Language Poetry and Collective Life

Abstract

132 This essay has benefited from the advice and criticism of many readers. I would like in particular to thank Barrett Watten and Barbara Johnson for their rigorous and generous comments. 1. The literature on Language poetry is now quite large. For an introduction to the poetry, see “Language” Poetries: An Anthology, ed. DouglasMesserli (New York, 1987) and In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono,Me., 1986). For writings that comprise the theoretical arm of Language poetry, see the still valuable L A N G U A G E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale, Ill., 1984). Other useful references (by no means an exhaustive list) include The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Bernstein (New York, 1990); Bernstein,A Poetics (Cambridge,Mass., 1992); Hank Lazer,Opposing Poetries, 2 vols. (Evanston, Ill., 1996); Andrews, Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis (Evanston, Ill., 1996);Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, ed. Peter Baker (New York, 1996); and other works (by Alan Golding, Silliman, BarrettWatten, and Steve McCaffery) cited elsewhere in this essay. Useful secondary sources include Bob Perelman, TheMarginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, N.J., 1996) and the many books of Marjorie Perloff. On the Marxism of the Language poets, see George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Bloomington, Ind., 1989). I am not overly concerned at the outset to provide a single definition for Language poetry, which, as I argue over the course of this essay, is most interesting as a movement performing evasive maneuvers against self-definition. Nor do I address the various terminological debates around Language poetry (L A N G U A G E poetry, Language writing, Language-orientedpoetry, and so on). Despite protestations to the contrary, I do not see that the term chosen has much of an effect on the descriptions or arguments proffered. For reasons of convenience, I use the term Language poetry throughout, although I might simply prepare the reader to note that the move from L A N G U A G E (as both a Language Poetry and Collective Life