Grant Jenkins opens his review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1 [2017]) with an anecdote that has now become canonical lore in American poetry, the encounter between me and Robert Duncan at the San Francisco State Poetry Center’s 1978 Zukofsky memorial. As the story is now forty (4-0) years old, it is more than surprising that it is used to frame a discussion of my 2016 volume of critical poetics, as if no one had ever heard it before:
One of the most infamous events in the history of “postmodern” or “experimental” US poetry is the 1978 argument between Robert Duncan, a veteran of the New American Poetry anthology generation who was 59 at the time, and upstart Barrett Watten, then the 30-year-old self-fashioned cofounder of the more recent school of modernist-inflected verse called “Language poetry.” The incident took place during a film screening at the San Francisco Poetry Center memorializing the “objectivist” poet, Louis Zukofsky, who had recently died at 74. According to most accounts, Duncan interrupted Watten because he did not like the younger poet’s reading of Zukofsky’s poetry.
