Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work. It plays down expression, seeing the poem as a construction in and of language itself. In more theoretical terms, it challenges the "natural" presence of a speaker behind the text; and emphasizes the disjunction and the materiality of the signifier.[2] These poets favor prose poetry, especially in longer and non-narrative forms.[2]
Language poetry has been a controversial topic in American letters from the 1970s to the present. Even the name has been controversial: while a number of poets and critics have used the name of the journal to refer to the group, many others have chosen to use the term, when they used it at all, without the equals signs. The terms "language writing" and "language-centered writing" are also commonly used, and are perhaps the most generic terms. None of the poets associated with the tendency has used the equal signs when referring to the writing collectively. Its use in some critical articles can be taken as an indicator of the author's outsider status.[3] There is also debate about whether or not a writer can be called a language poet without being part of that specific coterie; is it a style or is it a group of people? In his introduction to San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets (San Francisco, City Lights, 2001 p.vii) David Meltzer writes: "The language cadres never truly left college. They've always been good students, and now they're excellent teachers. The professionalization and rationalization of poetry in the academy took hold and routinized the teaching and writing of poetry." Later in the volume (p. 128) poet Joanne Kyger comments: "The Language school I felt was a kind of an alienating intellectualization of the energies of poetry. It carried it away from the source. It may have been a housecleaning from confessional poetry, but I found it a sterilization of poetry."
Online writing samples of many language poets can be found on internet sites, including blogs and sites maintained by authors and through gateways such as the Electronic Poetry Center, PennSound, and UbuWeb.
History
The movement has been highly decentralized. On the West Coast, an early seed of language poetry was the launch of This magazine, edited by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten, in 1971. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, ran from 1978 to 1982, and was published in New York. It featured poetics, forums on writers in the movement, and themes such as "The Politics of Poetry" and "Reading Stein". Ron Silliman's poetry newsletter Tottel's (1970–81),[4]Bruce Andrews's selections in a special issue of Toothpick (1973), as well as Lyn Hejinian's editing of Tuumba Press, and James Sherry's editing of Roof magazine also contributed to the development of ideas in language poetry. The first significant collection of language-centered poetics was the article, "The Politics of the Referent," edited by Steve McCaffery for the Toronto-based publication, Open Letter (1977).
In an essay from the first issue of This, Grenier declared: "I HATE SPEECH". Grenier's ironic statement (itself a speech act), and a questioning attitude to the referentiality of language, became central to language poets. Ron Silliman, in the introduction to his anthology In the American Tree, appealed to a number of young U.S. poets who were dissatisfied with the work of the Black Mountain and Beat poets.
"I HATE SPEECH" — Robert Grenier
"Thus capitalized, these words in an essay entitled "On Speech," the second of five short critical pieces by Robert Grenier in the first issue of This, the magazine he cofounded with Barrett Watten in winter, 1971, announced a breach – and a new moment in American writing.
The range of poetry published that focused on "language" in This,Tottel's,L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and also in several other key publications and essays of the time, established the field of discussion that would emerge as Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry.
During the 1970s, a number of magazines published poets who would become associated with the Language movement. These included A Hundred Posters (edited by Alan Davies), Big Deal,Dog City,Hills,Là Bas,MIAM,Oculist Witnesses,QU, and Roof.Poetics Journal, which published writings in poetics and was edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, appeared from 1982 to 1998. Significant early gatherings of Language writing included Bruce Andrews's selection in Toothpick (1973); Silliman's selection "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets" in Alcheringa, (1975), and Charles Bernstein's "A Language Sampler," in The Paris Review (1982).
Certain poetry reading series, especially in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, were important venues for the performance of this new work, and for the development of dialogue and collaboration among poets. Most important were Ear Inn reading series in New York, founded in 1978 by Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein and later organized through James Sherry's Segue Foundation and curated by Mitch Highfill, Jeanne Lance, Andrew Levy, Rob Fitterman, Laynie Brown, Alan Davies, and The Poetry Society of New York; Folio Books in Washington, D.C., founded by Doug Lang; and the Grand Piano reading series in San Francisco, which was curated by Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Tom Mandel, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Carla Harryman, and Steve Benson at various times.
Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work. It developed in part in response to what poets considered the uncritical use of expressive lyric sentiment among earlier poetry movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, certain groups of poets had followed William Carlos Williams in his use of idiomatic American English rather than what they considered the 'heightened', or overtly poetic language favored by the New Criticism movement. New York School poets like Frank O'Hara and the Black Mountain group emphasized both speech and everyday language in their poetry and poetics.
