Citation
Epstein, Andrew. “Language Poetry.” The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945, by Andrew Epstein, 1st ed., Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 145–59. DOI.org (Crossref), https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781108687317/type/book.
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Language poetry is the most significant avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th century
Language poetry has come to be seen as the most significant, influential avant-garde poetry movement of the later twentieth century.
This once-marginal group has had a powerful impact on the course of contemporary American poetry, gradually altering the very “mainstream” it once opposed.
Language poetry led to the rise of the new “hybrid” poetry since 2000
Its success even contributed to the rise of a new “hybrid” poetic mode that has moved to the fore of poetry since 2000
Language poets
Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, and close affiliates Susan Howe and Michael Palmer
the work is quite diverse and varied, stretching from the minimalism of Robert Grenier to the expansive, aggressive disjunctive collages of Bruce Andrews to Susan Howe’s typographical experiments enacted upon materials drawn from the archives of American literature and history.
Carla Harryman, Joan Retallack, Leslie Scalapino, and Rosmarie Waldrop
Erica Hunt
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Harryette Mullen
Language poetry was connected with radical, leftist politics
young writers in San Francisco, and to a lesser extent New York, began congregating in lofts and bars to discuss radical poetry and its possible connections with radical, leftist politics.
But even among Language poets, this political claim – the notion that scrambling syntax and disrupting conventional meaning can be an effective form of subversion or an attack on capitalism and the reigning sociopolitical system – has long been hotly debated.
Language poets shared a devotion to avant-garde American poetry
They shared a devotion to the more avant-garde side of American poetry – to the experimental poetics of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, the early, more daring William Carlos Williams, and the neglected Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky
Language poets challenged the avant-garde New American Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s
saw themselves as simultaneously extending and challenging the avant-garde New American Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s written by figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg.
Language poets were influenced by literary and cultural theory
They were also deeply influenced by the advent of literary and cultural theory
Immersed in Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, in deconstruction, Marxist theory, feminism, and post-structuralist theory more broadly, the Language writers were intent on bringing new theoretical ideas about language, representation, subjectivity, gender, and capitalism to bear on the writing of poetry.
At a time when many poets were retreating to a rather anti-intellectual, neo-Romantic model of lyrical self-expression (as we saw in the previous section), Language poets were talking about concepts like the signifier and signified, the politics of the referent, and the ideological state apparatus.
Language poets refused to abide by the boundary between creative and critical writing
They also refused to abide by the boundary between creative and critical writing – valuing writing poetics as much as composing poems – and their most influential writing has been as much in the form of essays about poetry as in poems themselves.
Language poetry is one of the best examples of postmodern poetry
Language poetry is often held up as one of the best examples of postmodernism in poetry
a suspicion of the conventions and assumptions underlying realism and traditional literary forms
self-conscious meta-reflection on its own textuality and artifice
a turn to radical formal experimentation, including an embrace of fragmentation, collage, pastiche, the appropriation of found language, and the use of constraints and procedures and play to generate text.
Language poetry also exhibits, as one of its chief features, postmodernism’s fascination with problems of language as a medium as well as its refusal of closure and devotion to openness and indeterminacy
skepticism toward grand narratives, foundations, and absolutes
belief in the social and linguistic construction of self and reality
general anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist outlook
Language poetry desires to dismantle a coherent, essential selfhood
desire to decenter subjectivity and dismantle the notion of coherent, essential selfhood
Language writers attack the model of selfhood found in such poems, taking special aim at the notion of a stable, unified “I” that presents itself as authentic and sincere in its convictions and emotions.
Language poets explore the fragmentation of identity and multiplicity of subjectivity (as we have already seen in poets like Ashbery, O’Hara, Spicer, and other New American poets)
Language poetry opposed 1970s dominant American poetry (official verse culture)
Language poets stood diametrically opposed to the brand of American poetry that reigned supreme in the 1970s, which in their view seemed decidedly out of touch with such currents of postmodernism.
