Twenty years on, it is timely to reread the kind of discourse—or brazen publicity—that was circulated about Language writing and the academy, and indeed the entire project of poetics that was imagined as their synthesis, about 2000. In the two decades that followed, everything has changed in terms of the “horizon of expectation” that led to this premature discussion of the dominance of Language writing in the academy; in 2020, I will say confidently from my experience, and what I know of others’, that such a thing never happened. Perhaps it was meant not to happen, and the provocative title page to the September 2000 article in Lingua Franca by Andrew Epstein may be the reason why. As I work through my archive, I am finding numerous such signposts to futurity that did not arrive, while at the time I was caught up in the process, let us charitably say, of negotiating the “stakes at the table” of the future of Language writing. Why this discourse was misdirected, and for whose interests, will be the substance of my reading below; those interested may find, in the interest of time travel, the full text of the article here.
Rereading the article at this later date evokes the same conflictual mix of responses. The polemical frame of the piece—”The Language Poets are taking over THE ACADEMY. But will SUCCESS destroy their integrity?”—reaches about as low as a literary hit piece can go. When one considers the naked hustling that attends mainstream careers, and its bland normalizing in venues like the New York Times Book Review, the tone is not only meant to shock. It is primarily meant to trade on the “outsider status” of Language writing and evoke the literary hustling that is usually absorbed into the “cup we all race 4,” fame. There is something illicit, contradictory, and fetishistic in the mainstreaming of Language writing, it seems. One could develop much about the public fetish of Language writing’s creation of “hole” in the Symbolic Order here, as a public discourse, if one wished.
The first section of the article backs up its grandiloquent opening with three then-current controversies. The first is Ron Silliman’s attack on Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry at a 1997 literary event in New York, where Silliman accused Perelman of writing the book for tenure—opening a split among Language writers over “becoming academic.” The second is Charles Bernstein’s appearance on a Super Bowl commercial for The Yellow Pages in 1999 (which I wrote on in an article for Textual Practice and sent to the article’s author on request). The point here is that Bernstein was caught in the act of selling out. Finally, Eliot Weinberger offers the hackneyed argument about the institutionalization of the avant-garde, from Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974; trans. 1984). This is the ideologeme most common in academic denials of the avant-garde, decisively rejected with the rise of New Modernist/Avant-Garde Studies from the 1990s on. Such is the pitch, and the Zeitgeist, of the polemic: “I used to be avant-garde, but now I am academic.”
The shock value of the opening, as often happens, is offset by a normalizing narrative of the rise of Language writing from the political 60s and the jobless 70s—the emergent “tale of the tribe” for this generation. There are now a number of encyclopedia and Cambridge Companion articles that rehearse this narrative (I have seen three, by Steve McCaffery, Jennifer Ashton, and myself), converging on what will become boilerplate literary history. Reading through this version, one notes its salient points: the Language school began with a strong claim to cultural and literary politics; the rise of Language writing coincided with the “rise of theory” in the 70s; its “becoming academic” is equally a refusal to separate creative and critical writing. The standard detraction, from Tom Clark, follows, that Language writing is a pretentious word salad, which sets up a look at a few examples, namely Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian. All of this is now common, but what follows immediately, almost magically, is the elevation of the practitioners of “word salads” to academic respectability. The most scandalous of these (thus effacing all others) is Bernstein’s appointment (with only an M.A.) to an endowed chair at SUNY Buffalo and his founding of the Poetics Program (which was, one learned years later, a program in name only, basically an affinity group and a listserv).
It is thus the sheer nominalism of this elevation, provoking a crisis of legitimacy, that fuels the reaction, from pundits like Richard Lehmann (“the idea of an academic movement that is avant-garde is oxymoronic. They are polar opposites”) and Richard Kostelanetz (“Bernstein’s literary politicking involved ‘a fundamentally fascist strategy'”). Apart from this hackneyed rehearsal, which returns to the Poetry Wars of the 80s in yet another decade, there are distinct gleams of insight. One, from Alan Golding, proposes that the debate leads to the question of “two different versions of the university. The first view sees it as a possible vehicle for social change, where liberatory thinking can get done. The counterpoint . . . is a vision of the university as a medium of social control.” The second is from Lyn Hejinian, who “sees a continuity between experimental writing and teaching . . . . ‘Really good teaching tries to foster intellectual creativity and encourage people to take intellectual risks, and good poetry does exactly the same thing.'” A third issue is still fraught and yet-to-be-determined: the institutional status of what may be termed Poetics 2.0, the next generation of poet/critics in the university who were influenced by, but must distinguish themselves from, the first wave. Each of these issues is ripe for discussion now; if there can be an inquiry into what “poetics” means for the university, under conditions of neoliberal destruction, it may begin there.
The article also raises the question of what was left out (and why) from debates in the period, and what would come next that would not adhere to its narrative of marginal poets becoming endowed chairs. One was the June 2000 Orono conference, which the author attended, where there was a significant exchange between Language writing and Black Arts poetry in the 60s. This event (the debate between me and Amiri Baraka) and its implications were much discussed online, but it did not “fit the story” of the institutionalization of Language writing—though it would. A second major elision is the “cultural turn” and innovative writing, emerging in poetry in the 90s and a central part of the 1996 Assembling Alternatives conference (and an article I wrote coming out of it, “The Bride of the Assembly Line”). Finally, a major omission to this overview of Language writing is . . . me. While I had corresponded with the author, sent him articles (which he used without attribution), and was even asked for a photograph, I was cut from the piece (apart from mention of my name and the journal This). The question is why? Whose interest did it serve to keep the story focused on “becoming academic” in this scandal-conscious way? Certainly, debates around “cultural poetics” and the recent Baraka event did not fit the story. Who decided that?
Let this piece stand as a benchmark, then. What happened next, in my creative and institutional life, could not have been more different. On the one hand, there was 9/11 and a decade of war and recession: our horizons were definitively changed, so much that the literary issues of 2000 seem now somewhat remote and effete. In my own work, I would point to The Constructivist Moment (2003), the co-edited volume Diasporic Avant-Gardes (2009), and multi-authored The Grand Piano (2006-10) as outside the narrative of the “institutional avant-garde.” Did success spoil the writing of The Grand Piano? I invite the reader to decide; this was a publication project without any institutional support and very little academic recognition (though it was performed at MLA). At the other end of two decades, as well, there are serious issues to take up: what has become of “poetics,” as a synthesis of the creative and the critical, in pedagogical or disciplinary terms. Was “poetics” a one-off bubble, and/or how does it continue with the 2.0 generation cited in the article, after many of the original figures have left the academy? What does “poetics” say to questions of racial and class justice that have erupted since 2010, from Trayvon Martin and Occupy to now? Finally, what does “poetics” now offer to the university in crisis, and the larger politics that that crisis represents? For all these reasons, the article in Lingua Franca got it wrong. Other questions need to be asked.
Notes
Epstein, Andrew. “Verse vs. Verse: The Language Poets Are Taking over the Academy, But Will Success Destroy Their Integrity?” Lingua Franca (September 2000): 45–54.
Watten, Barrett. “The Bride of the Assembly Line: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.” Impercipient Lecturer Series (ed. Steve Evans and Jennifer Moxley) 8 (October 1997): 1–36.
———. Review of Masocriticism by Paul Mann. Textual Practice 14, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 209–22.
Image
John F. Peto, The Cup We All Race 4, c. 1900. De Young Museum, San Francisco.
