Barry Schwabsky on Barrett Watten's Questions of Poetics

In this weekend's latest installment of Barry Schwabsky's Hyperallergic "Reader's Diary," he reads through Barrett Watten's recent contribution to the study of poetics, and especially language poetry.

What is “language writing” anyway? The very phrase sounds like a puzzle — it makes me feel like the down-home musician who wondered, after hearing someone ask about folk music, “but isn’t all music made by folks?” Isn’t all writing made of language? Speaking, as Barrett Watten does in his ruminations on the movement, of “a foregrounding of language as opposed to reference” is not helpful, since reference is merely an aspect of language and not outside it. What is helpful is Watten’s earnest effort to trace the origins of what he and others call language writing back to its precedents, before the term itself was invented in the 1970s — that is, back to the New American Poetry of the ‘50s and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early ‘60s, as well as parallels with the Conceptual Art of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, to name a few. He wants to understand, as well, its subsequent history — in which he played a large part — as the group associated with it scattered across the country from concentrations in the Bay Area and New York (with an important outpost in Washington, DC), and many of the participants (notably Watten himself) turned to the study of poetics (and concomitantly, though Watten doesn’t highlight this, to an academic grounding for practices that had at first been understood as counter-institutional). He wants as well to take onboard some of the critiques that have been directed at language writing by a successive generation of poets, and its influence on such movements such as flarf and, particularly, conceptual poetry (of which he presents cogent criticisms).

Read on at Hyperallergic.