And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.
—Laura Riding, “The Poet’s Corner

From Moscow, under conditions of global duress, comes the online publication of Flagii (Flags), double issue, numbers 16/17. Clicking on this link gets the issue, and for those without Russian, using Google translate or its equivalent yields a sense of the incredible poetic activity going on right now, with an intent to find “allies of any country.” Also breaching the gap are a number of texts with visual properties, in a selection introduced by Vladimir Feshchenko with work by Jackson Mac Low, Bernadette Mayer, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Hannah Weiner, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Susan Howe, and myself (“Introduction to the Letter T”). I am also represented by an interview with Vladimir Koshelev and a translation of a section of Under Erasure by Lisa Kheresh, linked here, as well as the note on a little-known collage by Sylvia Plath that I wrote about on this site in 2010 (here), with commentary in Russian (here). It is not only a real honor to be included in this work but an example of what we should be doing now, connecting across the greatest distances possible, aspiring toward the horizon of “this time we are both.”

Interview with Vladimir Koshelev [here]

The conversation with Barrett Watten continues Flags‘ traditional series of interviews with contemporary American poets. As we did before with Lyn Hejinian, we talked about the situation of and trends in contemporary American poetry that one of the key representatives of “language writing” might draw to our attention. As a complement to the interview, we invite you to read an excerpt from Watten’s poem “Under Erasure,” translated by Flags editor Lisa Kheresh. (Russian introduction; adapted from auto-translation)

1. How would you assess the condition and mood of contemporary American poetry? What active trends and directions would you identify?

I will answer your question obliquely. In 1935, André Breton gave a lecture in Prague titled “The Surrealist Situation of the Object.” Using his rhetoric, I have never ceased to be inspired by that lecture. (Perhaps that is the opposite of my feelings about “The American Situation of Poetry,” which does not often inspire me). He begins with to address to “comrades”; how far is our current situation from any sense of solidarity with our peers? A numbing privatization exists to inhibit exchange and dialogue in many instances. He then goes on to say how inspired he is by the city of Prague, which seems to welcome the surrealist project. Here, I would comment that it is only in exchange with poets working in other regions, with more defined and immediate goals and looking outward toward their connections with others, that I find commonality. You may find the essay here in translation (from the Czech translation from French). (A technology that does inspire me is the automatic translation available on Facebook threads, regardless of its accuracy; I am able to “listen in” to the conversations of Russian and Ukrainian poets, under conditions of emergency, for example.)[1] The American Situation of Poetry is now a quagmire of award culture, careerism, writing programs, and defensive perimeters of formerly open group formations. There are shining examples of the opposite: I may term this “the poets one cares about.” I deeply care about the continuing work of my peers who started out with me in San Francisco in the 1970s: the West Coast Language writers of The Grand Piano [2]. I follow the work of individual poets who convey a sense of “project” that they are seeking to define in relation to the work of others. The term “project” is the important one here. Show me a poet with a “project”—I can name several, including your present authors—and I will attend.

2. Earlier, in an interview with Flags, Lyn Hejinian said the following: “Much of the time, we live at the edge of chaos, receiving endless amounts of information and sensation, some of it contradictory or otherwise perplexing. Our capacities for cognition and perhaps our very senses themselves are growing, becoming faster, more sensitive. Literary writing, insofar as it benefits from and reflects new human sensibilities, can’t help but become more complex. Or-writers and readers, overwhelmed by “reality”, can seek refuge in simple or familiar or otherwise uncomplicated things. At the moment, I see literary writing in many quarters making a turn to simplicities, if not to simplicity itself: the search for individual identity, the search for love.” Do you agree with Lyn’s opinion? How American modern poetry and world poetry in general work with a category of political action? What future changes are they going to undergo when it comes to the political function of poetry?

What Lyn Hejinian offers in her response is a value judgment and context for making it. Though she does not say it outright, she believes complexity is the recognition, without denial, of the “perplexing” and terrifying deluge of disturbing information we live in and through as a condition for one’s “project.” On the other hand, to simplify one’s response is to adopt a moral or ethical “pass,” to seek some kind of guarantee to get us through. I do see a “project” in the goal of complexity insofar as it contests the ideological formations that try to neutralize and destroy us. Poetry becomes a form of solidarity against an incapacitating irrationalism, the constant stream of lies. Poetry becomes a site for affirmation, also, of that information or knowledge one gleans from the deluge. Therefore, I don’t see “complexity” as stylistic or formal preference as so simply a guarantee of ethical probity. In recent days, I have been thinking of three great Soviet thinkers on ideology critique—Shklovsky, Vygotsky, and Voloshinov [linguist, philosopher, musicologist from the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin—Trans.]. A “project” that works with defamiliarization, the social origins of inner speech, and the constructedness of ideology is one I am interested in. This is reducible to neither “complexity” nor “simplicity.” Returning to past examples of poetry, “vigilance” is what I aspire to as a politics of poetry.

