ENG 5530, “Language Writing and Beyond,” has now passed the halfway mark. Organizing the vast amount of material is one thing, but the challenge of teaching Language writing at this historical date—50 years after the first emergent activity—involves rethinking its (non)narrative, its “author function”, its categories, its forms, its values, its politics, what is revealed and concealed, and what comes next. To summarize this pedagogical work of framing, I devised a midterm exam that students understood was, to begin with, an assemblage of the work done so far. Here I want to make this intellectual labor, in the context of an advanced upper division “Topics” course at Wayne State University, available to the field. I believe strongly a revision is necessary and in the works, and that the “usual” account has long since outlived its opening rationale for our work of literary production and reception, and that much needs to be recovered. What emerges, decisively, is that Language writing was in no sense a “period style,” a combine of, say, open form plus material textuality after the New Americans or collage-driven abstraction as a “turn to language” with the New York School—or really, any of a dozen major influences, from modernism and Conceptual Art and to the politics and artist spaces of the 70s.
Language writing was, and continues to be, an event—and that is the (non)narrative I am working to present, over 14 weeks in the form of teachable survey but moving from there to call for new frames and approaches, or better a rethinking of the relations between them. Our discussion began with work by David Melnick (1938–2022) and Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), in both cases biographical destiny now assured. The publication of Nice: Collected Poems locates Melnick’s early work as a punctual moment of early Language writing, if not a point of origin as there many. On the other hand, Hejinian’s work, with the imminent appearance of perhaps her last major work, Lola the Interpreter, involves every negotiation of historical horizon—to the point of an allegorical horizon, in her sense. Thus I began with the two poets and extended the discussion, on the one hand, through the linguistic/literary theory that is immediately suggested by the language-centeredness of Pcoet, and then the formal and procedural aspects of Hejinian’s continuing unfolding and thus challenge to meaning. From there, I contrasted four early Language writers (or proto- in two cases), whose work involves durational processes and punctual challenges: Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, and Robert Grenier. Think of their work—and forms of authorship—as four points on a Greimasian rectangle: what could be generated from that? To pursue these comparisons, I brought in two radically opposed monuments of language philosophy, Wittgenstein (a ten-page handout of the opening of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations) and Heideggger (“The Way to Language”). Even a minimal set of terms from either was more than enough to populate distinctions and identify differences. I also found useful articles by Alan Golding, on William Carlos Williams as an “influence” (though much pressure has recently been applied to that term) and Ondrea Ackerman, on Grenier’s handwritten poems—which became an item of interest in the class, adding to the first inscribed first edition of Sentences that I brought to show. Lilian Chaitas’s theoretical account of position taking (after Bourdieu) and the antagonism of groups and schools proved highly suggestive, in Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes (a German American Studies monograph difficult to obtain but essential in my view). Her channeling of debates over American realism/modernism, the “Raw” and the “Cooked,” immediately suggested the antagonistic moment of Olson’s “closed” and “open” forms, Hejinian’s reorientation of them as interpretive practices, and finally the rawness of Grenier’s drawings.
It would not be my class, either, if I did not throw some curve balls. These can be seen in the first two prompts, which I deliberately saw as either unanswerable or equally answerable in any number of ways. There is no right answer: let’s get over that. The responses were all interesting: it was clear everyone got the joke but many still took the challenge and did some second-order thinking before they moved on to the longer questions. In some cases, there was a serious effort to include or exclude the “wrong” answer (little support for “langpo” unless all the boxes were ticked). Some responses developed a weighted account of each name and term, each to varying degrees. These trick questions opened the discussion to the next major topic: the name of the movement and its bicoastal formations: this is where we are at present, looking at readings, artspaces, publications in San Francisco and New York, and the decisive moment of Language writing as an event that hardwires its formal strategies to unfolding history. My approach, I hope it is clear, is the opposite of an assemblage of documents (online archives, MOOCs, albeit useful) but a reenactment.
The exam
1] Below are some terms that have been used for our course topic. Which is correct?
