Language Poetry

 

The Language Poets 

BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL on JULY 10, 2020 • ( 0 )

The writers who emerged in the 1970s and have been identified variously as “Language poets,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets” and “so-called Language poets” generally conceive of themselves less as a movement or school than as a loosely knit community of writers who, with a particular intensity from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, cultivated their own means of literary production and engaged critically in each others’ work. Although a diversity of formal and thematic concerns characterize the writings of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Tina Darragh, Ray Di Palma, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, P. Inman, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, and Hannah Weiner (just a few of the many Language writers who could be listed), in general, these writers may be said to view lived experience more as a construction of language than as a transparent reflection of it. Language writing extends the tradition of avant-garde poetry exemplified by Donald Allen’s groundbreaking 1960 anthology New American Poetry: 1945–1960, which cast a number of poetic groupings (BLACK MOUNTAIN, NEW YORK SCHOOL, BEATS, SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE) decidedly against the mainstream, or “academic,” verse of the time. Language writing also revisits the work of neglected modernists (Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Velimir Xlebniko, among others) and is often informed by Russian formalist and French poststructuralist theories of language and ideology. Additionally the civil rights and free speech movements, along with the protests against the U.S. engagement in the Vietnam War, provided a stimulus for many of these writers.

While the Allen anthology delineated the major tendencies in avant-garde poetry for several generations of poets nurtured on modernists, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, other tendencies emerged on the 1960s cultural landscape that Allen could not have anticipated. The work of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson became syntactically freer. Ted Berrigan led a second generation of New York school poets by using a variety of collage techniques in his sonnets that picked up where John Ashbery’s “Europe” and Frank O’hara’s “Biotherm” left off. Objectivist poets from the 1930s either returned to writing poetry (George Oppen) or garnered attention after years of neglect (Zukofsky). Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies reasserted the importance of neglected modernists and poetries from cultures previously dismissed as “primitive”. Something Else Press, founded by Dick Higgins in the wake of the antiart movement Fluxus, included reprints of important works by Stein (The Making of Americans [1966], Geography and Plays [1968]), and Lucy Church Amiably [1969]) in its catalogue. John CAGE and Jackson Mac Low introduced chance-based compositional procedures into music and writing, while performance art, free jazz, and the feminist and Black Arts Movementsalso began to flourish. Such interests worked their way into poetry journals and little magazines, such as Caterpillar (edited by Clayton Eshleman), Joglars (edited by Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer, immediate precursors of Language writing who have generally distanced themselves from group alignments), and 0 to 9 (edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, whose workshops at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the early 1970s were attended by several Language writers). One issue of Toothpick, Lisbon and the Orcas Islands, edited by Andrews and Michael Wiater (fall 1973), contained work by a number of writers who would by the end of the decade be known as “Language poets.”

Charles Bernstein

In 1971, Grenier and Watten launched This magazine out of Iowa City, home of the country’s first creative writing M.F.A. program (the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and thus a mainstream poetry establishment through which a number of avant-garde dissidents had passed. This 1 (winter 1971) featured a cluster of review-essays by Grenier, whose declaration “I HATE SPEECH” signaled an all-caps challenge to a projective verse rooted in speech and the breath, while the issue also contained an homage to the recently deceased Olson. Claiming “I want writing what is thought / where feeling is / words are born” (qtd. in Silliman “American” 497), Grenier proposed a poetry of attention to language less as a way to refer to the world and more as a fact of experience in its own right. He also applied such attention to critical writing: His own review of Stein’s Lectures in America consisted of 14 quotations from her book, one quotation from Creeley, and only five lines of his own commentary— essentially letting her work speak for itself.