Daniel Morris
History and/as Language Poetry: Remembering Literary Community through Negation in Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.
In a recent essay in American Literature, J. Peter Moore reads silence and/as the vernacular in Amiri Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964).[1] Moore understands Baraka’s privileging of silence as a “fugitive effort” that signifies resistance to hegemony, but that also initiates community through “opacity” (805). Baraka’s subject position, generational situation(he was born Everett Leroi Jones in Newark in 1934), and poetic affiliations – he wrote The Dead Lecturer on the cusp of his participation with the Black Arts Movement in Harlem after abandoning the Beats following Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 -- differ markedly from the subject of this essay, Barrett Watten. Born in Long Beach, California 1948, Watten, a founding member and historiographer of the Bay Area Language Poetry movement, majored in biochemistry at Berkeley when The Dead Lecturer appeared in print. At the same time, Watten in Questions of Poetics: Language Poetry and Consequence (2016) argues that Language Poetry, which occurred as a belated rhetorical response in the mid-1970s to the limits of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, abides by a poetics that foregrounds obduracy as a form of vernacular expression. As with silence and silencing as notable components of dissident group formation in Baraka, Watten does not only imagine negation as a key feature in Language Poetry’s obfuscatory resistance to hegemony. He also frames negation as a means of signifying a community of outsiders who may “remain conscious within a language of systematic denial” through “techniques of subtraction and refusal of closure that lead beyond formal composition (tonal or atonal) to nonintentionality and sound in postwar and contemporary avant-gardes” (179).
Language Poetry is a type of opaque writing that negates ease of reader receptivity.[2] This negation occurs even as Language poets self-consciously design texts that maximize the range of possible responses to the materiality of language. Language poets may understand their writings as meaning-bearing constructs, but subject to an endless deferral of conclusive receptivity through the withdrawal of difference between poesis and textual critique. At least in theory, Language poetry’s ludic qualities upend the Neo-Liberal fetishization of the consumable object as a transparent form of private property available to monetization through a market economy. Appropriating Moore’s understanding of the fugitive purposes of silence and the vernacular in Baraka’s watershed book of poems from 1964, I am reading Watten’s account of Language Poetry in Questions of Poetics as, in Moore’s terms, a “willful failure to comply to standards” of normative discourse. As with the vernacular, Language Poetry in Watten’s recuperative historiographic treatment of the avant-garde movement in Questions of Poetics and in The Grand Piano collective autobiography project (2006-2010), featured the communal value of resistance as a non-normative social formation. Ironically, the poetry community’s failure to stick together over the ensuing decades merely underscores the unruly role negation has played in the development of a movement bent on resisting containment via periodization. In a study that as a rule averts emotional expressivity as a residue of lyric subjectivity, Watten’s acknowledgement, even embrace, of fissure, abandonment, and incompleteness as characteristics of his attempt in The Grand Piano to historicize Language Poetry as a canonical movement signals a poignant aspect of Questions of Poetics. Language Poetry conveys a communitarian ethos and yet tolerates, even courts, dissolution as a constituent feature of a poetics that resists distinctions between primary textualization and secondary contextualization. In his reception of The Grand Piano in Questions of Poetics, Watten regards the ten-part collective autobiography he designed and published from his current home base in Detroit as creating a space of “multiauthorship at a crossroads where friendship, community, and writing meet” (125). At the same time, he acknowledges that “differences and conflicts” among the ten authors involved in the group project led to “the fault lines of negativity” and “dissent from collective forms” (128) that, in turn, led Bob Perelman to abandon his role in The Grand Piano prior to the completion of the series. According to Watten:
Bob worries that the turn to language cancels the presence and immediacy he finds to be a central concern of writing
(and of the contingency of community, as present rather than an artifact of the past), throwing out the baby (presence)
with the bathwater (tradition) leads him to preserve the fault lines of negativity among us as a fact of literary value
and friendship. (128)
Fragmentation becomes a characteristic of the consequential afterlife of Language poetry, which Watten treats as holding an insecure but identifiable relationship to more recent movements such as Conceptual Writing and Flarf. We think of Language poetics as materialist. Watten’s oddly dislocational historicism, however, interprets his movement as an ineffable conceptualism that simultaneously moors and dislodges the text from a specific time and place. What does success for Language poetry look like, I wondered, given Watten’s consideration of movement’s obscurity, dissensus, and defiance of closure as privileged versions of terms that, as Moore argues with Baraka, are usually viewed as disappointing indications of malfunction.[3]
In “On the Advantages of Negativity,” chapter five of Questions of Poetics, Watten shows partiality towards negativity in a nuanced appreciation and sensitive close reading of fellow Language Poet and long-time Fordham University Political Science professor Bruce Andrews’ appearance on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor (November 2, 2006). In the segment of the right wing program entitled “Outrage of the Week,” O’Reilly challenges Andrews’ decision to include Robert Sheer’s The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq (2003) on a reading list for a course on “Analysis of International Politics.” Watten especially admires Andrews’ refusal to accept O’Reilly’s premises or, conversely, to vigorously defend his decision to teach Sheer, which Watten describes as “a signal instance of negativity” (172). In Bartleby fashion, Andrews neither affirms nor denies O’Reilly’s HUAC-like Red Baiting characterization of Andrews as in agreement with Sheer’s positions in The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq (2003). Watten concentrates on how Andrews questions the questioner, challenges O’Reilly’s premises, and refuses to succumb to O’Reilly’s “assumptions” about the relationship between the professor’s views and his inclusion of Sheer on a reading list (174). By so doing, Watten connects Andrews’s negativity (his obduracy) to the political valence of Language Poetry, which signifies a non-compliance with “the dominant discourse network” (Moore, 800).
Watten implicitly links Andrews's negativity to other examples of a poetics of obfuscation that occurred prior to the birth of Language Poetry, but which in retrospect has motivated his reading of the relationship between difficult poetry, disruptive politics, and critical obduracy. A case in point is Watten's analysis of Allen Ginsberg's response -- documented in the film Berkeley in the Sixties (1991) to a reporter's questions about his role in a 1965 Vietnam Day Committee march from Berkeley to the Oakland Army Base:
Reporter to Ginsberg: Go ahead, just react.
Ginsberg: Well, what do you want? A reaction to what?
Reporter: React to the greatness of the march, of the day, as a victory or what? Are you happy with it?
Ginsberg, into camera, singing: Hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva.
[Looks at reporter and nods] (29)
For Watten, the Beat icon illustrates, avant la lettre, how a Language poet may use silence, absurdism, indirection, and the privileging of an otherness that is left untranslated, if not fully untranslatable, to disrupt normative politics in ways that could not be accomplished through resort to a coherent enactment of Free Speech. According to Watten: “Ginsberg’s answer to the reporter’s awkward question is a perfect non-explanation of his perspective on the march, as well as of his politics: the mantra hari om namo shiva” (30). As with his reading of Andrews on The O’Reilly Show, and, by and large, his understanding of Language Poetry’s inscrutability, Watten is claiming Ginsberg aims for what Watten defines as a use of language that expresses a desire for “opaque emancipation” that expresses aims that “cannot be communicated transparently”(32).
