'What about all this writing?': Williams and alternative poetics

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Linguistic self-reflectiveness; attention to the materiality of written language; the self as constructed in and by language; a cultural politics of oppositionality, including opposition to 'literature'; a Marinetti-like view of words in freedom, allied to the embrace of readerly freedom; the problematics of signification; generic hybridity enacted through various forms of disjunction and parataxis: these were central attributes of William Carlos Williams' writing and thinking about writing. Taking its examples from the Language school and from other post-Objectivist and post- New American poets, this essay examines the importance of these aspects of Williams' work for a later generation of experimental writers.