as Laurence Joel Eigner, was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School.
This is a poetry journal associated with what would later be called Language poetry because during the time span in which This was published, "many poets of the emerging Language school were represented in its pages".
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an avant-garde poetry magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews that ran thirteen issues from February 1978 to October 1981. Along with This, it is the magazine most often referenced as the breeding ground for the group of writers who became known as the Language poets.
Anne-Marie Albiach was a contemporary French poet and translator.
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.
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.
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.
Nick Piombino is an American poet, essayist, artist and psychotherapist. He has been associated with poets from both the New York School of the 1960s and the Language Poets of the 1970s, though his work is not easily classified.
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).