In Questions of Poetics, Watten frames Language Poetry from Berkeley in the 70s as a belated linguistic response to the poet’s own, at times traumatic, involvement with the limits of the Free Speech movement. His study also confronts the fiction of liberalism’s tolerance for dissent, and the state-sponsored violence that enforced these limits in the mid to late 1960s. As noted in Questions of Poetics, Watten was in fact a student at Cal in the late 1960s, graduating with an AB in biochemistry in 1969, the time and place he defines as one layer of the foundation for the subsequent development in the 1970s of Language Poetry as a nonstandard discursive performance.[4] Retroactively, Watten interprets Language Poetry as a response to the limits of Free Speech at Cal during the protest movement as documented in the film Berkeley in the Sixties, which Watten comments upon in detail in Questions of Poetics. Watten was among those who attended California’s flagship public university at a time when modest tuition enabled many young people of modest means to matriculate there. He represents his movement’s esoteric relationship to mimesis as a rejection of the academic, civic, and political environment that denied Free Speech to Cal students. Watten associates the distribution of tear gas via military helicopters to disperse a Free Speech rally in the Bay Area with gas bombings in South East Asia. In this reading, the children of California’s middle class morph into displaced victims of U.S. imperial rage. Negating lyric convention as a symbolic reflection of a discredited liberalism, Language Poetry becomes an allegorical instantiation and disruptive commentary upon the limits to Free Speech imposed upon outspoken, but silenced, UC activists.[5] In 1964, Cal President Clark Kerr barred Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, and Michael Rossman from placing tables to distribute anti-war literature at Sproul Place on the Berkeley campus by Clark Kerr. Kerr was a leading proponent of defining the public research university as a component of the knowledge industry. Kerr viewed Cal in terms of its use value. Cal, Kerr argued, could grow the nation’s GDP in postmodern times in ways comparable to how the railroads and the automobile industry enhanced the nation’s economic progress in modernism. By invoking Berkeley in the Sixties, director Mark Kitchell’s 1991 documentary about Cal in 1964, Watten troubles our ability to locate the origins of Language poetry in time and space. He connects Language poetry’s pre-history at Cal with actions by the Black Panthers, who sell (but initially do not read) Mao’s Little Red Book, to progressive students outside the gates of the Berkeley campus to earn funds to buy weapons. He also links Language poetry with the subsequent post-colonial theories of Gayatri Spivak, whose figure of the subaltern, “the voiceless other outside the total system of Western reason and its self-confirming construction of alterity, who has no voice and cannot speak” is read as anticipated by Kerr’ silencing of Cal protestors (412). This is not your father’s Language Poetry, but one that is rooted in the embodied experience of engaged, activist, populist, vernacular, historical, communitarian, and resistant student protestors on the front lines.
Language Poetry is not merely an art world intervention. Primarily white, mostly male, mostly straight, and attending elite universities, Language poets are in this study remembered as locking arms and standing shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters in a political movement that was far more queer, multicultural, embodied, engaged, pop cultural oriented, friendly to difference, and communitarian than the literary movement is often remembered to have been. As opposed to his repudiation of Conceptual Writing as excessively reliant upon formalist concerns to promote its situation as a break from Language writing, Watten remembers Language Poetry’s origins in the context of what Moore, writing on Baraka, calls a “cultural tradition of vernacular aesthetics” that eschews “avant-garde insularity” (804).
Contesting the critique of Language Poetry as a formal movement in opposition to and exclusive of poets of color, women, poor persons, and queer poets, Watten in Questions of Poetics recalls an initiatory scene for Language Poetry that occurred at a coffee shop in Berkeley in which he and Ron Silliman meet Lyn Hejinian. The initiatory scene is complex in terms of the politics of gender relations and the formation of Language poetry. On the one hand, Watten represents Hejinian as part of the foundational trio, and so critiques of the movement as male-centric would be overstated. On the other hand, the foundational moment has the whiff of what Eve Sedgwick would have described as a homosocial event “between men.” As Watten acknowledges in his recollection of the movement’s primal scene, Hejinian’s appearance seems to bring out a belated adolescent rivalry between Watten and Silliman as they wonder between themselves whether Hejinian has ever read Milton:
Beyond the admission of belatedness (often associated with narratives of beginning) in this passage [from the Grand Piano
in which Hejinian recalls meeting Watten and Silliman at a Berkeley café in 1977], the homosocial moment of interpellation
or hailing is important. The two men’s anxiety over Milton’s influence of a woman poet, an association with Lyn’s imagined
class background and real Harvard education, was a challenge to patrilineage and homosocialty in the early stages of
group formation. Lyn likely remembers this moment of challenge because that is what it was: in asking for her literary
credentials, the two males playfully (or offensively) resist (or agree to) modification of their ‘original’ compact, which
will be deepened as collectivity develops and expands. (124)
Milton, of course, is a politically radical figure. Notably, he wrote treatise on divorce, educational reform, regicide, and republicanism. His Aeropagitica (1644) argued in favor of free speech and a free press. According to Blake, Milton in Paradise Lost represented the combative romantic artist who chafed against the restrains of hierarchy by being of Satan’s party without knowing it, but Milton also represents, perhaps more so than any other English poet besides Shakespeare, a fixture in the high English canon. Watten is challenging traditional ideas of linear narrative historiography. He represents Language Poetry as forged a decade before he met with other Bay Area figures at coffee shops to organize cultural endeavors that he would, in retrospect, regard as formational activities to a movement whose significance was unpredictable. The meanings of Language poetry have unfurled via an array of historicist interventions of which Questions of Poetics and The Grand Piano are major instances.[6] As in William Faulkner’s quip from Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It's not even past,” Watten displaces the foundation of Language poetry into moments prior to its inscription and also anterior to what is commonly regarded as its periodic heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. Watten understands Language Poetry as a response to the “falseness of public language” and to the “inadequacy of language to history” (66), as well as to the encounter with “the limits of the system” of American liberalism that occurred during the clamp down on the Free Speech movement in Berkeley a decade prior to the formation of Language Poetry.