Charles Bernstein gave the enemy a memorable name, “official verse culture,” by which he meant the academic creative writing establishment and its MFA programs, presses, prizes, and professors, which Language writers saw as deeply hostile to aesthetic innovation and formal experiment.
deeply hostile to aesthetic innovation and formal experiment.
Bernstein and his fellow poets critiqued the conservatism, conformity, and emphasis on professionalism they saw in “official verse culture” and viewed “academic creative writing as overly commodified and aesthetically stultifying”
From its inception, the bête noire of Language poetry was the so-called “workshop lyric” fostered by MFA programs
The poets had special disdain for the ascension of “epiphany poems” and confessional, first-person lyric poetry. In their eyes, such poems fail because they seem to ignore the radical advances of modernism and the twentieth-century avant-garde; instead, they fall back on naïve, traditional, and conservative notions about language, self, and poetry’s possibilities.
Avant-garde journals
avant-garde journals (such as This, Hills, and Poetics Journal) and small presses like Sun & Moon and The Figures.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The journal, which printed theory and criticism by poets rather than poems, provided a name for the nascent movement.
Language poets aspired for a utopian model of poetic community
They developed a rigorous, sometimes utopian model of poetic community, in part inspired by the communitarian ethos and the poetics of sociability espoused by the “New American Poetry” of the postwar period led by the New York School, Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poets.
Language poetry experimented with collaborative writing practices
social and communal dimensions of poetry
they began to experiment tirelessly with collaborative writing practices, resulting in multiple-authored works like Legend and Leningrad.
Marjorie Perloff was the most forceful academic advocate of language poetry
In the 1980s, Marjorie Perloff, one of the premier critics of twentieth-century poetry, became the movement’s most forceful academic advocate.
Language poets later became parts of the institutions they critiqued
By the 1990s, many of these anti-establishment poets, who had begun their careers far from the confines of the academy, had, controversially, become professors themselves. As these rebellious outsiders began to enter the canon and become at least somewhat “official” themselves, the poets wrestled with their own acceptance and pondered the relationship between poetry and institutions, as did critics and scholars of the movement.
Language poetry’s gradual acceptance and ultimate canonization increasingly looks like a watershed moment in the history of poetry since 1945.
Language poems consider how language influence subjectivity
Language poems often compel us to consider how much of an individual’s subjectivity, how much of our sense of ourselves, is shaped or determined by language, and in particular, by the dominant conventional forms of language in our culture
Language poets reject the ideal that language can provide unmediated access to the “real”
Inspired by arguments advanced by deconstruction and other forms of literary theory, they also oppose the model of language underlying mainstream poetry, which, they argue, rests on a faith that words can provide unmediated access to the “real.”
Language poets employ techniques that lay bare the materiality of language
Rather than treating language as a transparent window on the world, Language poets, by contrast, are drawn to collage, fragmentation, artificial constraints, and other methods that highlight the materiality of language and lay bare its workings.
Language writing “places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning”
Language poets techniques
To remind us of language as such, these poets use a wide range of devices to make the tangible, material nature of words inescapable. These include punning, experimenting with typography and the space of the page, prioritizing sound over conventional sense, and so on.
Language poets compose texts that are radically disjunctive, nonlinear, and open-ended. They argue that such writing calls for the reader to become an active participant in the production of the text’s meaning rather than merely a passive receiver.
This openness often leads to smashing normal syntax and coherence, which, many Language poets believe, is a powerful method for resisting and subverting the prefabricated, covertly ideological language produced by mainstream culture.
Language poets believe writing is unnatural
no element of writing is natural
our usual grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and subject matter are merely conventions
Language poets reject the authority of writer over reader
Lyn Hejinian calls for “The Rejection of Closure” and celebrates the idea of “the open text,” one that “invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies” (Language of Inquiry 43).
