L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E '79

Steve McCaffrey, 1979: "The fight for language is a political fight." [Source: PDF and eclipse.]

are you writing poems?

During a LINEbreak show, hosted by Charles Bernstein in New York in 1995, Bruce Andrews was asked: "Do you think of yourself as writing poems?" Here was his answer:

That's an interesting question. I do now. I guess when I started, I started writing in the 1969-1970 period, I thought of it as a kind of literary writing or experimental work in writing, more than I thought of it as poetry. Poetry I think of now as an institutional designation, so as soon as I began publishing and getting in touch with other writers, it was clear that any future for anything I did or anything they were doing was going to be under the category of poetry as defined by other people. So, over the years I've just accepted that.

I remember, for instance, when the term 'language poetry' started getting thrown around, and my original nervousness about the term stemmed mostly from the P word rather than from the L word. You know, that I thought of it as language writing, a term that I wasn't all that displeased with, because it suggested almost a new genre or a new sub-genre possibility that hadn't yet been defined, so that it would be a type of writing that had the certain way of foregrounding the way meaning was produced and operated on in a social world, rather than language poetry, which then implies that language is the adjective referring to a sub-category of what we already think of as poetry.

Here is an audio recording of the LINEbreak show featuring Bruce Andrews.

they're more delicious this way

not to enclose, but to move within

I've made available a several-page excerpt from George Hartley's book on language poetry. This is the passage in which he outlines modernist influences: Dickinson, Stein, Ashbery, Williams, and Zukofsky. I chose a section that focuses particularly on Steinian and Ashberyian elements of the movement. On Stein:

Stein's importance for them appears to lie in the following qualities of her work:

1. Although her work appears to be meaningless, it does have meaning; in fact, it seems to be an exploration of the very conditions for meaning.

2. Meaning is not forwarded as something existing out in the world but as an interaction between subject and object.

3. Her work appears to operate under the assumptions of the Saussurean conception of meaning as a function of a system of difference.

4. She does not write in order to enclose (define, delimit, decipher) the world but to move within it; in other words, she does not function according to the static determinism of the noun but through the process of relationship.

5. Her foregrounding of the material side of language (sound, rhythm, syntax) is a formal analogy of the process of perception--the "movement 'spreading' from transparency . . . to the implied darkness & opacity of blindness."

on the brink of fetish

Poetry is an art of constitution. Not only plastic "composition." But not a graceful maneuvering of representations or descriptions or stories or denotations, all of which teeter precariously on the brink of fetish. - Bruce Andrews, "Constitution/Writing" (1981)

It turns out that people can't hear words in isolation very well. - Bob Perelman in "Sense"

Andrews: Open Letter 5th ser. 1 (winter 1982): 154-165. Perelman: "Sense" in Writing/Talks, p. 76.

reference, like the body itself...

In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews wrote that:

[C]onfusion about the nature of this exploration flourishes. For instance, the idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one-on-one, to an already constructed world of "things." Rather, reference, like the body itself [and there, again, is the body, the "plan"], is one of the horizons of language. . . . It is the multiple powers and scope of reference (denotative, connotative, associational), not writers' refusal or fear of it, that threads these essays together. It is a renewed engagement that comes from the recognition that the (various) measuring and questioning and composition of our references is the practice of our craft.

the Williams who torques sentences

The William Carlos Williams that motivated a young Robert Creeley was The Wedge of 1944. For Ron Silliman and--he suspects--others among those who "became known as Language Poet[s]"--the key Williams was to be found in Spring & All (1923). They found it in the 1970 Frontier Press edition.

Silliman believes that one of the important distinctions between the Language Poets and earlier avant-garde generations was their "different reading" of Williams - their Spring & All-centered reading of him.

As Ron prepared to participate in a 1999 symposium I hosted at the Writers House on contemporary poetry, I asked him about his WCW, and this is how he responded:

[S]omething Robert Creeley said at his reading in Camden recently [November 1999] made me conscious once again of how radically different the different generations will read certain poets. For Creeley, the important Williams was his 1944 book, The Wedge, and what mattered to Creeley was seeing how much the work was driven by (his word) "anger."

