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Document 77: Reviews of QP

There is now a good handful of reviews of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (and a recent theoretical article on Language writing that discusses my early work), from remarkably different perspectives. When time permits, I hope to continue the dialogue on the issues raised and texts discussed in the book. For now, I am grateful to the authors for the time and commitment it takes to write critically on others’ work.

2019

Jeanne Heuving, review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences and Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins. American Literature 91, no. 4 (December): 905–7. PDF here.

Timothy Kreiner, “The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History.” In Annie McClanahan, ed., special issue on “Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work.” Post45 no. 1 (1 January). Link here.

Tyrone Williams, “Examples Of: On Barrett Watten’s Questions.” Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Jacket2 (18 January). Link here.

2018

Luke Harley, “Searchlight Intelligence.: Barrett Watten’s Critical Poetics.” Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Journal of Poetics Research no. 9 (31 August). Link here.

Daniel Morris, “History and/as Language Poetry: Remembering Literary Community through Negation in Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Talisman 46 (2018). Link here.

2017

Grant Matthew Jenkins. Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1. Link here.

2016

Barry Schwabsky. “Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Hyperallergic (6 November 2016). Link here; for see the notice on Harriet link here.

Don Wellman, “Cows Nostrils Are Blue: An Essay on Practice with Comments on Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Immanent Occasions (20 September); link here.

To order Questions of Poetics online, click here (discount options coming).

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no pessimism or negativity think positive stop negative thinking having pessimistic thoughts be positive and optimistic thinking makes you happy

no pessimism or negativity think positive stop negative thinking having pessimistic thoughts be positive and optimistic thinking makes you happy

Negativity, my fourth keyword from Questions of Poetics, is a rich term whose usage far outstrips its dictionary definitions or thesaurus synonyms. Searching for an image for this post, I encountered a raft of popular maxims on the disadvantages of negativity, on how negative thoughts, feelings, actions only hinder us in the quest for happiness, becoming a detriment to any sort of sociality or belonging. The first results for a Google Advanced Image search for negativity reveals: an image of a glass half full or half empty; “7 Signs That Someone’s Negativity Is Toxic“; a “no negativity” logo; a cartoon image of a fighting couple; “Don’t let anyone’s ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be”; “Good things happen when you distance yourself from negativity and those who create it”; a personal training manual for “Beating Negativity“; a cartoon image of three happy-faced “blocks” outweighed by a black, negative “block”; “5 Ways You Are Spreading Negativity Without Knowing It”; “How to Deal with Negativity (6 Mindful Strategies); “Negativity Is a Thief, It Steals Happiness,” and so on. While “the power of positive thinking” is as American as apple pie, this result shows nothing less than a cultural logic that forbids the expression of “negative” thoughts, emotions, or actions, insofar as they are seen as a threat to “our” forms of positivity. Negativity has become a social threat, a thought crime that may be punishable—a moment of social reinforcement that has everything to do with normalizing our current extreme circumstances.  … More

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fv_williams

Throughout Questions of Poetics, I use radical particularity as a critical concept to discuss the making and interpretation of Language writing and other forms of art—but also its limits as a pre-given or “one-size-fits-all” concept. Language writing may be characterized, in almost every instance, by the foregrounding or highlighting of the “radical particular,” but this does not simply guarantee the success of its aesthetics or politics, nor does it distinguish its use of the radical particular from other art practices. I see the focus on the “radical particular” as common to the avant-garde, as having a critical potential that is the beginning, not the end, of its politics:

Radical particularity has a long history in avant-garde practice—indeed, it may be the formal feature most characteristic of the manifold histories of the avant-garde, from Dada’s cut-ups to surrealism’s found objects to imagism’s direct treatment to Language writing’s parataxis, continuing in myriad ways in present poetry and art. The priority of parataxis (or principle of equivalence) over hypotaxis (or principle of subordination) has, in itself, even been taken as the key principle of Language writing’s claim to a politics, as if the mere foregrounding of the materiality of language would overturn the Symbolic Order, mirroring or subverting the equivalence of the commodity form and exchange value by bringing material social relations to consciousness and thus negating them. What remains to be shown are the precise relations between materiality, signification, criticality, and form such that the agency of the work is not reduced to a universal effect, good for every occasion. (8)

… More

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kosuth definition

Unlike period style, which has a specific meaning in art history going back to Winckelmann, the term critical art practice has a contemporary but less defined usage, among left art educators for one (see its current Wikipedia stub). It appears in Questions of Poetics primarily in the introduction, and with a larger range of inference. Even so, the distinction between period style and critical art practice is crucial: the former is a set of static attributes, associated with fixed aesthetic or literary periodization, and the latter the real-time engagement with fundamental assumptions of language, style, form, genre, medium, person, identity, discourse, reception, history, and so on: … More

