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October 18, 2025

Entry 69: Language Notes III

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. … More

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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

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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

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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.

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April 6, 2025

Entry 65: Hands Off America!

For the thousand manifestations that dotted the American landscape yesterday, I want to post this broadside poem by Robert Creeley. It has always seemed a kind lurching effusion of a politics, a consequence of the state of mind he wrote it in without doubt. Creeley was often convulsive, and that is to the point of his aesthetic, even concerning details. But here the subject of his “attack” in William Carlos Williams’s sense is broad, vast, gestural, involuntary. It is worth remembering that much poetry that followed shelters in the shadow of that attack. Thus it bears some comment at a later moment, as late as the one we are in, where the poem resonates anew. … More

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March 1, 2025

Event 104: Signifying Non-Solutions

“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions
in Time of War”

Ekaterina Derisheva, University of Pennsylvania
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Jamie Olson, St. Martin’s University

The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
University of Louisville, February 22, 2025

“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions in Time of War” introduces the work of experimental poets writing in Russian and Ukrainian, from positions of opposition, emigration, and displacement, from the late Soviet period to the present conditions of war and exile. The notion that “the non-solution must signify” is a formulation by critic Terry Eagleton that seems apt to the present moment, where poetry can best address a situation of profound indeterminacy.

… More

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December 1, 2024

Entry 64: Communicating Vessels II

Marxism, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, admitted that in capitalist societies mankind had not reached its full possibilities for development and self-realization. . . . [What] model did Marxism use to conceive, project, and eventually realize that human nature? It was, in fact, the bourgeois model: sexuality of a bourgeois type, family of bourgeois type, aesthetic of bourgeois type. —Michel Foucault, “Human Nature: The Chomsky-Foucault Debate” (1971)

The Waiting Room

I am in a medical waiting room in Novi, Michigan, reading the politics of dream in Les Vases communicants. On a large screen unfold tedious details of home improvement projects, finding new spatial arrangements, knocking out windows, sanding floors. Three older women are facing the screen, representative of Novi and its majority suburban demographics. They are possibly X voters, I imagine. Interrupting the quotidian program are three election ads, two paid for by Y and one by X. The space of the waiting room becomes a scene of unfolding dreams. In the first, X brags that he only hires the best in the business. We next meet a series of former subordinates, from A to B. All are white male counter authorities, having once believed in but turned from X. The message is impactful and distressing, a diremption in the structure of legitimacy. It provokes displeasure and crisis that cannot be revealed among the three women, who rigidly stare straight ahead. The next features a sympathetic woman they might identify with: an older white woman in an ordinary scene. Social security will be at risk under X, she explains. She finishes her argument with a risqué turn of speech: he will give the middle finger to the middle class. The three women’s basic livelihood appears at risk, after the legitimacy crisis. The third ad feature a younger women who claims the federal government, under Y, will pay for gender reassignment care. She is a mother and there is an imagined threat to her obligation to care for her child in the way she believes. The first two messages attack certainty in order to draw out and question a core belief. The last preserves a core belief by promoting an untenable fantasy. At the bottom of the dream is a nonexistent object that the three messages attempt to disclose. How much of the disclosure itself—seeing the ad content as analogous to a dream on waking—can be retained on waking; what does the erosion of memory mean for the core belief? In two cases the core belief is unsettled; in the latter, it is preserved as inaccessible fantasy, what people may think but will not admit to, the basis for a turn to fascism in a democracy. My reading of Les Vases communicants extends, of necessity, from 1932 to this scene.

“The Best People,” Harris campaign ad: view here
“Kamala Is for They/Them. I am for you” ad: view here

… More

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November 23, 2024

Document 106: Various Devices!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE! 

VARIOUS DEVICES:
SELECTED WRITINGS

BY CARLA HARRYMAN

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 Carla Harryman.

The works, chosen by editor Vladimir Feshchenko, represent the full range of her pioneering genre-disrupting, performative texts—from Percentage (1979) and Under the Bridge (1980) to Cloud Cantata (2020) and Scales for the Living (2023).

Also featured are the complete scripts of her germinal works for San Francisco Poets Theater: “Third Man” (1978); “There Is Nothing Better Than a Theory” (1984); and “Memory Play” (1994).

Excerpts from her dystopian novel Gardener of Stars (2001) and the ludic hybrid text Baby (2005) are included, along with selections from her erotic picaresque, co-authored with Lyn Hejinian, The Wide Road (2011).  … More

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November 22, 2024

Document 105: Not This!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE! 

NOT THIS: SELECTED WRITINGS
BY BARRETT WATTEN

MOSCOW: POLYPHEM, 2024

[for Russian text, click here]

Polyphem, an independent press in Moscow, has announced 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. … More

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October 4, 2024

Entry 62: The One Great Story

Remarks on Jameson and Narrative

Under any house is a basement of psychological dimensions, a surplus affective space. And as I read The Political Unconscious into the night, a sump pump in the basement would go on and off, shunting gallons of water out of its perpetual flood. An editor asked me for a theory of such drainage in the form of a critical review, which I refused as not entirely serious. —”Foxes,” Bad History, 60

The year is 1981. Carla Harryman and I are living in a working-class bungalow on Hampshire Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, competing with raccoon families and occasional gunshots to establish a relationship in an indeterminate time. Ronald Reagan has been elected, while the alternative arts are forging ahead on multiple agendas. Poets Theater is in full swing, with a character called “Jameson” in Kit Robinson’s play, as I discussed previously. Jameson has entered the Language and New Narrative debates and given his talk at 80 Langton Street, siding with Narrative while symptomatizing Language, but also has now published The Political Unconscious, a watershed work that would have long-term impact on questions of narrative and form. Jameson’s “questions of interpretation,” bringing together form and history, would anchor a more expansive, contextual methodology not confined to surface language—bypassing precisely the critique of Language’s dissociation of sensibility in the postmodern. The “turn to history” via poetic form begins right here. … More

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