Language as Politics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry

Abstract

During the 1970s a new mode of avant-garde practice, language writing, emerged as a reaction to what was perceived as the “cookie-cutter” workshop poem propagated in MFA programs. Though generally characterized by antiexpressionist values (e.g., nonlinear syntax, agrammatical structures, and the demotion of semantic coherence), language writing was initially a loose coalition of writers practicing outside the MFA workshop models prevalent in academia. However, as language writing began to crystallize around social formations (the high school and college friendships among the key language writers Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman), political values (the expansion of antiwar protests against the Vietnam conflict into Marxist critiques of capitalist imperialism and colonialism), and militant aesthetics (the “turn to language”), the movement was criticized by different camps of poets and critics. Representing both “mainstream” poetics associated with academia and “marginal” poetics associated with racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, these poets and critics viewed the “turn to language,” on the one hand, as a turning away from traditional poetic values and, on the other hand, as an abandonment of social and cultural crises whose urgency seemed to demand the most transparent, direct, and accessible language. While the poetics (and to a lesser extent, the politics) of San Francisco poets like Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robin Blaser set important precedents for the language writers, the latter understood their practice as something more than just a return to, and extension of, the 1950s and 1960s Cold War anarchist politics of the Beat writers. The turn also represented a reconception of the relationship between politics and poetics at the height of the Vietnam conflict, which for many of the language writers represented another stage of the Cold War. Theorizing that anarchism tended to dovetail with American individualism, as evident in the “do your own thing” philosophy of hippie gurus like Timothy Leary, Watten and Silliman, in particular, widely considered the cofounders of language writing, reached beyond the Beats in order to rehabilitate the experimental writings and Marxist politics of, among others, the Objectivist poets, who had started writing and publishing in the 1930s. Louis Zukofsky’s and George Oppen’s combination of innovative writing and social critique made them especially significant to Watten and Silliman. Thus the more linear narrative forms deployed by Objectivists such as Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and Lorine Niedecker led to their relative neglect by Watten and Silliman despite their avowal of leftist politics. And while the Objectivists interrogated their alienation from mainstream America as a function, in part, of covert (when not overt) anti-Semitism, the language writers, by and large, ignored or marginalized this aspect of their precursors’ experiences, blind spots replicated in relationship to the racial, gender, and sexual orientation upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s.