Now Williams had a huge impact on me -- it was discovering The Desert Music when I was 16 that made me realize that poetry was the form/genre/tradition that would allow me to do what I wanted to as a writer. But it was Spring & All that would be for me (and I suspect for many others of "my" generation) become the defining WCW text, coming as it did into print for us only with the 1970 Frontier Press edition. Similarly, I have always been struck by how there seems to be one Louis Zukofsky who exists for poets only a few years my senior (John Taggart or the late Ronald Johnson, say) and another for "my generation." One of the real distinctions of what became known as Language Poetry would be this different reading of these two writers.

In George Hartley's book about the development of the so-called language poetry, he has a chapter on modernist influences. "Williams writes words and sentences that continually drift between materiality and transparency," notes Hartley. In WCW Hartley finds "the 'torquing' of sentences that Silliman values," and he quotes from that early Williams:

Will you bring her here? Perhaps---and when we meet on the stair, shall we speak, say it is some acquaintance---or pass silent? Well, a jest's a jest but how poor this tea is. Think of a life in this place, here in these hills by these truck farms. Whose life? Why there, back of you. if a woman laughs a little loudly one always thinks that way of her. But how she bedizens the country-side. Quite an old world glamour. if it were not for-but one cannot have everything. What poor tea it was. How cold it's grown.

iconoclasm and its discontents

Here is the first paragraph of Bob Perelman's old article "Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center)":

Not many days after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the New York Times ran an article discussing the structure of the building and the possibilities of its being brought down by a larger and more thoughtfully placed explosion. It turns out not to be easy: apparently, each tower is built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded jet liner taking off. In addition to the strength of the structure, attackers would have to confront its complexity: there are twenty-one load- bearing pillars and they could not be reached simultaneously by the force of an explosion. In being destroyed, a particular section would in fact shield other areas by absorbing the impact. The timing and placement of the article is interesting in itself: it was a rapid-response anodyne to the spiral of geopolitical urban trauma while at the same time, under the cover of a discussion of engineering, it invited its readers to participate in transgressive calculations of how the Trade Center towers might actually be brought down.

Just a bit more of this article can be read here. The link to Bob Perelman's own home page seems to have broken in the years since I first excerpted the article for my students. Not sure why. I'll ask Bob.

can't be for or against narrative

In "Toy Boats" Carla Harryman argues that narrative is not something to believe in but something that is there. So we do things with it. In a way this was a rejoinder to all the anti-narrative posturing of her colleagues and contemporaries, but it is at the same time a piece written in the revolutionary-manifesto spirit of those who thus postured.

Here's the opening of "Toy Boats":

The enemies of narrative are those who believe in it and those who deny it. Both belief and denial throw existence into question. Narrative exists, and arguments either for or against it are false. Narrative is a ping-pong ball among blind spots when considered in the light of its advantages and defects.

Narrative holds within its boundaries both its advantages and defects. It can demonstrate its own development as it mutates throughout history. This is its great advantage. I.e., in accomplishing its mutability, it achieves an ongoing existence.

Narrative might be thought to be a character and its defects lie in his "potential to observe his own practice of making falsehoods." If this narrative is imitating anything, its intention is to convince the audience to enjoy the imitation, whatever its lack of truth or reasonableness.

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he's plainly & simply thankful for friends

In a Thanksgiving-inspired blog entry, Ron Silliman gives thanks for the close friends who poetically came of age with him in the Bay area and who are now collaborating on a multi-authored, multi-volume collective autobiography, The Grand Piano. Just now I read Mark Scroggins' "Culture Industry" entry on the GP. He quotes Joe Strummer offering via lyrics a "pretty unanswerable summary of the institutional absorption of the subversive margins" and that is his topic, although on balance he is a critic of those who criticize the GP authors on these grounds. He reminds us that "[i]t’s of course an old move to point to how many prominent Language Poets...have moved into the academy." He says we must allow a measure of narcissism in the project.

And how could one not, since it's the nature of autobiography that it...well...be about the person or people whose lives and work it's about. I suppose one standard for evaluating its success is the extent to which reading it makes one think about that apparently generic aboutness. On this score, I would say that it succeeds quite well.

But back to narcissism. What surprised Scroggins is "how little space was given over to assertions of the innovativeness, the subversiveness, the sheer importance of Language writing" (in at least the first volume of the work).

I am fascinated by the response to GP and suggest a few links:

[] James Sherry's review
[] Barry Watten on how GP is being written
[] Andy Gricevich's blogged response to volume 4
[] the main GP site