FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE!
NOT THIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
BY BARRETT WATTEN
MOSCOW: POLYPHEM, 2024
[for Russian text, click here]
Polyphem, an independent press in Moscow, announces publication of a comprehensive, bilingual edition of the writings of Barrett Watten.
The works, chosen by editor Vladimir Feshchenko, extend from his first collection (Opera—Works, 1975) to the unpublished “Notzeit,” written during COVID (2020).
The selection represents the author’s “turn to language” in the 1970s, his development of hybrid genres and longer forms, and his critique of distorted social communication.
Major serial and long poems such as “Plasma,” “Compete Thought,” “Under Erasure,” “Zone,” “Plan B,” and “Notzeit” are translated in their entirety; for Table of Contents, click here.
The translators are ten notable poets and scholars: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Mikhail Khazin, from the Leningrad Summer School in 1989, Alexander Skidan and Anna Glazova, from the Dragomoshchenko Prize in 2016; and recent translators: Ruslan Mironov, Liza Kheresh, Ekaterina Zakarkhiv, Stanslav Snitko, Olga Sokolova, and Vladimir Feshchenko.
426 pp., perfect bound, bilingual; cover by Andrei Cherkasov.
Publisher’s biographical note
[for Russian text, click here]
Barrett Watten (b. 1948) is an American poet and critic who was at the origin of “Language writing” in the United States and is active in poetry today.
Many of his texts are built on the non-identity of form and content. They resist the poetry of narrative coherence and communicative ease.
The poetic text is constructed and reads as a linguo-poetic experiment—with its semi-artificial sentences and a semantics of constant shifts of focus.
In these shifts, the reader can discern the operation of a purely poetic function of language, where the message turns on itself and generates extraordinary meanings.
Such writing amounts to a kind of “critical poetics,” realizing the principles of critical theory by means of poetic effects.
Inheriting the influence of Russian formalism, among others, Watten proposes a poetics of “social formalism.” Instead of meaning and content being emptied out and remaining the same in everyday life, the social is reanimated in and realized through its poetic forms.
This edition publishes for the first time in Russian and English an extensive selection of the author’s works, from his earliest book Opera—Works in 1975 to the recent poem “Notzeit.”
To order:
[for Russian text, click here]
Not This: Selected Writings will be available from the publisher in Russia (https://t.me/polifempublishing) and at the following bookstores: WordOrder (https://wordorder.ru); Falanster (https://falanster.ru); and Ozon (https://www.ozon.ru).
It can be ordered outside Russia from Interbok.se and shipped from Sweden (see www.interbok.se or write info@interbox.se); review copies and orders can be obtained directly from the author (“This Direct” at www.barrettwatten.net or barrett.watten@gmail.com); availability updated here.
For more information:
Barrett Watten / barrett.watten@gmail.com
Facebook or @thisdirect.bksy.social
https://barrettwatten.net
https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/ad6155