3. Together with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, you wrote the book Leningrad. There are excerpts from it in Russian, thanks to the work of Ivan Sokolov. Can you tell us about the writing process and a meaning of this kind of co-authorship for you?

We thought of, and experienced, our visit to then–Leningrad in August 1989 as an “event” in, clearly, two senses. One was the simple experience of our travel to an unknown world and our surprising and revelatory Summer School (Letnaya shkola). The other was the incremental changes in the Soviet state, after Chernobyl particularly, that would lead to its collapse; it was as if we were witnessing the beginning of an uncontrolled reaction that has continued to this day. Once returned, we thought (I proposed, I believe) that we write an account of it, but in the form of an “event” in its own right. The formal model for this writing was certain experiments in multi-authored writing in the 1970s (the “Brat Guts” project in The Grand Piano or the circulation of a poetic samizdat about the same time among group members or several examples of dialogic writing projects)[3]. In any case, the dismantling of the individual “author” insofar as that was possible was imagined as a form of collectivism, however provisional; we wanted to explore the fault line between individual and collective in our writing itself. That is not to say we granted, at any moment, that either Language writing or the Soviet Union had achieved “collectivism” as a goal, but that is what we wanted to explore. Critically, not just in some kind imitative form which would be entirely false and presumptuous, given for one thing the terrible consequences of Soviet collectivism we were all aware of. Leningrad, then, was an attempt to situate ourselves in the “event” of the end of the Cold War and to critically address the nature of collectivity in both form and content. We are delighted that there is interest in this work coming out in Russian, and hope present conditions change so that it may appear.

4. As we know, writing for many authors of Language School is often connected with a concept of memory (take My Life by Lyn Hejinian as an example). In “Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia: From Leningrad to Occupy” you write about a trip to Leningrad. How much do you relate to yourself as an author and a receptive person 34 years later?

In a poem that serves as the invocation to my collection 1–10 (1980) titled “Mode Z,” I wrote, very ironically but in a manner that was taken to be a kind of edict: “Now become the person in your life. Start writing autobiography”—as if you were already not the person in your life, and you needed to write autobiography to complete yourself. Perhaps that is the interesting aspect of this edict some four decades later. Just this week I am writing (as a form of autobiography) a piece on a “return” to my family’s “homeland” in Norway, where I had never been. How did I manage to get to Leningrad some 34 years before I explored any such thing as a “homeland”? Existence, as my tutelary guide Breton wrote, is elsewhere, and we devoted an entire volume of Poetics Journal (with a cover by Erik Bulatov) to that concept. Memory, then, is a psychological fact, but what writing gives to it is variable and complicated, certainly important to explore. Memory is not irreducible, however, and exists in the midst of the othering of language and ideology, as well as the negations of existence. Nabokov’s title Speak, Memory [in Russian this book is called Other Shores—Trans.] always struck me as authoritarian, sending a sign from a man who has a portentous and important memory. With Mandelstam, the situation is different, but I would balance the lucidity of his work on memory with, say, its negation in Paul Celan (as reader of Mandelstam): memory and its erasure toward being in the present are close in the latter’s project. Bob Dylan has a terrific line: “These memories I got, they can strangle a man” and then goes on to say “I’m not sorry for nothin I’ve done” [6]. Memory and erasure go hand in hand; around 1990, I investigated that possibility in my poem Under Erasure.

5. As you know, Russian meta-realism represented by Parshchikov, Dragomoshchenko, Zhdanov, etc. now continues to live, develop, and take on a new face in the poetics of young authors. What is happening to “language writing” in the U.S. now? Could you highlight young authors who are working in this direction?

One way to think about Language writing is that it changed the “platform” of writing itself, after the earlier platform of “expressive subjectivity” among the New American poets particularly. The recent Russian anthology frames this movement; what is so interesting is the range of writers who are assembled between those poles. Is Jack Spicer an “expressive subject” or is his relation to language (as Other) a prefiguring of our slightly later group? Then, what happened after the “paradigm shift” of Language writing (a term from historian of science Thomas Kuhn we were all aware of)? Once the (nearly religious) conditions of belief congealed around expressive subjectivity had been unwoven, they could not be put back together. We are witnessing in many younger American poets a partial and hedged “turn to language” redirected toward expressive aims—but the upshot is, after our work, that expression is always mediated by language, and thus partly not of the author’s own doing. Hence, the influence of Language writing has been to turn poetry, whether it wants to go there or not, toward the kind of collectivity that is lived as ideological. This is what everyone is concerned with, yes? I see this among the new Russian poets, in emigration or writing internally. Poetry is enmeshed in conditions of “world” insofar world is experienced as language, and it is here both the meta-realists and conceptualists (don’t forget Dmitrii Prigov!) did the same kind of work. They changed the platform on which writing would place in a language, as historically undo-able. In that sense the change in platform is parallel to the paradigm shift of the end of the Soviet period—these changes are not just literary, but a collective unfolding toward new ends.

