This, the literary magazine I co-edited with Robert Grenier from 1971–74 and continued to edit and publish until 1982, now has a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Press. This is how the entry currently reads:

This (magazine)

This is a poetry journal associated with what would later be called Language poetry.

First three issues edited by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten (1971-1973); subsequent nine issues edited by Watten (1973-1982) who also published monographs under the imprint This Press (1974?-1986?).

External links

• Barrett Watten, comp., “This 1-12 Index” (Oakland, CA: This Press, 1983). Digital facsimile edition published by Eclipse.

All the details of this entry strike me as significant, even the uncertain and inaccurate account of This Press, which continues to publish under the series imprint “Mode A” and never published “monographs.” In terms of representation, it is the exteriority of these “knowledge sentences” that captures my attention as writing—beyond any mere descriptive function. I have been interested in sentences that can be seen both as possessing an “intention” to represent and as structurally invoking a “state of affairs” outside the sentence. The structure of the entry above is not only “intentional”; rather, it maps specific domains of knowledge that have been determined from a position outside them. This is not the Canadian journal of a similar name; it is representative of “Language poetry” (which is nameable, as such); it was edited and published in a specific time frame; an index exists and is available online; one can click on the link and access the index, and so on. The representation of the index is itself indexical—in describing the index, it also accesses it. That is an effect I want to put to use in creative processes—such as making the current site. Knowledge, in such a poetics, is agency.