In chapter four, “Periodizing the Present,” Watten links the Japanese-born (but, from 1965, New York based) conceptual artist On Kawara’s date paintings, “which bring together form and history” (156) to The Grand Piano (2006-2010), “in which the defamiliarizing New is read in relation to historical frames” (156). Watten offers a historicist reading of Language Poetry as steeped in a 60s radicalism that is connected to a critique of Free Speech. At the same time, his placement of Language poetry exceeds a fixed periodization. Language Poetry is thus protected from the danger of supersession by “the proliferation of post-avant strategies” (154). By contrast, he treats Conceptual Writing as, ironically, not conceptual because the emphasis is on the material dimensions of what he regards as a sterile formalism. “Conceptual writing is concerned with repurposing existing forms of language, as does Language writing, rather than dematerializing existing conventions of art, as does conceptual art” (155). Far from an unmediated expression of a “pure present” (158), Conceptual Writing is in fact a hypermediated (and thus, like Language poetry, materialist oriented) practice. Rather than inaugurating a new period in literary history, Conceptual Writing is merely a rehashing of 20th century projects “from Dada cut-ups to John Cage’s and Jackson Mac Low’s chance procedures to the New Sentence and OuLiPo” that, predating Language Poetry, used “repurposing” and “citational methods” for defamialiarizing projects. By contrast to Conceptual Poetry, which Watten regards as neither an unmediated “pure present” nor a significant advance over past practices of appropriation, Language Poetry is aligned to the temporally disjunctive and spatially uncontainable processes found in On Kawara’s date paintings, known collectively as Today (1966-2013). Kawara’s art defies periodization because his “oeuvre as a whole is organized as an archaeology of representations of time that reflexively engages the temporal frameworks – or periodized/ing history – that it was produced in” (149). Through his reading of Kawara’s date paintings, Watten, by analogy, can frame Language Poetry as a practice that one may date as a movement that Watten helped found in the Bay Area in the mid-1970s, but that may not be contained or reduced to that single historical frame. As The Grand Piano and Questions of Poetics indicate, the ongoing reinscription of the significance of the movement has extended into its reception as a reauthorization that, Watten contends, he and other early proponents of the movement neither could have predicted nor have produced at the time of the movement’s origination. Questions of Poetics historicizes, and in this sense periodizes, Language Poetry. Watten narrates Language Poetry’s pre-history in the Free Speech struggles of the Sixties. He also conceives The Grand Piano and Questions of Poetics as part of the ongoing “social formation of the avant-garde” through the construction of “interpretive frames” (14). Moving away from an understanding of the Language poem as a distinct materialist work, he deliberately blurs the lines between reading and writing, production and consumption, historiography and poetics, poetic practice, literary history, embodied protest, and cultural theory. A paradoxical history, Questions of Poetics negates traditional conceptions of the genre as consisting of divvying up events, understood as value-bearing outside or their representation, into a neatly demarcated past, present, and future. “Like artistic production, the reception of the work of art is also a construction of value. Works of literature and art are valued not only in terms of their individual merits but also as representative of their periods, genres, and schools – each a material construction above the level of the author or work” (16).[7]
Just as Watten’s critical/historical/autobiographical prose is designed to cast Language Poetry as currently resonant, he also wants to receive the movement most likely to be regarded as superseding Language Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, as one that “still depends on past art production to give it meaning and value” (17). Watten, for example, reads fellow Language poet Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet’s use of proceduralism and attention to typography as at once anticipating and superseding in quality later conceptual projects such as those put forward by Kenneth Goldsmith:
The Alphabet often anticipates – and does advance work for – later conceptualist strategies that provoke uncertainty over whether
a given work needs to be read, once its procedures are notes. Silliman’s procedural forms may be read as early (and more
complex) examples of conceptual writing, long before the movement was announced as an alternative to Language
writing” (93).
Watten is overstating the case because of his investments in promoting the work of a fellow member of a movement each helped to found. He distinguishes Silliman from Goldsmith by claiming that while Goldsmith’s places value in a “pure present,” The Alphabet (2008) is simultaneously a conceptualist project of linguistic dissociation from referent and “a historical reference or an event itself” (93) that provides information about the Vietnam War, the Manson murders, the Gulf War, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Like Silliman, Goldsmith has used processes of arbitrary proceduralism such as the alphabet to construct frames for his appropriative uncreative writing in books such as Capital (2015). It is, however, inaccurate to suggest Goldsmith is exclusively offering, as Watten claims “a defamiliarizing, inauthentic presence in its chosen forms of writing, an open-ended allegory for the ‘homogenous empty time’ of the reified lifeworld as an opaque reinscription of preexisting language” (156). A major Goldsmith work such as Capital does work with “preexisting language,” and does touch on the themes of reification and defamiliarization, but at the same time, as with Watten’s version of Silliman, Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (Verso: 2015) is brimming with historical information and is itself a significant historical event.
To conclude (and to return this essay to remarks I made at the outset) I am aware that on several fronts my decision to begin this review essay on Questions of Poetics by connecting the role of negativity in Baraka and Watten is somewhat perverse. Unlike Baraka, Watten in Questions of Poetics wrestles with the conundrum of representing what Moore calls “fugitive resistance” from a position of whiteness and class privilege. Further, Watten and Baraka opposed each other in a well-publicized, contentious, and feisty debate about the history of Language Poetry at a conference held at the University of Maine at Orono in 2000. That said, if verbal conflicts with other contemporary culture workers at public forums --Robert Duncan, Donald Pease, Juliana Spahr – barred me from making analogies between Watten’s poetics and that of others, I would be limited in doing what Watten himself wants readers to do, which is to offer a revisionary history (and pre-history) of Language Poetry in relation to movements often viewed as antithetical to his own. Verbal sparring at literary events has been par for the course for Watten at least since the 1970s. This is so even as his written work may be characterized as detached, objective-sounding, and impersonal in tone and even as he comes across in person (in the few times I have met him in non-confrontational situations) as a mild-mannered, Clark Kent looking bespeckled late middle aged academician in khaki pants and button down. Lore of Watten’s heated conflicts, however, have become legendary within certain circles interested in how new poetics does or does not interact with politics, the academicization of alternative cultures, and especially how race, class, and gender are represented (or not) in new poetry movements. Perhaps, as Robert Archambeau has suggested in a blog post on Watten’s critique of panel presentations on the Robert Duncan-inspired New Gnosticism movement at the Louisville Conference on Language and Literature since 1900, such conflicts remain for Watten traumatic memories at once recalling and stunting his responses to emotionally stunning verbal ripostes with revered elders. Trauma may be one reason why the tone of Questions of Poetics is so remote, at times impenetrable. This is so even as the history Watten recalls is intimate, and even as, in his own view, a good deal of his critical study could be dismissed as a potentially illegitimate “biographical indulgence” (207) offering “the genealogy of the poet/critic” (217). In the book’s final chapter, Watten goes so far in the direction of self-analysis that he offers a close reading of his own poem “Radio.” He also recalls a reading, first published in The Constructivist Moment (2003), of a drawing he did at age five of a “head of a king’s son” (207). He must have composed the drawing during an experience of real life trauma involving a father and a son: the juvenile’s artwork was made “about the time my father was stationed on a destroyer and in Japan during the Korean War” (207).
