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September 14, 2019

Entry 38: > Ekaterina Zakharkiv

I met Moscow poet Ekaterina Zakharkiv in St. Petersburg in November 2016, at “Other Logics of Writing: Arkady Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko at 70,” the Second International Conference on Dragomoshchenko and experimental poetics. Ekaterina was co-winner of the Dragomoshchenko Prize for younger experimental writers, presented at the new Alexandrinsky Theater on the Fontanka in St. Petersburg. Recently we began an exchange on digital poetics from our respective cultural, linguistic, and theoretical perspectives. This is a first attempt to speak of digital/media poetics across two distinct “regions of practice.”

September 12, 2019
Dear Ekaterina—

Hello! You asked about my approach to analyzing the internet poetic discourse.

I’ve cut and pasted your letter as you will see to create conditions for dialogue:

I am a graduate student of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, so my methodology is only starting to form, in general it may be said that the study is conducted from pragmatic-linguistic positions, in particular—the theory of speech acts, and also the linguistic poetic method.

My own basis in poetics is heavily indebted to the Formalist tradition, especially Shklovsky, Tynjanov, and Jakobson. There is a disconnect between that method—which influenced early Language writing, particularly with Hejinian, Silliman, and Harryman (and was very much in play when we had our “Letnaya Shkola” in Petersburg in 1989)—and the influences of critical theory, cultural studies, and now digital theory. I am trying to work at these intersections while being “language-centered.”

… More

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January 21, 2019

Entry 37: The Psychohistorical Absolute

For nearly all our originality comes from the stamp
that time impresses on our sensibility.
—Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

My title is an oxymoron, as there is no “absolute” in the process of “psychohistory.” But to recall Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute, there is a historical relation of the psychohistorical to the emergence of the literary as an unfolding horizon of meaning, which they describe in the use of the romantic fragment in The Athenaeum. That tradition leads to Hegel’s preference for romantic art as best because it is always incomplete, thus demanding completion, and on to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Konstanz School, with Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. The concept of horizon, which is everywhere in my critical work (and in the title of my UC Berkeley dissertation Horizon Shift), unites an historical openness of interpretation with the ground of the events of psychic history. Today, for instance, is Martin Luther King’s birthday, and in an online post I recalled hearing the news of his death: “I was in sociology class, junior year, UC Berkeley, taught by Robert N. Bellah, when Martin Luther King’s assassination was announced in class—an event that would puncture the world view of liberals like him. He was, however, eloquent in tribute and memorable.” The meaning of that event was both historical and psychic, and it unfolds, for me and arguably all of us, in a horizon at once open and changing. It was, in short, psychohistorical; it remains so, and the way that it does grounds the horizon of its further interpretation.

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January 20, 2019

Entry 36: Ashbery Alpha and Omega

ashbery w jarrett earnest

Barrett Watten, “Ashbery Alpha and Omega: Presentism, Historicism, and Vice Versa.” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Changsha, China), no. 3 (2019): 87–93. For pdf, click here.

Abstract: This reading of a single poem from the last collection of verse John Ashbery published before his death in 2017 sees it as an example of a concept of “presentism” that differs from modernist or postmodern accounts of the “present” associated with abstraction or immanence. Rather, Ashbery’s presentism is historical in being based on overlapping and discontinuous linguistic and experiential frames. Ashbery’s poetic use of the content of experience is always mediated through its presentation as information, ranging from high to low values and often employing “low-mimetic,” pop cultural elements. What results is a suspension of certainty in which meaning is structured and informed by its status as information. Thus leaving open questions of knowledge, Ashbery’s poetry does not represent a fully present consciousness but relies on forms of cognition and information processing that are nonconscious, operating in the background and informed by decades of his practice as a poet. A brief comparison with the late paintings of Willem de Kooning, who experienced cognitive disability at the end of his life, points out similar nonconscious forms of cognition such as motor skill and even aesthetic judgment. The reading is thus informed by information theory, cognitive science, and neurophysiology in showing how Ashbery’s late style makes a present that is historical and structured on his entire oeuvre.

Keywords: Poetics, the New York School, information theory, cognitive science, late style

Headnote: This paper was given in a session titled “Social Readings of John Ashbery” at the Louisville Conference for Literature and Culture After 1900, University of Louisville, Feb. 2018. Thanks to Alan Golding and panelists Sandra Simonds and David Kellogg.

Image: detail from John Ashbery, Late for School, c. 1948. Collage, 12 1/2 x 8 inches. From “John Ashbery with Jarrett Earnest,” Brooklyn Rail (3 May 2016); link here.

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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)

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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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