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.
A recent post by Vladimir Feshchenko, Russian linguist and scholar of language-centered writing, raised a question of the historical reception of Language writing—as a history of its own making. Language writing’s historicism is in this sense double—not only a question of its publications, influences, reception, contexts, but the way its formal and theoretical or explorations lead to the future unfolding of new meanings. One thus can trace the historical (real-time) reception of Language writing in relation to these aspects of its “constructivist” poetics, in the sense I develop in The Constructivist Moment. That was 2003, “midway through Language writing’s journey,” and the results keep coming in. They continue in a line that extends to Lyn Hejinian’s later theory of allegory, in Allegorical Moments (2023), pluralizing “moments” in dialogue with that “moment.” … More