We have learned from theorists such as Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) that silence, negation, amnesiac forgetting, resistance to closure, temporal displacement, and a lack of access to feeling are characteristic (non)responses to trauma. Emphasizing how forms of obduracy, anamorphosis and negation motivated difficult writing as a site for dissent and community formation among Language oriented poets in the late 1970s in the Bay Area, Watten in Questions of Poetics recalls (again, by vacating an emotive register) traumatic experiences. Trauma range from being a victim of a state-sponsored helicopter-distributed chemical attack on Bay Area protesters in the late 1960s, to the run-ins with Baraka and Duncan, to his recollection of the drawing he made when he was five years old and his father was on a destroyer ship near Japan during the Korean War. The austere language and chill tone he selects to remember these experiences deprives (negates and silences) the reader from access to vivid representations that would recreate the emotionalism, lyricism, and linguistic intensity that one expects to find in a more traditional memoir. Without knowing Watten’s backstory, I suspect a reader might underestimate Watten’s investment in recalling the history of a movement he has devoted his adult life to developing and to keeping relevant in the face of threats by upstart movements such as Flarf, conceptual writing, The New Gnosticism, and the New Narrative. In Questions of Poetics, Watten treats the high profile conflicts with Baraka and Duncan in flatly stated and objective-sounding footnotes. He literally displaces these conflicts away from the main body of the work in the spatial sense that he relegates the discussion of the Baraka and Duncan events to endnotes. Watten enacts negation through silence. He suppresses the emotional significance of face-to-face performances in a study that regards what happened in the past, as in his reading of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise (2008), as an “archive….motivated by a negativity at its core – of trauma, unrepresentability, nonidentity – and each unfolds at the boundary between narrative and nonnarrative, the visible and the opaque” (102-103). A freezing of feeling (it was Dickinson who wrote that such a “formal feeling” tends to follow “great pain”) is part of how Watten treats with asbestos gloves moments of explosive fissure and generational (with Duncan) and racial and generational (with Baraka) conflicts. Such incidents, I trust Watten would maintain, are always already fictive constructs. It is not that the footnotes on the Duncan and Baraka conflicts are uninformative. They are. Watten’s point is that we should interpret face-to-face events within the context of an unfolding historiography of a poetics movement whose significance remains undetermined outside of an ever-expanding horizon of critical interventions at conferences, in journals, blogs, and reappraisals such as Questions of Poetics and even this essay for that matter. For Watten, the dustups with Baraka and Duncan are themselves textual events available to reinscripton, commentary, historiography, performance, language, and theory. The endnotes devoted to them are primarily a spur to promote further reading, reflection, and commentary as the footnotes include a bibliography of published commentaries, interviews, and theoretical underpinnings that suggest the ongoing significance of the debates in terms of the ongoing unfolding of the historiography of the poetics project.[8] It is as if what must have been stressful and even disheartening conflicts did not happen to Watten, and I believe he would in some sense claim the events did not happen to him, or, better, that the “him” of the representations of these events is a separate entity from the feeling person who experienced the conflicts. In similarly uninflected rhetoric, Watten uses a passive sentence structure to foreground the agency of language over and above the agency of the embodied participants in his (non)memory of the especially consequential conflict between himself and Robert Duncan at an event in honor of Louis Zukofsky in the late 1970s. In retrospect, Watten has viewed the conflict with Duncan as setting Language Poetry back a decade and several observers have told me the Zukofsky event was an experience of particular upset to Watten.[9]
A study of the roots and consequences of an influential literary movement, Watten in Questions of Poetics claims distinctions earlier generations of critics have made between the production and reception of poetry is moot when it comes to understanding the kinds of writings he values the most. Watten disputes W.K. Wimsatt’s interpretation of the poem as an object of desire that is distinct from the critical response to it. Watten, by contrast, aligns his poetics with the unstable interaction between poet (and/as) critic and/or critic (and/as) poet found in William Carlos Williams’s genre-busting Spring and All (1923), the hybridic lyric/essayistic writings of Charles Olson, and the poetics fostered in Donald Allen’s 1960 The New American Poetry. Donald Allen, of course, included work by Baraka, as well as figures such as Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, all of whom take their place as precursors to the version of Language Poetry that Watten develops in Questions of Poetics. As in the texts put together by Williams, Olson, and Allen, Watten blurs the lines between poetry and theory, primary and secondary texts, poet and theorist, writing and reading, work and commentary, text and context, unsettling language and disruptive politics. Watten privileges the idea of the “poem as an expanded object” (201). Calling “for wider horizons of interpretation and meaning,” he explores “the formal construction of the work in relation to external, cultural logics” (210 beyond New Critical assessments of the poem as distinguished object removed from the web of critical scrutiny that invests libidinal significances upon a linguistic formation of elevated significance (201).
Advancing a provisional claim for Language poetry’s place in literary history, Watten remains mindful, however, that periodization at once affirms the movement’s epochal significance, but also threatens to contain its ongoing relevance to the development (and critique) of upstart movements such as Conceptual Writing and Flarf whose proponents have claimed to have superseded Language Poetry. Unlike Marjorie Perloff’s interpretation of Language Poetry as a primarily formalist/aesthetic period in a “series of avant-gardes” (7), Watten argues that the progressive political resonances evident in Language Poetry’s pre-history reveal an aporia in subsequent movements such as Flarf and Conceptual writing that, allegedly, have displaced it in the 2000s. During the cultural wars of the 1980s, the pluralist movements of the 1990s, Language Poetry has been critiqued as, variously, narcissistic, elitist, “hostile to identity politics” (6), and as promoting a “contextless formalism divorced from any specific political, cultural, or expressive aims” (5). More recently Language poetry has been criticized as authoritarian in its claims to have been the first and last true avant-garde movement in poetics, Watten’s goal is to restore the “historical crises that gave Language writing its necessity” (5).
Works Cited
Robert Archambeau. "’Where's It Coming From?’: Barrett Watten, Robert Duncan, and the New Gnosticism in Poetry.” Samizdat Blog.
February 24, 2013.
Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2016.
William Faulkner. Requiem for a Nun.(1951). New York: Vintage International Reprint Edition, 2012.
LeRoi Jones. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.Charles Rycroft. A Critical
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, New York: Penguin, 1995. Second Edition.
Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Barrett Watten. Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.
--. Editor. The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. Detroit: Mode A. 2006-2007.
Permissions to reproduce quotations from Questions of Poetics have been granted by Barrett Watten.
[1] J. Peter Moore; “A silence that only they understand”: Amiri Baraka and the Silent Vernacular of The Dead Lecturer.
American Literature 1 December 2017; 89 (4): 791–820. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4257859
[2] In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft defines “Negation”: “Process by which a perception or thought is admitted to consciousness in negative form, e.g., the onset of a headache is registered by the thought, ‘How lucky I am to have been free from headaches for so long’; the fact that a figure in a dream stands for the mother is admitted by the statement, ‘It wasn’t my mother anyhow.; (The point here is that none the less the idea that it might be the mother must have occurred for it to be denied.) Not to be confused with denial; negativism.” (108). A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, New York: Penguin, 1995. Second Edition.
[3] I understand closure in psychoanalytic terms as a breach in the fictive bracket persons may impose upon immediate events as dissociated from subsequent linguistic remediation.
[4] Watten had attended MIT before transferring to Cal, where he would return in the 1980s for a PhD after taking an MFA at Iowa.
Watten notes: “I was among the crowd of students underneath the helicopter attack. My next ‘turn’ was to poetry, specifically
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I was referred by Josephine Miles and Robert Grenier, arriving in January 1970.” (Note, p.231)
[6] The Grand Piano was in fact the name of “a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-1979 the authors [of The Grand Piano collective autobiography] took part in a reading and performance series” [The Grand Piano book flap].
[7] Watten adds: “Writing in the present about writing in the past creates a double register of temporality and historicity: the past becomes a shifter, as the present continually changes meaning and value. Similarly, the date paintings of On Kawara, as an exemplary meditation on presentism and periodization in conceptual art, create a dynamic in which the present in which the work is made (identical to the date depicted on the paining) shifts into the past immediately on completion. The date as a referential shifter (between present and past) keeps the periodization of On Kawara’s serial work open, until it ends (or until one of the conceptual strategies he uses terminates)” [17].
Watten writes: “The conflict over the poetics of presence and translation erupted as a moment of dissensus between me and Robert Duncan during an evening, sponsored by the San Francisco Poetry Center, devoted to the work of Louis Zukofsky shortly after his death in 1978. Many references to the event appear throughout The Grand Piano; see also Jarnot, “San Francisco is Burning,” chap. 61 of Robert Duncan. (244). (On the politics of empty signifiers, see Laclau, Emanicipations(s), chap. 3.” (231)
[9] Recalling Watten part in a discussion of the New Gnosticism at a conference in Louisville, Robert Achembou writes: “Here's what I think was at stake: the return of the repressed, or the revisiting of trauma. The best way to get at this may be to come back to a moment, now legendary in certain poetry circles, when a young Watten had a very public run-in with Robert Duncan, a kind of godfather of the New Gnosticism (and the primary subject of Peter O'Leary's study Gnostic Contagion). The late David Bromige told the story well, maintaining, in an interview, that Watten was ‘the arch villain’ of poetry in Duncan's eyes, because Watten and the Language poets were, for him, ‘the New Criticism come again. It was everything he, Robert and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.’ For Duncan, Watten represented ‘poetry written by critics, and a very buttoned down kind of poetry too...’ Matters came to a head, says Bromige, at a conference in 1979, when Watten and Duncan were going to speak about Louis Zukofsky.”
