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January 19, 2019

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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August 12, 2018

Entry 35: On Bearing an Inscription

bw tattoo 1200

Yesterday I joined many millions throughout the history of humanity and submitted to ritual scarification, of my own volition and free will: I got a tattoo, my first after many years of sworn testimony that I would never do so. Like any complex choice, there was a before and an after—I had been visually imagining and verbally debating such a decision for years, months, and days leading up to the act, which took place on August 11, 2018, in the company of two friends, at the hand of Zach Hewitt at Signature Tattoo on Nine Mile Road in Ferndale, Michigan. The consequences of this act after resonate across time, space, and my work as a writer, beginning now. … More

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July 4, 2018

Document 76: On Negativity

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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June 23, 2018

Document 75: Radical Particularity

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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June 17, 2018

Document 74: Critical Art Practice

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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June 15, 2018

Document 73: Period Style

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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June 10, 2018

Document 72: Book Quest DE (2018)

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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May 24, 2018

Document 71: Purloined Letters

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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May 6, 2018

Entry 34: Lost America

lost america of love cover ed

The question of my relation to the New Americans over the long decades since the ’70s has recently come up. In working through my last post, a response to a review that framed my 2016 book with a retelling of the poetic debacle of 1978, I linked to an essay I published in 2000 (per copyright date; it likely appeared in 2001) that was, at the time, my critical and historical assessment of some of its major figures: Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Duncan (1988) and Dorn (1999) had already passed, and I do not think I sent the essay to Creeley, with whom I maintained good relations at the time (Creeley died in 2005). Creeley tended to glaze when I sent him offprints of my critical writing, for instance the essay on “poetic vocabulary” that links Jackson Mac Low and BASIC English, to which he wrote a one-word response: “Impressive.” Only later did I find, via a comment Creeley dropped in conversation and a letter in his Selected Letters, that BASIC English had been an influence on his work, after a high school teacher asked to write an essay using its minimal vocabulary.

The events of September 2001 decisively changed the focus of thinking through the poetics of the New Americans onto a more immediate political situation; the broad expanses of time needed for genial conversation on poetry and poetics would be displaced by a militarized discourse of threat, reprisal, and nonexistent WMDs. The essay itself was a kind of swerve, using a request from editor Timothy Murphy for a contribution for a volume of the academic journal Genre to be titled “Desert Island Texts,” with a prompt something like, “what one book would you want to have if stranded on a desert island.” … More

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May 5, 2018

Entry 33: The Duncan Thing

boojum

Grant Jenkins opens his review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1 [2017]) with an anecdote that has now become canonical lore in American poetry, the encounter between me and Robert Duncan at the San Francisco State Poetry Center’s 1978 Zukofsky memorial. As the story is now forty (4-0) years old, it is more than surprising that it is used to frame a discussion of my 2016 volume of critical poetics, as if no one had ever heard it before:

One of the most infamous events in the history of “postmodern” or “experimental” US poetry is the 1978 argument between Robert Duncan, a veteran of the New American Poetry anthology generation who was 59 at the time, and upstart Barrett Watten, then the 30-year-old self-fashioned cofounder of the more recent school of modernist-inflected verse called “Language poetry.” The incident took place during a film screening at the San Francisco Poetry Center memorializing the “objectivist” poet, Louis Zukofsky, who had recently died at 74. According to most accounts, Duncan interrupted Watten because he did not like the younger poet’s reading of Zukofsky’s poetry.

… More

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