This belief that the reader must be an active participant in the creation of a text’s meanings is a major component of Language poetics
Criticisms against language poetry
Its detractors deride it as a kind of antiliterary word salad or, in the words of one critic, Tom Clark, “non-referential solipsist Muzak” self-enclosed, overly theoretical, impersonal, deliberately obscure and elitist, cut off from or disdainful of the “real,” and so on (Poetry Beat 71).
Charles Bernstein
His innovative, genre-bending essays (some of which appear in verse form) offer an inspired blend of contrarian polemic, acute analysis, and ironic humor as they confront the stifling rules and protocols of poetry and the institutions that underlie it
“Verse is born free but everywhere in chains,” he writes in My Way. “It has been my project to rattle the chains” (11).
In his poetry, Bernstein relentlessly draws our attention to the artifice of literary conventions, the constructed, ideological nature of language itself, and the indeterminacy of meaning.
He prefers a poetics of stuttering, interruption, and inarticulacy. Some poems even flirt with illegibility
Radically defamiliarizing language use in this way, Bernstein draws attention to the material surface of language and the visual and aural properties of literary texts.
they are often collages that juxtapose discontinuous statements, disparate voices, types of discourse, and bits of found language. Despite their strangeness and difficulty, his poems are enlivened by antic humor, as they crackle with exuberant wordplay, punning, and delight in language and its possibilities and pitfalls. Like so many Language poems, they also frequently reflect on themselves and their own processes
Anti absorption per Bernstein
In an important essay in verse called “The Artifice of Absorption” (which John Shoptaw has called “the best introduction to Language poetry likely to be written”) Bernstein contrasts “absorptive” writing – which he associates with words like “rhapsodic,” “spell-binding,” “hypnotic,” and “enthralling” – with the kind of “anti-absorptive” or “impermeable” poetry he favors (Schultz, Tribe 218). The latter takes as its province “artifice, boredom, / exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, / digression” (Bernstein, A Poetics 29). The goal of the kind of poetry he values is “to wake / us from the hypnosis of absorption” (A Poetics 54). Rather than the glazed gaze of the consumer, he calls for the awakened attention of the active reader
Ron Silliman
Silliman’s is actually overbrimming with carefully observed, concrete details of daily life and lyrical images that are not very hard to comprehend or grasp
This gift for vividly rendering the concrete specifics the world, along with Silliman’s penchant for puns and wordplay, playful irony and humor, and incisive cultural critique make his poetry quite engaging and even fun to read, despite the challenges it presents.
Rather than focusing on particular subject matter, telling a story with linear narration, or presenting anecdotes about the experiences of a stable autobiographical self, Silliman’s work is not overtly “about” a specific subject; instead, his radically inclusive, polyvocal poems aim to encompass everyday experience itself in all its three-dimensional variety and complexity.
Another distinctive feature of Silliman’s work is its effort to document the micropolitics of daily life, to use sharp-eyed observation and the juxtaposition of telling fragments to expose just how infiltrated by power, class, gender, and race the everyday can be.
Throughout his work, Silliman’s mantra seems to be “attention is all,” as his poetry calls for and enacts an intense attentiveness to the minutiae of quotidian experience and the nature of language.
All of these concerns and techniques would come together in a massive long poem called The Alphabet, which has rightly been called “an epic of everyday life.”
New sentence per Silliman
One of the founders of the West Coast branch of Language poetry, Silliman had a breakthrough in 1974 when he began to experiment with a new form of prose poetry that he called the “New Sentence.”
In his essay of that title, Silliman explains that the New Sentence dispenses with line breaks and other formal features of lyric poetry and instead calls for the creation of paragraphs made of complete, usually grammatically correct sentences, juxtaposed in collagelike, discontinuous structures.
prose poems written in the New Sentence mode often seem made up of non sequiturs, disparate fragments placed side by side which gain meaning through juxtaposition and relation, each sentence playing off the one before and after it. This style of prose poem became central to the work of many Language poets in the San Francisco area in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Hejinian and Perelman.
