Entries published during August, 2025

August 30, 2025

Entry 68: Language Notes II

ENG 5530: Language Writing and Beyond
Wayne State University, Fall 2025

Breaking with custom, I am uploading the syllabus (minus boilerplate and policy) for my “Topics in Poetry” this fall. The reasons are several. Since coming to Wayne State, unlike other major hires of Language writers in the early 90s, I was brought in to teach literature and cultural studies, with my poetry and poetics career a plus but not well understood. Over twenty-five and more years, I crafted a pedagogy designed to bring literature and cultural studies together, and the dissertations I advised reflect that synthesis—while there are several that address modernist and later poetries at a high level of discussion. However, I have never taught a course devoted to my work or literary movement in poetry and poetics per se, and now is the time—again for more than one reason. One, I want this poetry, history, and theory to be as pedagogically known and significant as any other “approach,” at any level of instruction from GenEd (to students in other fields) through the Major and the graduate program—my teaching at three levels as has usually been the case. Then, it is time for an overview of Language writing that takes into account not only its emergence but the controversies and reception issues it produced, followed by its academic reception and gradual departure from the academy, and finally with the evidence of the strong new work that has appeared, from every major figure, since the Millennium. Lyn Hejinian’s death in 2024 is also a turning point: while her work was always written prospectively and toward its continuing, we may now compare her lifelong project—Beginnings, Middles, and Ends at once—to other authors who may be read in that way: Stein, Zukofsky, Riding, Creeley, Hughes, Baraka and so on. Retrospection is one aspect of that reading, but also a careful attention to the values of time, memory, historicity and everyday life in her project. Given many aspects of her uniqueness, constructing comparative frameworks must now also be undertaken across the board: with the original figures, the controversial history, the emergence of new schools and writers where there is variously a connection to an overarching focus on Language as site of meaning making.

Herewith the provisional syllabus, as always a working document that may be cut back or amended as the course unfolds, with many authors and issues overly condensed or regrettably left out. Sixteen sessions, or eighteen, would do more justice, but fourteen 2½-hour classes is what we are given. So forth: … More

August 27, 2025

Document 108: Global Poetics

“Particularity, Nonnarrative, and Global Poetics:
Critical Regions of Cultural Transmission”

CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY OCTOBER 2, 12:00 P.M. PST

American Comparative Literature Association
Palais des congrès de Montréal
February 26–March 1, 2026 /submit proposal here … More

August 15, 2025

Entry 67: Language Notes

This fall, I continue an adventure of some 50 years with the literary movement with which I am associated, Language writing, once so-called and now so inscribed. ENG 5530 is a dedicated “Topics in Poetry” course, addressing students at all levels at Wayne State University. For some, this will be a first encounter with poetry; others are already writing in ways identified by their teachers as “aha! Language writing!”; and others are taking a literature or creative writing elective with, hopefully, open minds and interest. I want to approach the topic with new eyes and ears, and thus have not given much thought as the opening of school approaches to how, precisely, I will proceed. In moving forward, I will be retrospectively assembling a curriculum but not in any linear fashion—that end has already taken place. How then to redefine, redeploy, rethink Language writing while constructing the course of study that opens new issues and opportunities?

My first thought was to provide a useful historical background, summarizing the “tale of the tribe” without dwelling on it. One divergence from the canonical narrative already appears—as Language writing gathered momentum and a degree of institutional recognition, there was a kind of mimicry of the Pound tradition and its “tale of the tribe,” a concept that is in need of historical and cultural correction. “Tribe” is not an auspicious term, for example, and the fact that there might be one “tale” that would hold it together even less so. The Orono conferences, importantly, were the site for a shift from the Pound model to an increasing pluralism, that over the decades (30s, 50s, 60s, 40s, and 70s) had increasingly to do with departing from a single narrative. Still, some kind of historical or periodizing ground is needed.

The best source I know for that was a series of online essays by Eleana Kim, written in 1994 and published on Gary Sullivan’s web site Readme, which is no longer online. Nada Gordon, however, has archived the series on the Wayback machine and I was able to download and pdf the series, with the addition of the bibliography from Nada directly. I have assumed that Kim is the same person as the UC Irvine Professor of Anthropology (here), but that needs to be confirmed. If so, she likely wrote the history as a graduate student, as she began publishing in Korean Studies about 2000. I suspect there is a connection, however, as the account of Language writing has a political awareness, sense of inclusion and exclusion, and critical astuteness about dominant narratives that could well connect to a cultural anthropologist. When that is determined I will repost, but this stands for one of the questions that now could be asked as the course unfolds: Why did Eleana Kim write on Language writing, and what does she think now? How did this very well written, politically savvy narrative become forgotten and erased, and why?

Eleana Kim, “Language Poetry: Dissident Practices
and the Makings of a Movement”

Note to the archived publication: “This essay was written in 1994 and, with the exception of minor editing for clarity, has not been rewritten. It does not, in other words, take into account material published in the years since.”

Part 1: “What is Language Poetry?” here

Part 2: “Tradition and Communal Praxis” here

Part 3: “San Francisco, circa 1975” here

Part 4: “Theory, What Theory?” here

Part 5: “Rumor in the House of Fame” here

Part 6: “The New Americans vs. the Treed Americans” here

Part 7: “Inclusions” here

Part 8: Bibliography here

Bear in mind that this was written in 1994; thus the bibliography is out of date. It would be important, first, to establish a 90s bibliography, but even more to track the works that have appeared since the millennium. That body of work could lead to an entirely different narrative. As well, the emergence of two immediate offshoots of Language writing, Flarf and conceptual writing; the influence of Language writing on poets of color; its relation to New Narrative, hybrid writing, disability aesthetics, digital writing and AI—all would need to be taken into account, which is precisely what I plan to do over the next fourteen weeks. Stay tuned for more posts as decisions get made on what to read and feedback happens on how that reading takes shape.