6. Are you interested in contemporary Russian poetry and in younger generation of Russian authors? What authors would you highlight? If not, how do you think to deal with this distance?

As above, of course! I am very excited by the work of younger Russian poets, and the keeping of the flame of our generational peers, at the moment. There is very good feeling there, a sense of mutual aims and support—as there must be under the present terrible circumstances. The hopes of my generation are with you, young Russian poets! Since visiting St. Petersburg in 2016, where Carla Harryman and I were a part of the Dragomoshchenko awards/conference, I have been very impressed and inspired by poets I met there, and have heard about later. Aleksandr Skidan, Ekaterina Zakharkiv, Ivan Sokolov, Dima Gerchikov, Dmitrii Golenko (alas!), Galina Rymbu, Inna Krasnoper, Ian Probstein, Anna Glazova, Stanislav Snytko are some of many who come to mind, and whom I see regularly on Facebook.

7. What was your goals during the work with Lyn Hejinian in Poetics Journal as an editor[7]? Do you think the World Wide Web, global innovation, etc., has completely changed editorial standards and strategies?

We wanted to establish a focus on writing “poetics” as both aesthetically and intellectually significant during the period in which we were developing, following the examples of those writing in poetics in the modern and later periods whom we had internalized (writers from the Soviet period and French poststructuralism most significant here, along with American forebears from modernism and the New American Poetry). The work unfolded over the ten issues of the journal, each of which represents a different stage in the development of “projects.” When we went to edit the journal for republication (A Guide to Poetics Journal), we saw these project falling into three areas—not exactly beginning, middle, and end, but something like first principles, states of becoming, and “ends” as anti-teleological and pluralizing. Due to the changes in the literary climate, that work of summary and clarification, redefinition toward new horizons, may be influential in some secret way, but in terms of public response has been largely ignored. That is both tragic and kind of diagnosis of the murky conditions that now obtain in American poetry. Returning to the project, I see hope for “poetics” but am afraid that the immediate gratifications of “poetry”—name recognition, prize culture, lyric biography—are overwhelming.

8. The last question has become a traditional one for me (I asked Lyn Hejinian and Charles Simic: Barrett, what advice would you give to young poets and poetesses whose work is evolving rapidly and whose pursuits are ubiquitous and varied?

Thank you for asking! Seriously. We are faced with inexorable conditions of immersion in poisoned ideology and imminent disaster. The situation of poetry, following William Carlos Williams, is the situation of hope: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” It is interesting that Williams saw “the news” and “poetry” as divergent and connected. In developing one’s project, one must attend to the terms of importance that it has discovered and enhance them. It is not “what thou lovest well remains” but the focus on discovery leading to consequences.

Notes

[1]  The company Meta, which owns Facebook, is recognized as extremist in Russia.
[2] Collective autobiography written by ten poets and poetesses in the second half of the 1970s in San Francisco; project page here.
[3] Interview about the creation of the project here.
[4] Bob Dylan lyrics here.
[5] Lisa Kheresh’s translation of an excerpt from the poem “Under Erasure” follows.
[6] Poetics Journal is a journal dedicated to innovative poetry, published from 1982 to 1998. The editors were Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten himself. A total of ten issues were published, combining modern poetic texts with author’s comments and theoretical notes.
[7] Cover of Poetics Journal 8,  with illustration by Erik Bulatov.

from Under Erasure, trans. Lisa Kheresh

We stormed the citadel under banner of amnesia
Winning absolute victory over the Germans in 1943
Fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . .

I look into myself,
                          only to see
Crowds in two directions pass by  . . .

As if each person were unrelated
Even by a rope, 
                       untying her hands . . .

And felt and touched then a substantial depth
(Words you should have written down immediately)
A surface that would have collapsed had it known . . .

In redundant history,
                              as a trope
Only to render them more typical . . .

Your memorial to perfect row plowing in England
In principle, every standard of scale is effaced
I wrap bales of cotton in bright yellow plastic . . .

A miniature man kneels and prays
To an overwhelming tree,
                                     a goddess . . .

Branching out,
                     until its meaning
Becomes a space he has abandoned . . .

And we imagine partners in speech
As an object,
                   a text giving access . . .

Their idea was to leave forthwith on a journey
Broken loop of a man sleeping as in a dystopia
Of purified cinematic nightmare in red and blue . . .

from “The Visual Dimension of Language Writing
by Vladimir Feshchenko [here]

The “Language school” has brought together a number of communities of poets at various points in the United States. In fact, this movement is the largest phenomenon in American avant-garde literature in the last half-century. Moreover, the movement is also unique for the length of its history. With five decades of practice, it remains to this day the largest poetic mega- (and meta-) movement: virtually all of its members are still active today.