Procedural constraints per Silliman
Silliman also began experimenting with the idea of using procedural constraints to generate his writing, which he felt could liberate his poetry from habits of perception, thought, and writing.
to create the very long prose poem Ketjak (1974), Silliman followed a series of self-imposed rules, including the constraint that each paragraph has double the number of sentences as the paragraph preceding it and repeats each sentence from the previous paragraph in the exact same order with new sentences sandwiched between the existing sentences.
Silliman followed his ambitious poem Ketjak by using a similar procedural method to create another book-length work, Tjanting (1981), which deploys the Fibonacci sequence to dictate how many sentences would appear in each paragraph of the poem.
Over the course of his long career, Silliman has experimented with many other constraints, including a long prose poem consisting entirely of questions (“Sunset Debris”)
another generated by writing one sentence per day for a year based on the poet’s looking down at the ground (“Jones”).
Lyn Hejinian
Hejinian is a distinguished theorist of poetry and poetics as well, which can be seen in her book of essays and statements on poetics called The Language of Inquiry.
My Life (1980) by Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian also deploys the New Sentence to powerful effect in her most famous work, My Life (1980), which similarly uses constraints and rules to generate the text.
My Life is an experimental book-length prose poem that plays with the conventions of autobiography in its title and its content, but also its unusual form
In its first edition, the poem consisted of thirty-seven prose sections, each featuring thirty-seven sentences to correspond with Hejinian’s age when she wrote the book.
Seven years later, she expanded the work so that it consisted of forty-five sections, each one now forty-five sentences long, to correspond once more with her age.
She also includes italicized lines or phrases at the start of each section, epigraphs which appear and reappear as leitmotifs as the poem goes on–such as “as for we who ‘love to be astonished,’” “it seemed that we had hardy begun and we were already there,” “the obvious analogy is with music” – taking on different meanings depending on the new contexts in which they are embedded (My Life 9. 12, 19). This lends the poem a fugue-like structure of repetition and variation. The obvious analogy is with music, indeed.
throughout My Life, Hejinian’s non-sequitur sentences are studded with acute observations of quotidian experience, shards of childhood memory, aphorisms, philosophical commentary, and bits of cultural critique (“there is so little public beauty”), moments of lyricism one might find in more traditional poetry (“the pair of ancient, stunted apricot trees,” and “on the low horizon lay the vanishing vernal day”), meta-commentary on writing, language, and memoir (“it was impossible to get close to the original,” “the lobes of autobiography,” “if words matched their things we’d be imprisoned within walls of symmetry”) (My Life 59), puns and wordplay, reflections on gender, power, and politics (“Women, I heard, should speak softly, without mumbling”) (My Life 52), and so on.
Despite the challenges it presents for those accustomed to traditional lyric poetry, the book’s fractured narratives and haunting repetitions offer moving glimpses of the poet’s life and evolution, while simultaneously questioning memory, the work’s own artifice, the genre of autobiography, not to mention the mysterious nature of selfhood itself. Not surprisingly, My Life has become one of the most canonical, frequently taught works of postmodernist poetry and an excellent example of Language poetry at its best.
Hejinian challenges writing the self
Hejinian’s deliberate use of “such formal artifice” and procedural rules for “a genre as ‘natural’ as autobiography” serves to call into question the assumptions and conventions governing all forms of writing the self – memoir, autobiography, poems of the lyrical “I” (Radical 164).
Hejinian challenges the domain of the workshop lyric, while putting a postmodernist and feminist spin on an old and overly familiar genre of writing the self.
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout’s work looks starkly different from the long, maximalist prose poems of Silliman and Hejinian.
Even as the movement was coalescing in the 1970s, Armantrout deliberately turned away from the New Sentence because she felt that the “declarative sentences” of poems written in this mode tend to “declare” – “to create a tone of certainty, of resolution and completeness which leaves little room for the experience of silence” (Collected Prose 22).
her signature style – extremely compressed, lineated poems filled with lots of gaps and abundant white space on the page, showing the influence of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, and other minimalist poets.