[ ] language-centered writing [ ] language poetry
[ ] L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ? [ ] Language writing
[ ] so-called language poetry [ ] Langpo2] The most important principles of “Language writing” are:
[ ] nonreferentiality [ ] lack of images or metaphor
[ ] “I hate speech” [ ] “the word as such”
[ ] the rejection of closure [ ] we need a search engine
[ ] a technique or method [ ] New Sentence/nonnarrative
[ ] signifier without signified [ ] the death of the author
[ ] relentless ambiguity [ ] sounds and scribbling
[ ] utopian community [ ] subjectivity and desire3] Our first text of Language writing was Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties. What did you experience and learn as a new reader of Language writing when encountering this text? Was your reading immersive, close, distant, surface, literal or “meta,” slow or fast, frustrated or pleasurable? How might you read through a “filter” in which you draw out and connect themes that develop through the work? What themes might you notice? What did the “topic” epigraphs to each section suggest as a way to read the text; what did their repetition do for the build-up of “meaning”? How did the experience of reading change from the 45-line sections (age 45) versus the 60-line sections (age 60)? Give an account of three different aspects of the experience of reading My Life in order to understand “how it works.”
4] Lyn Hejinian’s essay “What’s Missing from My Life” (Grand Piano 9; expanded in Allegorical Moments) to begin with, distinguishes between memory and history. She wonders, What could a child of nine years old (the age her granddaughter was at the time) know or remember of the present as historical? Lyn then looks at newspapers from the year when she turned nine (1950) to see what she was aware or unaware of at that age, and what of it entered into her recollections for My Life. She also talks about the “family romance” of the Governor of California, and how that perhaps shaped her sense of a “typical” girlhood (which she may not have been conscious of). What was missing from her writing; what did she learn from looking at the historical record in the newspapers; how do you connect the two aspects of her experience (or are they still separate)?
5] Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” was a major essay on the poetics of Language writing (Guide to Poetics Journal; The Language of Inquiry). How did it comment on, continue, modify the New American distinction (in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse”) between “open” and “closed” forms; what is similar, what different? Does Hejinian gender the open forms of writing she advocates; why or why not? How does her essay connect to the other examples, both in Guide to Poetics Journal, of the theory and practice of “open” forms: George Lakoff’s essay “Continuous Reframing” and Steve Benson’s performance “Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings”?
6] Alan Golding’s essay “‘What about all this writing’: Williams and Alternate Poetics” (Writing Into the Future) details numerous ways the experimental approach of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All influenced Language writing and the turn to the language. Pick two passages from the work and discuss how they might have been influential on the later avant-garde movement. Williams strongly distinguished poetry, as “new form dealt with as reality in itself,” from prose, which he characterized as mere states of mind, details of everyday life, not the thing itself. Golding also shows how women writers were influenced by Williams, perhaps in different ways than their male peers. Give examples of Williams’s influence on Language writers.
7] Vladimir Feshchenko’s chapter (“Language Writing: American and Russian Poetic Transfers”; Russian and American Poetry of Experiment: The Linguistic Avant-Garde) shows numerous points of contact between the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s/20s and contemporary Language writers. One was the use of the theories of Russian Formalism and concepts such as defamiliarization, foregrounding, the semantic shift, stepwise unfolding. Another was the work of poets who wanted to separate the signifier from the signified, a basic premise of structuralist linguistics after Saussure’s work, and emphasized the pure sound or graphic aspects of poetry more than reference or “meaning.” Give two examples of the influence of the formalist theory on Language writing. How do writers like early Clark Coolidge (in Space) or David Melnick (in Pcoet) compare with poets of the Russian avant-garde like Velimir Khlebnikov or Alexei Kruchyonyk (note: this will take an internet search, but it will not be hard to find good examples).
8] We watched a clip from an interview with Clark Coolidge (PennSound, s.v. “Coolidge”), where he says he is a “process guy” who wants to go wherever the writing takes him, and listened briefly to the opening of the “longwork” he began in the 70s (published as A Book Beginning What and Ending Away and read over seven nights at 80 Langton Street). We also encountered two other long, open-ended works: Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, which doubles the length of paragraphs every section, and Hejinian’s My Life, which adds one more line for every year of her age. We could also see Robert Grenier’s Sentences as a vast work, as it was published as 500 index cards. How would you compare the poetics, artistic goals, experience for the reader, and finally success of these very long texts. Why did early Language writers want to “go long”?