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period style

An online commentator, I have heard, has just described my critical work Questions of Poetics as imperialist and hegemonic—strong language indeed! While my book does make strong claims, they are in the context of critiquing, and revising, the history of Language writing after 2000, among many topics. One of its major polemical goals is to defend Language writing from the charge of being a “period style”—a term first used by Marjorie Perloff and taken up by others to dismiss Language writing’s continuing relevance. I argue that Language writing has been widely influential, among many tendencies; it is a part of the literary history and poetic resources of the present. That does not make it the Third Rome, no.  … More

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lokanandi books

Adorno, Theodor W. Night Music: Essays on Music, 1928–1962. Trans. Wieland Hoban. London: Seagull, 2017.
artiCHOKE, no. 12. Feat. Fabiana Faleiros, Birgit Kreipe, Samuel Solomon, and Jackie Wang. Berlin: Vierte Welt, 2018.
Avermaete, Tom, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten. Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future. Exhibition catalogue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010.
The Beatles. “Michelle” b/w “Girl.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 152.
———. ““No Reply” b/w “Eight Days a Week.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 22 893.
———. “We Can Work It Out” b/w “Day Tripper.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 122.
Detroit—Berlin: One Circle, 30.5–2.6.2018. Program catalogue. Berlin: HAU, 2018.
Flaßpöhler, Svenja. Die potente Frau: Für eine neue Weiblichkeit. Berlin: Ullstein, 2018.
Franke, Melanie, Silke Krohn, and Dieter Scholz, eds. The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection Berlin. Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Prestel, 2008.
Fuchs, Von Konrad, and Heribert Raab. Wörterbuch Geschichte. 13th ed. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.
… More

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The recent unfriendly publication of my email exchange with Nathaniel Mackey, along with fragments of a Facebook thread that I had removed—both without permission, as is customary and a sign of respect among authors and publishers—demands some comment and explanation. I have asked that the material be taken down, as it is framed as an act of theft, intended to humiliate, and circulated to recreate the adversarial dynamics of the “poetry wars” of the 1980s. As such it is an extension of what I have called “The Duncan Thing” and have written about previously here.

Perhaps the best way to respond is to change the framework of this discussion, since the material is out there, and attempt to reframe it from my own perspective. Readers may read what I wrote differently in a context that does not evoke literary theft or online flaming. I have had a long-term, friendly, and collegial relationship with Mackey, and have seen and interacted with him many times over several decades—and have often done things that support his work in ways great or small. I will begin, then, with an email I sent to Mackey on March 30, 2017, asking if would be interested in being part of a panel on “Generation and the Arts of the Present” at the ASAP conference in Oakland that fall. … More

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Entry 31: Generation

Generation n. 1 All of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively; ‘one of his generation’s finest songwriters.’ 1.1 The average period, generally considered to be about thirty years, in which children grow up, become adults, and have children of their own; ‘the same families have lived here for generations.’ 1.2 A set of members of a family regarded as a single step or stage in descent; as modifier, in combination ‘a third-generation Canadian.’ 1.3 A group of people of similar age involved in a particular activity; ‘a new generation of actors and directors.’ 1.4 A single stage in the development of a type of product or technology; ‘a new generation of rear-engined sports cars.’ 2 mass noun The production or creation of something; ‘methods of electricity generation’; ‘the generation of wealth.’ 2.1 The propagation of living organisms; procreation. Origin Middle English: via Old French from Latin generatio(n-), from the verb generare (see generate).

Oxford Living Dictionaries

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Introduction to “The Face Gone:
Generation in Presentist Poetics”

presented at ASAP 9, 27 October 2017
“Generation and the Arts of the Present”
with Lawrence Rinder and James Smethurst;
chaired by C.D. Blanton; Rita Raley, respondent

In critical and creative terms, “generation” is a blindspot in the discourse of the arts of the present. My essay starts by questioning the reliance on art historical, literary, and critical paradigms of periodization as assumed across the disciplines: from Foucault’s “epistemic shift” to Jameson’s “cultural logic of late capitalism” to periodizing notions of the literary, artistic, or cultural succession of one movement, school, style, or group to the next. Rather, I see “generation” as a cultural logic is negotiated at every moment in poetic practice: for instance, Language writing does not simply succeed and overturn the “presentness” of the New American poets, nor is it simply overturned by conceptualism or new activist poetries—rather, a complex negotiation of generation takes place at each moment, which may be seen both within the details of the work or movement’s construction or self-understanding, and externally in terms of its aesthetic positioning. … More

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Document 66: The Bungalows

[In memory of John Ashbery]

ashbery collage 01

THE BUNGALOWS

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

… More

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