In a recent essay in American Literature, J. Peter Moore reads silence and/as the vernacular in Amiri Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964).[1] Moore understands Baraka’s privileging of silence as a “fugitive effort” that signifies resistance to hegemony, but that also initiates community through “opacity” (805). Baraka’s subject position, generational situation(he was born Everett Leroi Jones in Newark in 1934), and poetic affiliations – he wrote The Dead Lecturer on the cusp of his participation with the Black Arts Movement in Harlem after abandoning the Beats following Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 -- differ markedly from the subject of this essay, Barrett Watten. Born in Long Beach, California 1948, Watten, a founding member and historiographer of the Bay Area Language Poetry movement, majored in biochemistry at Berkeley when The Dead Lecturer appeared in print. At the same time, Watten in Questions of Poetics: Language Poetry and Consequence (2016) argues that Language Poetry, which occurred as a belated rhetorical response in the mid-1970s to the limits of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, abides by a poetics that foregrounds obduracy as a form of vernacular expression. As with silence and silencing as notable components of dissident group formation in Baraka, Watten does not only imagine negation as a key feature in Language Poetry’s obfuscatory resistance to hegemony. He also frames negation as a means of signifying a community of outsiders who may “remain conscious within a language of systematic denial” through “techniques of subtraction and refusal of closure that lead beyond formal composition (tonal or atonal) to nonintentionality and sound in postwar and contemporary avant-gardes” (179).
Language Poetry is a type of opaque writing that negates ease of reader receptivity.[2] This negation occurs even as Language poets self-consciously design texts that maximize the range of possible responses to the materiality of language. Language poets may understand their writings as meaning-bearing constructs, but subject to an endless deferral of conclusive receptivity through the withdrawal of difference between poesis and textual critique. At least in theory, Language poetry’s ludic qualities upend the Neo-Liberal fetishization of the consumable object as a transparent form of private property available to monetization through a market economy. Appropriating Moore’s understanding of the fugitive purposes of silence and the vernacular in Baraka’s watershed book of poems from 1964, I am reading Watten’s account of Language Poetry in Questions of Poetics as, in Moore’s terms, a “willful failure to comply to standards” of normative discourse. As with the vernacular, Language Poetry in Watten’s recuperative historiographic treatment of the avant-garde movement in Questions of Poetics and in The Grand Piano collective autobiography project (2006-2010), featured the communal value of resistance as a non-normative social formation. Ironically, the poetry community’s failure to stick together over the ensuing decades merely underscores the unruly role negation has played in the development of a movement bent on resisting containment via periodization. In a study that as a rule averts emotional expressivity as a residue of lyric subjectivity, Watten’s acknowledgement, even embrace, of fissure, abandonment, and incompleteness as characteristics of his attempt in The Grand Piano to historicize Language Poetry as a canonical movement signals a poignant aspect of Questions of Poetics. Language Poetry conveys a communitarian ethos and yet tolerates, even courts, dissolution as a constituent feature of a poetics that resists distinctions between primary textualization and secondary contextualization. In his reception of The Grand Piano in Questions of Poetics, Watten regards the ten-part collective autobiography he designed and published from his current home base in Detroit as creating a space of “multiauthorship at a crossroads where friendship, community, and writing meet” (125). At the same time, he acknowledges that “differences and conflicts” among the ten authors involved in the group project led to “the fault lines of negativity” and “dissent from collective forms” (128) that, in turn, led Bob Perelman to abandon his role in The Grand Piano prior to the completion of the series. According to Watten:
Bob worries that the turn to language cancels the presence and immediacy he finds to be a central concern of writing
(and of the contingency of community, as present rather than an artifact of the past), throwing out the baby (presence)
with the bathwater (tradition) leads him to preserve the fault lines of negativity among us as a fact of literary value
and friendship. (128)
Fragmentation becomes a characteristic of the consequential afterlife of Language poetry, which Watten treats as holding an insecure but identifiable relationship to more recent movements such as Conceptual Writing and Flarf. We think of Language poetics as materialist. Watten’s oddly dislocational historicism, however, interprets his movement as an ineffable conceptualism that simultaneously moors and dislodges the text from a specific time and place. What does success for Language poetry look like, I wondered, given Watten’s consideration of movement’s obscurity, dissensus, and defiance of closure as privileged versions of terms that, as Moore argues with Baraka, are usually viewed as disappointing indications of malfunction.[3]
In “On the Advantages of Negativity,” chapter five of Questions of Poetics, Watten shows partiality towards negativity in a nuanced appreciation and sensitive close reading of fellow Language Poet and long-time Fordham University Political Science professor Bruce Andrews’ appearance on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor (November 2, 2006). In the segment of the right wing program entitled “Outrage of the Week,” O’Reilly challenges Andrews’ decision to include Robert Sheer’s The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq (2003) on a reading list for a course on “Analysis of International Politics.” Watten especially admires Andrews’ refusal to accept O’Reilly’s premises or, conversely, to vigorously defend his decision to teach Sheer, which Watten describes as “a signal instance of negativity” (172). In Bartleby fashion, Andrews neither affirms nor denies O’Reilly’s HUAC-like Red Baiting characterization of Andrews as in agreement with Sheer’s positions in The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq (2003). Watten concentrates on how Andrews questions the questioner, challenges O’Reilly’s premises, and refuses to succumb to O’Reilly’s “assumptions” about the relationship between the professor’s views and his inclusion of Sheer on a reading list (174). By so doing, Watten connects Andrews’s negativity (his obduracy) to the political valence of Language Poetry, which signifies a non-compliance with “the dominant discourse network” (Moore, 800).
Watten implicitly links Andrews's negativity to other examples of a poetics of obfuscation that occurred prior to the birth of Language Poetry, but which in retrospect has motivated his reading of the relationship between difficult poetry, disruptive politics, and critical obduracy. A case in point is Watten's analysis of Allen Ginsberg's response -- documented in the film Berkeley in the Sixties (1991) to a reporter's questions about his role in a 1965 Vietnam Day Committee march from Berkeley to the Oakland Army Base:
Reporter to Ginsberg: Go ahead, just react.
Ginsberg: Well, what do you want? A reaction to what?
Reporter: React to the greatness of the march, of the day, as a victory or what? Are you happy with it?
Ginsberg, into camera, singing: Hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva.
[Looks at reporter and nods] (29)
For Watten, the Beat icon illustrates, avant la lettre, how a Language poet may use silence, absurdism, indirection, and the privileging of an otherness that is left untranslated, if not fully untranslatable, to disrupt normative politics in ways that could not be accomplished through resort to a coherent enactment of Free Speech. According to Watten: “Ginsberg’s answer to the reporter’s awkward question is a perfect non-explanation of his perspective on the march, as well as of his politics: the mantra hari om namo shiva” (30). As with his reading of Andrews on The O’Reilly Show, and, by and large, his understanding of Language Poetry’s inscrutability, Watten is claiming Ginsberg aims for what Watten defines as a use of language that expresses a desire for “opaque emancipation” that expresses aims that “cannot be communicated transparently”(32).