9] Marjorie Perloff’s article “Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) shows how Wittgenstein’s approach to language and meaning, as well as the form of writing, could have influenced a number of writers. We have looked briefly at early Wittgenstein, where he is attempting a “logical description of the world” in which “the world is everything that is the case”; but also the later Wittgenstein, who pursues an open investigation into language and meaning that often focuses on unresolvable ambiguity, as illustrated in the “rabbit/duck” drawing. Show how Wittgenstein’s concerns might be observed in Robert Creeley in Pieces; or Michael Palmer, in Notes for Echo Lake; or Coolidge, in The Maintains; or Grenier, in Sentences.
10] Lilian Chaitas (Being Different, sections 5.2–3). discusses dichotomies in poetic styles, groups, and movements in the distinctions PF and RS (to avoid spelling out these out-of-date terms, I recommend abbreviations); raw and cooked; open and closed; and by extension embodied or linguistic. We have looked at four poets in these terms (Coolidge, Palmer, Silliman, Grenier): pick at least two and show either how one element of the dichotomy predominates or both elements are present at the same time. How do these terms help comprehend the field of possibles that their work explores, both inside and outside it. How might antagonism be the result?
11] Heidegger’s “The Way to Language” (On the Way to Language) is a philosophical discussion of Language as kind of “saying” that is the ultimate guarantor of being “human.” In his formulation, “Language is the house of being.” At the end of his essay, he distinguishes between a “saying” that is authentic and well formed as a result (Gestalt) versus language that is merely a technical medium for communication (Gestell). Apply these terms to Grenier’s writing: his very short poems in Sentences and his drawing poems, as discussed in Ondrea Ackerman’s essay (“Wandering Lines: Robert Grenier’s Drawing Poems”). If Heidegger says Language is basically “speech” or “saying,” what does that mean for Grenier’s famous one-liner “I hate speech”? You could also contrast Grenier with Silliman, who is much more friendly to inauthentic or technological language.
12] Your humble professor’s essay “The Turn to the Language and the Sixties” (Critical Inquiry; Questions of Poetics) could be an earlier version of Hejinian’s “What’s Missing from My Life,” in its attempt to show how the politics and culture of the 1960s was internalized and reinterpreted by poets who emerged in the 1970s. There are a number of moments of “speech” in the discussion, including the speech of students at Berkeley pursuing Free Speech and the use of Sanskrit by Allen Ginsberg to talk truth to power. The article goes on to discuss four different poets who read at Berkeley (and one who didn’t) and tries to imagine how Language writing could emerge out of this environment. What were the politics of the Turn to Language when seen from the perspective of the 60s?
13] Ben Friedlander’s “A Short History of Language Writing” (Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism) credits Clark Coolidge as laying down some, but not all, of its basic formal features: “true poetry lies in ‘obduration’ . . . at risk of comprehension”; the poet is “she who enters an unlimited relationship with her work”; and “the poet must feel herself in the presence of sense and nonsense alike”; “it is by the gaps in knowledge, and by consciousness of those gaps, that one enters the poem”; leading to the idea of “language as material . . . a language that, though sounded, is heterogenous to speech” (273–74). For him Coolidge is primarily important for exploring the “materiality of language.” Discuss what this means in examples of his poetry and that of his peers.
14] On pp. 292–93 of “A Short History,” Friedlander presents four criteria for Language writing: 1) “Subjectivity is a vector of social forces”; 2) “the individual . . . strives in language to apprehend ‘the real’” versus 3) “a poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence”; 4) no poet is ever quite sure what she’s going to say next” or 5) “the unrealizable ideal is to write as if the earth opened up and spoke.” Friedlander thus goes beyond Coolidge to claim that Language writing is importantly about “social subjectivity.” Discuss in the poets he contrasts to Coolidge: Silliman, Hejinian, Watten, and/or Bernstein.
15] Creative writing extra credit: discuss the creative writing you have done so far that has been prompted by our examples, in terms of what is interesting to you creatively.
Note and links
Students were asked to respond to four questions, with a fifth available for extra credit. The last two questions on Friedlander’s Simulcast refer to his digital visit to the class in week 6, which was recorded and will be online (t/k).
Entry 67: “Language Notes I” here
Entry 68: “Language Notes II” here
Document 107: “Archive Seminars” here