In contrast, some of the Language poets emphasized metonymy, synecdoche and extreme instances of paratactical structures in their compositions, which, even when employing everyday speech, created a far different texture. The result is often alien and difficult to understand at first glance, which is what Language poetry intends: for the reader to participate in creating the meaning of the poem.[7]
Watten's & Grenier's magazine This (and This Press which Watten edited), along with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, published work by notable Black Mountain poets such as Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner. Silliman considers Language poetry to be a continuation (albeit incorporating a critique) of the earlier movements. Watten has emphasized the discontinuity between the New American poets, whose writing, he argues, privileged self-expression, and the Language poets, who see the poem as a construction in and of language itself. In contrast, Bernstein has emphasized the expressive possibilities of working with constructed, and even found, language.
Gertrude Stein, particularly in her writing after Tender Buttons, and Louis Zukofsky, in his book-length poem A, are the modernist poets who most influenced the Language school. In the postwar period, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and poets of the New York School (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan) and Black Mountain School (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan) are most recognizable as precursors to the Language poets. Many of these poets used procedural methods based on mathematical sequences and other logical organising devices to structure their poetry. This practice proved highly useful to the language group. The application of process, especially at the level of the sentence, was to become the basic tenet of language praxis. Stein's influence was related to her own frequent use of language divorced from reference in her own writings. The language poets also drew on the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially the concepts of language-games, meaning as use, and family resemblance among different uses, as the solution to the Problem of universals.
Ten of the Language poets, each of whom at one time curated the reading series at the San Francisco coffee house of that name, collaborated to write The Grand Piano, "an experiment in collective autobiography" published in ten small volumes. Editing and communication for the collaboration was accomplished over email. Authors of The Grand Piano were Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, Ted Pearson, and Kit Robinson. An eleventh member of the project, Alan Bernheimer, served as an archivist and contributed one essay on the filmmaker Warren Sonbert. The authors of The Grand Piano sought to reconnect their writing practices and to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s."[8][9] Each volume of The Grand Piano features essays by all ten authors in different sequence; often responding to prompts and problems arising from one another's essays in the series.
Some poets, such as Norman Finkelstein, have stressed their own ambiguous relationship to "Language poetry", even after decades of fruitful engagement. Finkelstein, in a discussion with Mark Scroggins about The Grand Piano, points to a "risk" when previously marginalized poets try to write their own literary histories, "not the least of which is a self-regard bordering on narcissism".[10]
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 poetry and prose.
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.
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. She is married to the poet Barrett Watten.
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.
Barrett Watten 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 has taught 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.
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 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.
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".
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.
David Melnick (1938–2022) was a gay avant-garde American poet. He was born in Illinois and grew up in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley.
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).
↑ Michael Greer (Winter/Spring 1989). "Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, the Naming of 'Language Poetry'", boundary 2, vol. 16, no. 2/3, pp. 335–355. See also: Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry;Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry;Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment;Ron Silliman, The New Sentence; and Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems.
Messerli, Douglas, ed. Language Poetries. New York: New Directions, 1987.
Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986; reprint ed. with a new afterword, 2002. An anthology of language poetry that serves as a very useful primer.
Books: Poetics and criticism
Andrews, Bruce. Paradise and Method. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Beach, Christopher, ed. Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998
Bernstein, Charles. Content's Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985
A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992
My Way; Speeches and Poems. University of Chicago Press, 1999
Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. University of Chicago Press, 2011
"Pitch of Poetry." University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Davies, Alan. Signage. New York: Roof Books, 1987.
Friedlander, Ben. Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1988. Rpt, New Directions, 2007.
The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Ratcliffe, Stephen. Listening to Reading. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000
Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992.
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987. An early collection of talks and essays that situates language poetry into contemporary political thought, linguistics, and literary tradition. See esp. section II.
Scalapino, Leslie. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Elmwood: Potes & Poets, 1989.
Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place. Roof Books, 1994.
The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence. Wesleyan University Press, 1999.
How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Litmus Press, 2011.
Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Ward, Geoff. Language Poetry and the American Avant-Garde. Keele: British Association for American Studies, 1993.
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. See esp. chaps. 2 and 3.
Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Perelman, Bob, et al. The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006. ISBN978-0-9790198-0-7. Described as an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. The project will consist of 10 volumes in all.
Piombino, Nick. Fait Accompli. Queens, NY: Factory School, 2006.
Watten, Barrett. Bad History. Berkeley, CA: Atelos | Small Press Distribution, 1998. ISBN978-1-891190-02-5
Articles
Andrews, Bruce, "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E", in The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, ed. Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Available online via Andrew's faculty page at Fordham University: Fordham English Connect.
Bartlett, Lee, "What is 'Language Poetry'?" Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 741–752. Available through JStor.
Bernstein, Charles, "The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," in Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale (London: Routledge, 2012).
Greer, Michael, "Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, the Naming of "Language Poetry," boundary 2, vol. 16, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring, 1989), pp.335–355.
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