In Questions of Poetics, Watten frames Language Poetry from Berkeley in the 70s as a belated linguistic response to the poet’s own, at times traumatic, involvement with the limits of the Free Speech movement. His study also confronts the fiction of liberalism’s tolerance for dissent, and the state-sponsored violence that enforced these limits in the mid to late 1960s. As noted in Questions of Poetics, Watten was in fact a student at Cal in the late 1960s, graduating with an AB in biochemistry in 1969, the time and place he defines as one layer of the foundation for the subsequent development in the 1970s of Language Poetry as a nonstandard discursive performance.[4] Retroactively, Watten interprets Language Poetry as a response to the limits of Free Speech at Cal during the protest movement as documented in the film Berkeley in the Sixties, which Watten comments upon in detail in Questions of Poetics. Watten was among those who attended California’s flagship public university at a time when modest tuition enabled many young people of modest means to matriculate there. He represents his movement’s esoteric relationship to mimesis as a rejection of the academic, civic, and political environment that denied Free Speech to Cal students. Watten associates the distribution of tear gas via military helicopters to disperse a Free Speech rally in the Bay Area with gas bombings in South East Asia. In this reading, the children of California’s middle class morph into displaced victims of U.S. imperial rage. Negating lyric convention as a symbolic reflection of a discredited liberalism, Language Poetry becomes an allegorical instantiation and disruptive commentary upon the limits to Free Speech imposed upon outspoken, but silenced, UC activists.[5] In 1964, Cal President Clark Kerr barred Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, and Michael Rossman from placing tables to distribute anti-war literature at Sproul Place on the Berkeley campus by Clark Kerr. Kerr was a leading proponent of defining the public research university as a component of the knowledge industry. Kerr viewed Cal in terms of its use value. Cal, Kerr argued, could grow the nation’s GDP in postmodern times in ways comparable to how the railroads and the automobile industry enhanced the nation’s economic progress in modernism. By invoking Berkeley in the Sixties, director Mark Kitchell’s 1991 documentary about Cal in 1964, Watten troubles our ability to locate the origins of Language poetry in time and space. He connects Language poetry’s pre-history at Cal with actions by the Black Panthers, who sell (but initially do not read) Mao’s Little Red Book, to progressive students outside the gates of the Berkeley campus to earn funds to buy weapons. He also links Language poetry with the subsequent post-colonial theories of Gayatri Spivak, whose figure of the subaltern, “the voiceless other outside the total system of Western reason and its self-confirming construction of alterity, who has no voice and cannot speak” is read as anticipated by Kerr’ silencing of Cal protestors (412). This is not your father’s Language Poetry, but one that is rooted in the embodied experience of engaged, activist, populist, vernacular, historical, communitarian, and resistant student protestors on the front lines.
Language Poetry is not merely an art world intervention. Primarily white, mostly male, mostly straight, and attending elite universities, Language poets are in this study remembered as locking arms and standing shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters in a political movement that was far more queer, multicultural, embodied, engaged, pop cultural oriented, friendly to difference, and communitarian than the literary movement is often remembered to have been. As opposed to his repudiation of Conceptual Writing as excessively reliant upon formalist concerns to promote its situation as a break from Language writing, Watten remembers Language Poetry’s origins in the context of what Moore, writing on Baraka, calls a “cultural tradition of vernacular aesthetics” that eschews “avant-garde insularity” (804).
Contesting the critique of Language Poetry as a formal movement in opposition to and exclusive of poets of color, women, poor persons, and queer poets, Watten in Questions of Poetics recalls an initiatory scene for Language Poetry that occurred at a coffee shop in Berkeley in which he and Ron Silliman meet Lyn Hejinian. The initiatory scene is complex in terms of the politics of gender relations and the formation of Language poetry. On the one hand, Watten represents Hejinian as part of the foundational trio, and so critiques of the movement as male-centric would be overstated. On the other hand, the foundational moment has the whiff of what Eve Sedgwick would have described as a homosocial event “between men.” As Watten acknowledges in his recollection of the movement’s primal scene, Hejinian’s appearance seems to bring out a belated adolescent rivalry between Watten and Silliman as they wonder between themselves whether Hejinian has ever read Milton:
Beyond the admission of belatedness (often associated with narratives of beginning) in this passage [from the Grand Piano
in which Hejinian recalls meeting Watten and Silliman at a Berkeley café in 1977], the homosocial moment of interpellation
or hailing is important. The two men’s anxiety over Milton’s influence of a woman poet, an association with Lyn’s imagined
class background and real Harvard education, was a challenge to patrilineage and homosocialty in the early stages of
group formation. Lyn likely remembers this moment of challenge because that is what it was: in asking for her literary
credentials, the two males playfully (or offensively) resist (or agree to) modification of their ‘original’ compact, which
will be deepened as collectivity develops and expands. (124)
Milton, of course, is a politically radical figure. Notably, he wrote treatise on divorce, educational reform, regicide, and republicanism. His Aeropagitica (1644) argued in favor of free speech and a free press. According to Blake, Milton in Paradise Lost represented the combative romantic artist who chafed against the restrains of hierarchy by being of Satan’s party without knowing it, but Milton also represents, perhaps more so than any other English poet besides Shakespeare, a fixture in the high English canon. Watten is challenging traditional ideas of linear narrative historiography. He represents Language Poetry as forged a decade before he met with other Bay Area figures at coffee shops to organize cultural endeavors that he would, in retrospect, regard as formational activities to a movement whose significance was unpredictable. The meanings of Language poetry have unfurled via an array of historicist interventions of which Questions of Poetics and The Grand Piano are major instances.[6] As in William Faulkner’s quip from Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It's not even past,” Watten displaces the foundation of Language poetry into moments prior to its inscription and also anterior to what is commonly regarded as its periodic heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. Watten understands Language Poetry as a response to the “falseness of public language” and to the “inadequacy of language to history” (66), as well as to the encounter with “the limits of the system” of American liberalism that occurred during the clamp down on the Free Speech movement in Berkeley a decade prior to the formation of Language Poetry.
In chapter four, “Periodizing the Present,” Watten links the Japanese-born (but, from 1965, New York based) conceptual artist On Kawara’s date paintings, “which bring together form and history” (156) to The Grand Piano (2006-2010), “in which the defamiliarizing New is read in relation to historical frames” (156). Watten offers a historicist reading of Language Poetry as steeped in a 60s radicalism that is connected to a critique of Free Speech. At the same time, his placement of Language poetry exceeds a fixed periodization. Language Poetry is thus protected from the danger of supersession by “the proliferation of post-avant strategies” (154). By contrast, he treats Conceptual Writing as, ironically, not conceptual because the emphasis is on the material dimensions of what he regards as a sterile formalism. “Conceptual writing is concerned with repurposing existing forms of language, as does Language writing, rather than dematerializing existing conventions of art, as does conceptual art” (155). Far from an unmediated expression of a “pure present” (158), Conceptual Writing is in fact a hypermediated (and thus, like Language poetry, materialist oriented) practice. Rather than inaugurating a new period in literary history, Conceptual Writing is merely a rehashing of 20th century projects “from Dada cut-ups to John Cage’s and Jackson Mac Low’s chance procedures to the New Sentence and OuLiPo” that, predating Language Poetry, used “repurposing” and “citational methods” for defamialiarizing projects. By contrast to Conceptual Poetry, which Watten regards as neither an unmediated “pure present” nor a significant advance over past practices of appropriation, Language Poetry is aligned to the temporally disjunctive and spatially uncontainable processes found in On Kawara’s date paintings, known collectively as Today (1966-2013). Kawara’s art defies periodization because his “oeuvre as a whole is organized as an archaeology of representations of time that reflexively engages the temporal frameworks – or periodized/ing history – that it was produced in” (149). Through his reading of Kawara’s date paintings, Watten, by analogy, can frame Language Poetry as a practice that one may date as a movement that Watten helped found in the Bay Area in the mid-1970s, but that may not be contained or reduced to that single historical frame. As The Grand Piano and Questions of Poetics indicate, the ongoing reinscription of the significance of the movement has extended into its reception as a reauthorization that, Watten contends, he and other early proponents of the movement neither could have predicted nor have produced at the time of the movement’s origination. Questions of Poetics historicizes, and in this sense periodizes, Language Poetry. Watten narrates Language Poetry’s pre-history in the Free Speech struggles of the Sixties. He also conceives The Grand Piano and Questions of Poetics as part of the ongoing “social formation of the avant-garde” through the construction of “interpretive frames” (14). Moving away from an understanding of the Language poem as a distinct materialist work, he deliberately blurs the lines between reading and writing, production and consumption, historiography and poetics, poetic practice, literary history, embodied protest, and cultural theory. A paradoxical history, Questions of Poetics negates traditional conceptions of the genre as consisting of divvying up events, understood as value-bearing outside or their representation, into a neatly demarcated past, present, and future. “Like artistic production, the reception of the work of art is also a construction of value. Works of literature and art are valued not only in terms of their individual merits but also as representative of their periods, genres, and schools – each a material construction above the level of the author or work” (16).[7]
Just as Watten’s critical/historical/autobiographical prose is designed to cast Language Poetry as currently resonant, he also wants to receive the movement most likely to be regarded as superseding Language Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, as one that “still depends on past art production to give it meaning and value” (17). Watten, for example, reads fellow Language poet Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet’s use of proceduralism and attention to typography as at once anticipating and superseding in quality later conceptual projects such as those put forward by Kenneth Goldsmith:
The Alphabet often anticipates – and does advance work for – later conceptualist strategies that provoke uncertainty over whether
a given work needs to be read, once its procedures are notes. Silliman’s procedural forms may be read as early (and more
complex) examples of conceptual writing, long before the movement was announced as an alternative to Language
writing” (93).