Armantrout’s is an art of omission, of leaving out
Armantrout’s poems are usually collage-like structures that stitch together suggestive observations, quotations, and images. She frequently divides her poems into brief, discrete sections separated by asterisks or numbers. Though they lack overt connection to one another, these fragments are carefully chosen and arranged to create tension, irony, and resonance between the disparate pieces.
Armantrout rejects the linear narratives and accessible anecdotes spoken by a stable “I,” in favor of multiple, clashing voices and types of language.
Her poems combine glimpses of concrete, everyday experience, snippets of overheard speech, pieces of found language appropriated from popular culture and the white noise of the media or, more recently, the Internet, and fine-tuned apercus and philosophical reflections.
Armantrout also avoids moments of revelation, tidy conclusions, easy answers, or forms of closure, returning again and again to philosophical and political questions about how words relate to the world.
Armantrout also uses her poetry to enact acute social observation and cultural critique, through irony, play, and sardonic wit. She is particularly fascinated by how power, political forces, sexism, consumerism, and other forms of reigning ideology quietly shape our everyday experience and sense of reality.
“I could call what I do a sort of ‘poetry of witness’ – except, instead of witnessing great events, I tend to focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness” (Collected Prose 120).
Language poetry devotes to the everyday
Armantrout’s poems display the same kind of devotion to the everyday as other Language poets
Susan Howe
Although she has never fully identified as a Language poet, Susan Howe is usually considered a very important ally and affiliate of the movement.
In contrast to her Language poetry peers, Howe’s distinctive body of work is much more rooted in a fascination with history and archives.
She is particularly captivated by the lineage of American thought, history, and language that runs from the Puritans through Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, and pragmatist philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, to modern poets like Wallace Stevens and Charles Olson.
Among her most important works is My Emily Dickinson, an unusual book that blends literary criticism, archival research, memoir, and lyricism to recover the radical dimensions of Emily Dickinson’s work and life.
Howe’s poetry can be thought of as a similar, extensive reclamation project. She plumbs the material traces of the past, digging into archives and finding meaning, mystery, and beauty in manipulating the language found there.
“marks he made in the margins of his books are often a conversation with the dead” (Nonconformist’s 89). The same could be said of Howe’s work.
“I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted – inarticulate” (Europe of Trusts 14).
Howe’s work can be understood as a political act and a feminist project
her work is “burdened by history: The burden of retrieving from erasure and marginality those (women) who have been written out” (194).
Howe’s unique, uncompromising work, especially her fascination with found or archival materials, her feminist recovery project, and her experimentation with the space of the page, have left a sizable mark on contemporary American poetry.
Howe’s avant-garde methods
Howe achieves this retrieval by using a range of avant-garde methods that make her work challenging and groundbreaking – these include the collaging together of fragments of found language, disrupted syntax, erasure, and extensive play with the visual look of words on the page.
In a Howe poem, sentences are sometimes printed upside down, lines cross the page at wild angles, or words overlap with other words. As a result, her unusual-looking poems are often works of both verbal and visual art.
Language poetry perpetuated the divide between experimental and identity-based writing
It also helped create, and perpetuate, an unfortunate divide between “experimental” poetry on the one hand and “minority” or “identity-based” writing on the other
the poets, along with many scholars who have written about their work, encouraged an opposition between the movement’s own brand of poetry – which rigorously resists the notion of unitary selfhood – and poetry based on “identity politics” written by people of color.
Post-Language writers
it spawned a whole series of important post-Language descendants who both extend and challenge the original movement (ranging from poets who studied with founding members, like Juliana Spahr or Peter Gizzi, to figures like Kenneth Goldsmith, whose own movement, conceptual poetry, arises in the wake of Language writing).
American hybrid form from 1990s
in the late 1990s, American poetry sees the emergence of a new middle path, a hybrid form that supposedly splits the difference between the diametrically opposed categories of “experimental” and “mainstream.” This new direction in poetry points to the assimilation of the disruptive, avant-garde techniques associated with Language poetry and the fusion of such strategies with more traditional conventions of lyric poetry.