‘A foot in both camps’: Michael Sappol’s Personal Injury, the New York School, and Language poetry before L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E

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ABSTRACT From 1975 through 1978, Michael Sappol’s little magazine Personal Injury proposed a remarkable moment of possibility in which writing by Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, Lynne Dreyer, P. Inman and Tina Darragh (all of whom would be included in Language poetry publications including Ron Silliman’s breakthrough anthology In the American Tree (1986)) jostled amiably alongside writing by New York School-affiliated poets including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Harris Schiff, and Eileen Myles. Personal Injury showed a little magazine’s ability to productively trouble and push back against critics’ efforts to neatly organise poets into ‘generations’ and/or ‘schools.’ As I will show, Personal Injury predicted a literary-historical future that drew dividing lines between the quotidian affect of poets such as Berrigan and Schiff and the theoretically informed texts of writers including Inman and Darragh and messed that future up before it happened. Personal Injury, I argue, stands as a preemptive and fun refusal of literary classifications, revealing networks of influence and congruence among writers who are now defined distinctly as Language or New York School poets.