Watten is overstating the case because of his investments in promoting the work of a fellow member of a movement each helped to found. He distinguishes Silliman from Goldsmith by claiming that while Goldsmith’s places value in a “pure present,” The Alphabet (2008) is simultaneously a conceptualist project of linguistic dissociation from referent and “a historical reference or an event itself” (93) that provides information about the Vietnam War, the Manson murders, the Gulf War, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Like Silliman, Goldsmith has used processes of arbitrary proceduralism such as the alphabet to construct frames for his appropriative uncreative writing in books such as Capital (2015). It is, however, inaccurate to suggest Goldsmith is exclusively offering, as Watten claims “a defamiliarizing, inauthentic presence in its chosen forms of writing, an open-ended allegory for the ‘homogenous empty time’ of the reified lifeworld as an opaque reinscription of preexisting language” (156). A major Goldsmith work such as Capital does work with “preexisting language,” and does touch on the themes of reification and defamiliarization, but at the same time, as with Watten’s version of Silliman, Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (Verso: 2015) is brimming with historical information and is itself a significant historical event.
To conclude (and to return this essay to remarks I made at the outset) I am aware that on several fronts my decision to begin this review essay on Questions of Poetics by connecting the role of negativity in Baraka and Watten is somewhat perverse. Unlike Baraka, Watten in Questions of Poetics wrestles with the conundrum of representing what Moore calls “fugitive resistance” from a position of whiteness and class privilege. Further, Watten and Baraka opposed each other in a well-publicized, contentious, and feisty debate about the history of Language Poetry at a conference held at the University of Maine at Orono in 2000. That said, if verbal conflicts with other contemporary culture workers at public forums --Robert Duncan, Donald Pease, Juliana Spahr – barred me from making analogies between Watten’s poetics and that of others, I would be limited in doing what Watten himself wants readers to do, which is to offer a revisionary history (and pre-history) of Language Poetry in relation to movements often viewed as antithetical to his own. Verbal sparring at literary events has been par for the course for Watten at least since the 1970s. This is so even as his written work may be characterized as detached, objective-sounding, and impersonal in tone and even as he comes across in person (in the few times I have met him in non-confrontational situations) as a mild-mannered, Clark Kent looking bespeckled late middle aged academician in khaki pants and button down. Lore of Watten’s heated conflicts, however, have become legendary within certain circles interested in how new poetics does or does not interact with politics, the academicization of alternative cultures, and especially how race, class, and gender are represented (or not) in new poetry movements. Perhaps, as Robert Archambeau has suggested in a blog post on Watten’s critique of panel presentations on the Robert Duncan-inspired New Gnosticism movement at the Louisville Conference on Language and Literature since 1900, such conflicts remain for Watten traumatic memories at once recalling and stunting his responses to emotionally stunning verbal ripostes with revered elders. Trauma may be one reason why the tone of Questions of Poetics is so remote, at times impenetrable. This is so even as the history Watten recalls is intimate, and even as, in his own view, a good deal of his critical study could be dismissed as a potentially illegitimate “biographical indulgence” (207) offering “the genealogy of the poet/critic” (217). In the book’s final chapter, Watten goes so far in the direction of self-analysis that he offers a close reading of his own poem “Radio.” He also recalls a reading, first published in The Constructivist Moment (2003), of a drawing he did at age five of a “head of a king’s son” (207). He must have composed the drawing during an experience of real life trauma involving a father and a son: the juvenile’s artwork was made “about the time my father was stationed on a destroyer and in Japan during the Korean War” (207).
