October 26, 2019
New York, 4–8 October 2019
“It’s nice to have a separate month” —Bill Berkson
Friday, October 4
Delta DTW > LGA
Tony Torn
Walt Whitman’s Words
@ The Center for Book Arts
Marjorie Welish
Christian Marclay @ Paula Cooper
Ishiuchi Miyako @ Fergus McCaffery
Teresa Burga @ Alexander Gray
Pope L., Jonathan Lyndon Chase,
Cheyenne Julien & Tschabalala Self
@ Mitchell-Innes & Nash
High Line Hotel … More
September 14, 2019
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.”
September 8, 2019
CALL FOR PAPERS
Refunctioning Poetics
The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture After 1900
University of Louisville, February 20–22, 2020
Organizer: Barrett Watten / contact by September 16
This is a call for one or two participants for a session on the “refunctioning” of literature (focusing on poetry and poetics in terms of “the making of the work” but including other genre possibilities). Recent texts suggesting such a “refunctioned” poetics include Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun; Kevin Killian’s amazon.com writings; Eugene Lim’s cyber-novels; and others proposed by panel participants. The concept of “Refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) comes from Walter Benjamin, via Bertolt Brecht, in his keystone essay “The Author as Producer” (1934). How can new forms and genres of poetics be seen as “refunctioning” the aesthetic as political, given that Benjamin’s world has been “refunctioned” in the “new presentism” we live and suffer? Returning to Benjamin’s 1934 essay, in the context of the struggles against fascism but also in contestation with socialist realism, the panel asks, what does “refunctioning” authorship, and the literary and cultural work, mean in the present? Participants may approach this question by rethinking the status of the author; theorizing poetic making from a gendered perspective; seeing material production and digital reproduction as central for rethinking poetics as “the making of the work”; and reading new genres of experimental writing, after the Millennium, that incorporate its precarious presentism.
September 2, 2019
CALL FOR PAPERS
Modernity @ Zero Hour:
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order
American Comparative Literature Association
Chicago, March 19–22, 2020
This seminar will address the relationship between literary modernism (traditionally seen as having its end date at 1945, but expanded to include work in genres not usually associated with high modernism) with the Zero Hour of the end of World War II (seen as a crisis of modernity that decisively set in place processes of globalization). Seminar participants will read works of modernism, from American, European, and non-Eurocentric sources, that imagine and constitute while they challenge and critique “the universal” as an entailment of modernist forms (which are often seen as characterized by forms of parataxis and the foregrounding of particularity that suspend any notion of the universal). In the process of critiquing modernist particularity, we will also interrogate the vertical, idealist, and even authoritarian aspects of mid-century modernism and their entailments for the post-1945 order. High modernist authors could include Eliot, Woolf, Williams, Pound, Breton, Stein, Beckett, and so on in the Eurocentric tradition, but these figures may be placed next to lesser-known and nonliterary figures, movements, genres, and works. We would then try to connect the aesthetic “universalist” aspect of these authors and works with political claims for universal ethical and aesthetic values, in historical frameworks that range from the Nuremberg Trials, on the one hand, to the rise of abstraction as a universalist aesthetic, on the other. Finally, we will move from the Eurocentric constructions of universals to query their possibility in “alternative modernities,” represented at 1945 by Russia, China, and India as non-Western states and cultures, along with the decolonizing world, as anticipating non-Eurocentric frameworks for the emergent global order that must be taken into account in any notion of the “universal.” The seminar will expand the implications of modernism for global and transnational pedagogy; should interest students of modernist, transnational, and postcolonial literature; and will engage theoretical concerns of Critical Theory and the gendering of modernity whenever possible.
Submit proposals to ACLA by Monday, September 23
For the ACLA portal: click here
Contact b.watten@wayne.edu or barrett.watten@gmail.com
January 21, 2019
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.
January 20, 2019
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.
January 19, 2019
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.
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.
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.
Grant Matthew Jenkins. Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1. Link here.
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).
August 16, 2018
Our seminar, originally a panel session, has been expanded to include five presenters, listed below; an enrolled and a public audience; and the opportunity to circulate papers that will be discussed over the 2-hour seminar. As the ASAP registration portal for seminars has closed, if you would like to take part in the seminar please contact the session organizer, and you will be enrolled in the seminar and printed in the program. Please do so by September 1 to make sure you are included on the website and printed materials. Contact: b.watten@wayne.edu.
Featured participants:
August 12, 2018
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
August 5, 2018
Travels in France with Carla Harryman
(Languedoc, Burgundy, Paris, Brittany)
19 July–1 August 2018
Note: while my main purpose in making pages like these, often with a variation of the heading “I Met (after On Kawara),” is conceptual, indexical, linguistic—I am fascinated with the minimal representation of people, art, places, and events given simply by their names or locations or modes of transport—there is linked content as well, which awaits the visitor.
Thursday–Friday, July 19–20
Delta Airlines DTW > CDG
SNCF TGV > Nîmes
Service publique Occitaine transports/car > Valleraugue
Chez de Laroque / Hôtel Valleraugue
Carla Harryman
Françoise de Laroque
Juliette de Laroque
Mathieu Saunier
Saturday, July 21
Thomas Bouvrot
Eva-Léa Le Roux
Rive l’Hérault
Sunday, July 22
Rive l’Hérault
Car/Service publique Occitaine transports > Nîmes
Hôtel Amphitheatre, Nîmes
