Language poets

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The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name) are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s; its central figures are all actively writing, teaching, and performing their work today. In developing their poetics, members of the Language school took as their starting point the emphasis on method evident in the modernist tradition, particularly as represented by Gertrude Stein, the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky and John Cage. Language poetry is also an example of poetic postmodernism. Its immediate postmodern precursors were the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance.

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Overview

While there is no such thing as a "typical" Language Poem, certain aspects of the writing of language poets became heavily identified with this group: writing that actively challenged the "natural" presence of a speaker behind the text; writing that emphasized disjunction and the materiality of the signifier; and prose poetry, especially in longer forms than had previously been favored by English language writers, and other nontraditional and usually nonnarrative forms.

Language poetry has been a controversial topic in American letters from the 1970s to the present. Even the name itself has been controversial: while a number of critics have used the name of the journal to refer to the group, most poets involved with the group have chosen to use the term, when they used it at all, without the equals signs. Discussions of the politics of the name may be found in Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, and Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment. 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.

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Early history of language poetry

The seed of language poetry was the launch of This magazine, edited by Robert Grenier and Watten, in 1971. In an essay from the first issue, Grenier declared "I HATE SPEECH." This statement, in the context of the essay in which it occurred, along with a questioning attitude to the referentiality of language evidenced even in the magazine's title, was later claimed by Ron Silliman, in the introduction to his anthology In the American Tree, as an epochal moment--a rallying cry for a number of young U.S. poets who were increasingly dissatisfied with the poetry of the Black Mountain poets and Beat poets. However, it was equally the range of contemporary poetries that focused on "language" in the first issue of This, rather than a single declarative sentence, that established the consensus that would develop into a school of poetry.

During the 1970s, a number of other magazines emerged who published poets under the language banner, most notably L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, which ran to 13 issues between 1978 and 1980 and which featured forums on writers in the movement, writings in poetics, and themes such as "The Politics of Poetry" and "Reading Stein." Some other literary magazines associated with the movement in the 1970s and 1980s included A Hundred Posters, Big Deal, Dog City, Hills, Là Bas, 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.

Other poets associated with the first wave of the Language school include: Rae Armantrout, Abigail Child, Clark Coolidge, Tina Darragh, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, P. Inman, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Jackson Mac Low, Tom Mandel, Bernadette Mayer, Steve McCaffery, Michael Palmer, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino, Joan Retallack, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, and Hannah Weiner. This list accurately reflects the high proportion of female poets among the Language movement.<ref>Template:Cite</ref> African-American poets associated with the movement include Erica Hunt and Harryette Mullen.

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Poetics

Language poetry attempts to emphasize the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a text and came about as a reaction to the use of everyday American English among earlier poetry movements which the Language poets felt a kinship to. In the 1950's and 60s 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. In particular New York School poets like Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara and The Black Mountain group emphasized everyday language about everyday occurences in their poetry and poetics. To break with that technique, the Language poets emphasized metonymy, lyricism, synechdoche and extreme instances of paratactical structures in their compositions. 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.

With reference to earlier poetry movements, it would be important to note that both This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published work by notable Black Mountain poets such as Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner. Ron Silliman, who emerged as one of the more vocal of the Language poets in the early 21st century, considers Language poetry to be a continuation of the earlier movements. Watten, however, has emphasized the discontinuity between the New American poets, whose writing privileged self-expression however mediated through language, and the Language poets, who tend to deprivilege expression and see the poem as a construction in and of language itself.

Gertrude Stein, particularly in her writing after Tender Buttons, and Louis Zukofsky, in his book-length poem "A," are the modernist poets most influential on 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, and 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. The influence of Stein came from the fact that she was a writer who had frequently used 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 being the solution to the Problem of universals.

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Language Poetry now

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Language poetry was widely received as a significant movement in innovative poetry in the U.S., a trend accentuated by the fact that some of its leading proponents took up academic posts in the Poetics, Creative Writing and English Literature departments in prominent universities (University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Buffalo, Wayne State University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Diego, University of Maine, the Iowa Writers Workshop).Template:Fact Language poetry also developed affiliations with literary scenes outside the States, notably France and the USSR. It had a particularly interesting relation to the UK avant-garde: in the 1970s and 1980s there were extensive contacts between American language poets and veteran UK writers like Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher, or younger figures such as cris cheek and Ken Edwards (whose magazine Reality Studios was instrumental in the transatlantic dialogue between American and UK avant-gardes).

Other artists, such as J.H. Prynne and those associated with the so-called "Cambridge" poetry scene (Rod Mengham, Peter Riley) were more skeptical about language poetry and its associated polemics and theoretical documents.

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Notes

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See also

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Further reading

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Anthologies

  • Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
  • Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1994.
  • 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.
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Books: Poetics and Criticism

  • 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.
  • Huk, Romana, ed. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
  • Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Articles

  • Barlett, Lee, "What is 'Language Poetry'?" Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 741-752. Available through JStor.
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External links

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