We have learned from theorists such as Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) that silence, negation, amnesiac forgetting, resistance to closure, temporal displacement, and a lack of access to feeling are characteristic (non)responses to trauma. Emphasizing how forms of obduracy, anamorphosis and negation motivated difficult writing as a site for dissent and community formation among Language oriented poets in the late 1970s in the Bay Area, Watten in Questions of Poetics recalls (again, by vacating an emotive register) traumatic experiences. Trauma range from being a victim of a state-sponsored helicopter-distributed chemical attack on Bay Area protesters in the late 1960s, to the run-ins with Baraka and Duncan, to his recollection of the drawing he made when he was five years old and his father was on a destroyer ship near Japan during the Korean War. The austere language and chill tone he selects to remember these experiences deprives (negates and silences) the reader from access to vivid representations that would recreate the emotionalism, lyricism, and linguistic intensity that one expects to find in a more traditional memoir. Without knowing Watten’s backstory, I suspect a reader might underestimate Watten’s investment in recalling the history of a movement he has devoted his adult life to developing and to keeping relevant in the face of threats by upstart movements such as Flarf, conceptual writing, The New Gnosticism, and the New Narrative. In Questions of Poetics, Watten treats the high profile conflicts with Baraka and Duncan in flatly stated and objective-sounding footnotes. He literally displaces these conflicts away from the main body of the work in the spatial sense that he relegates the discussion of the Baraka and Duncan events to endnotes. Watten enacts negation through silence. He suppresses the emotional significance of face-to-face performances in a study that regards what happened in the past, as in his reading of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise (2008), as an “archive….motivated by a negativity at its core – of trauma, unrepresentability, nonidentity – and each unfolds at the boundary between narrative and nonnarrative, the visible and the opaque” (102-103). A freezing of feeling (it was Dickinson who wrote that such a “formal feeling” tends to follow “great pain”) is part of how Watten treats with asbestos gloves moments of explosive fissure and generational (with Duncan) and racial and generational (with Baraka) conflicts. Such incidents, I trust Watten would maintain, are always already fictive constructs. It is not that the footnotes on the Duncan and Baraka conflicts are uninformative. They are. Watten’s point is that we should interpret face-to-face events within the context of an unfolding historiography of a poetics movement whose significance remains undetermined outside of an ever-expanding horizon of critical interventions at conferences, in journals, blogs, and reappraisals such as Questions of Poetics and even this essay for that matter. For Watten, the dustups with Baraka and Duncan are themselves textual events available to reinscripton, commentary, historiography, performance, language, and theory. The endnotes devoted to them are primarily a spur to promote further reading, reflection, and commentary as the footnotes include a bibliography of published commentaries, interviews, and theoretical underpinnings that suggest the ongoing significance of the debates in terms of the ongoing unfolding of the historiography of the poetics project.[8] It is as if what must have been stressful and even disheartening conflicts did not happen to Watten, and I believe he would in some sense claim the events did not happen to him, or, better, that the “him” of the representations of these events is a separate entity from the feeling person who experienced the conflicts. In similarly uninflected rhetoric, Watten uses a passive sentence structure to foreground the agency of language over and above the agency of the embodied participants in his (non)memory of the especially consequential conflict between himself and Robert Duncan at an event in honor of Louis Zukofsky in the late 1970s. In retrospect, Watten has viewed the conflict with Duncan as setting Language Poetry back a decade and several observers have told me the Zukofsky event was an experience of particular upset to Watten.[9]
A study of the roots and consequences of an influential literary movement, Watten in Questions of Poetics claims distinctions earlier generations of critics have made between the production and reception of poetry is moot when it comes to understanding the kinds of writings he values the most. Watten disputes W.K. Wimsatt’s interpretation of the poem as an object of desire that is distinct from the critical response to it. Watten, by contrast, aligns his poetics with the unstable interaction between poet (and/as) critic and/or critic (and/as) poet found in William Carlos Williams’s genre-busting Spring and All (1923), the hybridic lyric/essayistic writings of Charles Olson, and the poetics fostered in Donald Allen’s 1960 The New American Poetry. Donald Allen, of course, included work by Baraka, as well as figures such as Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, all of whom take their place as precursors to the version of Language Poetry that Watten develops in Questions of Poetics. As in the texts put together by Williams, Olson, and Allen, Watten blurs the lines between poetry and theory, primary and secondary texts, poet and theorist, writing and reading, work and commentary, text and context, unsettling language and disruptive politics. Watten privileges the idea of the “poem as an expanded object” (201). Calling “for wider horizons of interpretation and meaning,” he explores “the formal construction of the work in relation to external, cultural logics” (210 beyond New Critical assessments of the poem as distinguished object removed from the web of critical scrutiny that invests libidinal significances upon a linguistic formation of elevated significance (201).
Advancing a provisional claim for Language poetry’s place in literary history, Watten remains mindful, however, that periodization at once affirms the movement’s epochal significance, but also threatens to contain its ongoing relevance to the development (and critique) of upstart movements such as Conceptual Writing and Flarf whose proponents have claimed to have superseded Language Poetry. Unlike Marjorie Perloff’s interpretation of Language Poetry as a primarily formalist/aesthetic period in a “series of avant-gardes” (7), Watten argues that the progressive political resonances evident in Language Poetry’s pre-history reveal an aporia in subsequent movements such as Flarf and Conceptual writing that, allegedly, have displaced it in the 2000s. During the cultural wars of the 1980s, the pluralist movements of the 1990s, Language Poetry has been critiqued as, variously, narcissistic, elitist, “hostile to identity politics” (6), and as promoting a “contextless formalism divorced from any specific political, cultural, or expressive aims” (5). More recently Language poetry has been criticized as authoritarian in its claims to have been the first and last true avant-garde movement in poetics, Watten’s goal is to restore the “historical crises that gave Language writing its necessity” (5).
Works Cited
Robert Archambeau. "’Where's It Coming From?’: Barrett Watten, Robert Duncan, and the New Gnosticism in Poetry.” Samizdat Blog.
February 24, 2013.
Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2016.
William Faulkner. Requiem for a Nun.(1951). New York: Vintage International Reprint Edition, 2012.
LeRoi Jones. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.Charles Rycroft. A Critical
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, New York: Penguin, 1995. Second Edition.
Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Barrett Watten. Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.
--. Editor. The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. Detroit: Mode A. 2006-2007.
Permissions to reproduce quotations from Questions of Poetics have been granted by Barrett Watten.
[1] J. Peter Moore; “A silence that only they understand”: Amiri Baraka and the Silent Vernacular of The Dead Lecturer.
American Literature 1 December 2017; 89 (4): 791–820. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4257859
[2] In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft defines “Negation”: “Process by which a perception or thought is admitted to consciousness in negative form, e.g., the onset of a headache is registered by the thought, ‘How lucky I am to have been free from headaches for so long’; the fact that a figure in a dream stands for the mother is admitted by the statement, ‘It wasn’t my mother anyhow.; (The point here is that none the less the idea that it might be the mother must have occurred for it to be denied.) Not to be confused with denial; negativism.” (108). A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, New York: Penguin, 1995. Second Edition.
[3] I understand closure in psychoanalytic terms as a breach in the fictive bracket persons may impose upon immediate events as dissociated from subsequent linguistic remediation.
[4] Watten had attended MIT before transferring to Cal, where he would return in the 1980s for a PhD after taking an MFA at Iowa.
Watten notes: “I was among the crowd of students underneath the helicopter attack. My next ‘turn’ was to poetry, specifically
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I was referred by Josephine Miles and Robert Grenier, arriving in January 1970.” (Note, p.231)
[6] The Grand Piano was in fact the name of “a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-1979 the authors [of The Grand Piano collective autobiography] took part in a reading and performance series” [The Grand Piano book flap].
[7] Watten adds: “Writing in the present about writing in the past creates a double register of temporality and historicity: the past becomes a shifter, as the present continually changes meaning and value. Similarly, the date paintings of On Kawara, as an exemplary meditation on presentism and periodization in conceptual art, create a dynamic in which the present in which the work is made (identical to the date depicted on the paining) shifts into the past immediately on completion. The date as a referential shifter (between present and past) keeps the periodization of On Kawara’s serial work open, until it ends (or until one of the conceptual strategies he uses terminates)” [17].
Watten writes: “The conflict over the poetics of presence and translation erupted as a moment of dissensus between me and Robert Duncan during an evening, sponsored by the San Francisco Poetry Center, devoted to the work of Louis Zukofsky shortly after his death in 1978. Many references to the event appear throughout The Grand Piano; see also Jarnot, “San Francisco is Burning,” chap. 61 of Robert Duncan. (244). (On the politics of empty signifiers, see Laclau, Emanicipations(s), chap. 3.” (231)
[9] Recalling Watten part in a discussion of the New Gnosticism at a conference in Louisville, Robert Achembou writes: “Here's what I think was at stake: the return of the repressed, or the revisiting of trauma. The best way to get at this may be to come back to a moment, now legendary in certain poetry circles, when a young Watten had a very public run-in with Robert Duncan, a kind of godfather of the New Gnosticism (and the primary subject of Peter O'Leary's study Gnostic Contagion). The late David Bromige told the story well, maintaining, in an interview, that Watten was ‘the arch villain’ of poetry in Duncan's eyes, because Watten and the Language poets were, for him, ‘the New Criticism come again. It was everything he, Robert and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.’ For Duncan, Watten represented ‘poetry written by critics, and a very buttoned down kind of poetry too...’ Matters came to a head, says Bromige, at a conference in 1979, when Watten and Duncan were going to speak about Louis Zukofsky.”