One of the main tenets of language writing has been the tendency to foreground the linguistic constructedness of the work-text, the materiality of signifiers in poetry. Charles Bernstein notes that this trend was most influenced by the Russian avant-garde with its notion of “facture” and Roman Jakobson with his concept of “poetic language” as “a verbal language that brings its material (acoustic and syntactic) signs into focus, providing an understanding of poetry as not so much a transmitter of messages as a medium of verbal language itself” (Pitch of Poetry). To give the text a tangible materiality, “language poets” resorted to a variety of visual devices, working with spatiality as a category of literary writing.

The selection below includes examples of American “Language poetry” in Russian translations that engage the visual-performative dimension of the poetic text. They are mostly taken from the Anthology of Recent US Poetry “From Black Mountain to Language Writing” (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2022, ed. Vladimir Feshchenko and Ian Probshtein). However, some of these texts are not included in that anthology: for example, a fragment from an early visual poem by Jackson Mac Low from the late 1930s, created long before the emergence of the “language school.” Mac Low works with linguistic combinatorics (“chance operations”), with the arrangement of text in the space of the page and beyond. He would later join the “language movement” and call this type of writing “language-centered.” Barrett Watten’s text “Introduction to the Letter T,” translated by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, is not included in the anthology. The text uses excerpts from Honoré de Balzac and Ernest Mandel to organize dynamic transitions in a schematic visualization of the letter-text.

One of the most eccentric exponents of “Language writing” was Hannah Weiner. She began in the 1960s with “Magritte Poems,” an attempt at a purely linguistic embodiment of Magritte’s verbal-visual tropes. Later, the installation on “word vision” would culminate in her experiments on automatic writing with different focuses of words and phrases. In Clairvoyant Journal, published in 1978, this verbal psychicism reaches the limits of schizopoetics. For Wiener, visually arranged poetic prose (as in the presented excerpt from Spoken), with multiple typographic interruptions, was an ideal medium for mapping a consciousness possessed by multiple voices. A more schematic format of automatic writing is evident in the text of Bernadette Mayer, known for her photo-textual diary chronicles.

Larry Eigner is another figure significant to the formation of the “Language school” that united East Coast and West Coast poetry circles. Paralyzed from birth, in his poems he seems to overcome the bodily stiffness and physical agony of writing, actively using the space of the page in the post-objectivist elaboration of linguistic fragments. Eigner himself admitted that his verse is born not from speech but from thinking. His closest associate in the “language school” was Robert Grenier (who later compiled Eigner’s multi-volume Selections). In his own experiments, Grenier works with minimalist structures of poetic utterance. His cycles of the 1970s and 1980s (Series: Poems, A Day at the Beach, Phantom Anthems, etc.) are based on attention to the spatial design of the poetic text, a special typographical placement in the space of the book. His Sentences series (1978), consisting of five hundred large-format catalog cards, each of which contains a short poem-expression (a very close analog to Lev Rubinstein’s “cards” created during the same years in Russia), was created in this special format.

An important role in the formation of the language movement belongs to Susan Howe, who continued the line of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky and discovered a new poetics of language. In Howe’s many books, and especially in one of her most famous, My Emily Dickinson, literary writing breaks out of the shores of genre constraints, drifting between prose and poetry, documentary and autobiographical. At times, such documentary takes the form of a free spatial play of words and lines, as in the fragment of her poem “Trampled by Sorrow” presented here. The original spatial design of verse is also created by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (not formally associated with the “language school,” but very close to it) in her main life project, the epic poem Drafts. Here the movement of writing transforms the very parameters of the page, involving the whole arsenal of experimental linguistic and extralinguistic means (as in the fragment “Rupture,” which also involves elements of blackout poetry). The first part of “Drafts” is now available to Russian-speaking readers thanks to the publication of the book Drafts 1-38: Toll (Moscow: Polyphemus, 2023).

For more on the visual component of American avant-garde and neo-avant-garde poetry, see articles by Marjorie Perloff and Vladimir Feshchenko.

Notes

Thanks to the editors and translators of this outstanding project; I am uploading the original texts of my interview and poem, and the lightly edited DeepL translation of Vladimir Feshchenko’s introduction, with their hoped-for permission, which I will obtain forthwith. Note that DeepL has been learning how to translate language associated with experimental poetry: Language writing and Language school both appear, where before there were awkward approximations. In the sentence on Hannah Weiner, note the terms psychism and schizopoetics. This means that our work, in the largest sense, is now part of the Large Language Model that DeepL uses—Language writing même!