A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982

Introduction

The first issue of Poetics Journal appeared in January 1982, in the midst of a period of intense poetic productivity, with several North American geographical centers (the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., being the most notable) and with corollary developments, both historical and contemporary, taking place elsewhere in the world. It was no accident that, from its inception, one of our chief editorial aims was to articulate the linkages between this multicentered Language writing movement and parallel developments in other avant-garde practices. In the intervening years, Poetics Journal witnessed the development of writing on poetics from a wide range of aesthetic tendencies—language-centered, ideology-critical, performance-based, New Narrative, hybrid genre, new lyric, textual materialist, and conceptual/documentary, to name only a few. Our tenth and final issue of Poetics Journal appeared in June 1998, but we do not consider the journal’s work complete. A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, along with its companion Poetics Journal Digital Archive, are intended as a resource for further work, by us and by readers who will take up the various challenges these materials and their interconnections offer.

Poetics as a contemporary genre of writing and artistic-intellectual prac-tice was (and is still) just beginning to discover its possibilities, even as it was attempting to create terminology, name its objects of concern, devise methodologies, and generate an arena for collaborative (and sometimes contentious) conversation. This volume is intended not merely as a contribution to literary history or cultural studies; indeed, we think it is primarily not that. Many of the works in it, though thoughtful in character, are polemically charged, and many of the questions they raise remain open. Otherwise put, many of the writings here signal the beginning of new modes of inquiry or creative approaches. This volume makes available a number of the perspectives that were initiated in the pages of Poetics Journal, but at many points the works are (as they were intended to be) suggestive rather than definitive—openings into new areas of inquiry more generally—and readers will discover not only an account of paths taken but also a clear indication of paths to be explored. We take the moment that Poetics Journal records to be one of incipience, a demand for intervention and participation in attempts to shift contemporary cultural horizons. In editing Poetics Journal, and in editing this guide and assembling the journal’s archive, we have wanted to extend the dimensions of the literary and cultural field and to alter its outline.

Poetics Journal began in the cultural recession of the Reagan era, a period many writers and artists experienced as one of increased social pressure and constraint. Such negativity can give rise to what Barrett Watten has called a “constructivist moment,” which seeks, as he puts it, “both to disclose the nature of the system and to develop an imagined alternative.” Our constructivist moment was already well under way in 1982 when Poetics Journal 1 appeared. Literary practice, as undertaken by those involved in Language writing, entailed ardent (as well as arduous) formal and informal conversations among its participants, along with persistent attention to the surrounding cultural milieu. Numerous works available by 1982 (poetry, reviews, talks, manifestos, and so on) testify to this. Poetics Journal was intended to expand, clarify, and intensify our ongoing thinking about the contexts and trajectories of the work under way. As became clear over the course of the ten issues of its run, a cultural topography was being outlined and indexed, the scope and details of which surprised even us as editors. Discussion of Language writing to this day persistently remains blind to the variety of interests and the range of cultural activity that inform its creation. These contexts are central to the meaning of Language writing, and to fail to note or acknowledge them is to miss one of its central points.

During the years that the journal was active, both editors of Poetics Journal were also writing poetry and editing literary publications. Barrett Watten edited the magazine This from 1971 to 1982, and This Press was active through the 1980s; it has recently published the ten-volume, ten-authored project titled The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980. My Tuumba Press, which published a sequence of fifty letterpress chapbooks, ran from 1976 to 1984 (it was revived in a different format in 2001 and remains active). That we decided to devote attention to a journal addressed to “poetics” is an indication of our interest in discovering and describing sites of artistic practice in terms of immediate cultural experience and the unfolding of social modernity and its outcome in the postmodern. “Poetics” emerges in the pages of Poetics Journal as a site where poetry, largely construed, expands into its implications. At the same time, poetics is a site where other spheres of cultural activity and other kinds of art-making enter into poetry. It is, at least in the account offered by Poetics Journal, a site for the practice of self-reflection and intensive redefinition as concomitant to broad social and aesthetic engagements; it is also a site for continuing incipience, a site for perpetual, open-ended, and curious becoming.

Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which began publication in 1978, posed the question of poetics in ways that were productive as well as problematic. The frequency of its publication and its newsletter format encouraged improvisatory practices in which the difference between poetry and poetics was often difficult to discern. Indeed, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E could be read as an argument against there being a difference between them: the editors sought articles that were generally short, indexical, and thus condensed in the manner of poetry. While we valued the foregrounding of language and the production of radical encounters in theory as well as in poetry, we also wanted to offer a venue in which writing in poetics could be developed at a greater length. It was with this in mind that we set about bringing the first issue of Poetics Journal into existence. With its simple green-gray stippled cover, it looks like a school notebook, with the white rectangle on which one might inscribe the notebook’s “subject” still blank; it was the only issue lacking a title, though we thought of it as “Beginning” or “Introduction.” (We had experimented earlier with mimeograph production, but decided to continue in the more distributable perfect-bound, offset format.) For this first issue (as, indeed, for all ten), we specifically asked for essays or reviews of substantive length, soliciting work from a political theorist (David Plotke), a linguist (George Lakoff), and a literary historian (Jed Rasula), as well as poets (Bob Perelman and Kit Robinson each contributed to the first issue, as did the editors). From the journal’s inception, we were interested in establishing dialogues between different theoretical and practical approaches to questions of language. In this first issue, with Watten’s “Politics of Style” and David Plotke’s “Language and Politics Today,” an explicit (and abiding) interest in laying bare the politics implicit but always at work within language usages (literary and otherwise) is evident.

I do not mean to suggest that Poetics Journal initiated the ideological critiques of language or literature; such critiques had been under way among language-centered writers for some time, as, for example, in the Canadian journal Open Letter, in L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E, and in other journals. What was new (and for us particularly dynamic) was the interdisciplinary character of the discussion. And the linkages to be made were not only between contemporaries. An important precedent for our notion of what “poetics” might look like was the early-twentieth-century work of the Russian Formalists. Viktor Shklovsky, Yurii Tynianov, Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Roman Jakobson, along with figures still virtually unknown in the West, had joined forces early in the twentieth century to form OPOYAZ (a Russian acronym for “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”) as an alternative to the academic philology in control of literary studies at the time (1916–23). Language writing likewise emerged at a time when a certain amount of mustiness was evident in the academy, as in the literary establishment generally, notably in their insistence on lyric subjectivity. We saw this as a symptom of ideological proclivities that were infecting social life generally, and we were encouraged (and, indeed, felt required) to follow the example set by OPOYAZ and rethink poetry and the poetic altogether. As tacit acknowledgment of our indebtedness to Russian Formalism, Richard Sheldon’s translation of a major essay by Viktor Shklovsky (from his Theory of Prose) appeared as the first work in our first issue.

The second issue of Poetics Journal (September 1982) was titled Close Reading. The choice of this topic had two points of origin. One was a talk (“Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings”) given by Steve Benson at 80 Langton Street in San Francisco whose implications seemed far-reaching and continued to reverberate. Offering a time-based and site-specific context for reading poetic texts (including Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, Larry Eigner’s typescripts, and his own work), Benson’s talk represented a radical intervention in the practice of “close reading” as it was purveyed by New Criticism, and it suggested an alternative trajectory to the practice as it was carried out by the Russian Formalists. The work of the Formalists, then, served as the second point of origin, from which we hoped to track overlooked trajectories and discover new, generative, contextualizing possibilities for close reading.

The first issue of Poetics Journal included eight contributors; the second contained fourteen, with work by a prominent linguist (Haj Ross) again represented, along with essays bringing an array of references into the discussion and pointing to the diversity of influences that were informing it (the work of Hart Crane, Eigner, Joseph Ceravolo, Georges Bataille, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others). A number of the terms that Language writing had generated were being productively (and sometimes contentiously) challenged by members of the loosely construed New Narrative group (which included Dodie Bellamy, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Bruce Boone, Kevin Killian, and Robert Glück). The central argument concerned the status of narrative itself—a mode that a number of Language writers (but most definitely not Carla Harryman) had dismissed as ideologically suspect. Robert Glück’s “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille” in the pages of Poetics Journal 2 offered a challenge (and contributed to a corrective) to that dismissal. Arguing on behalf of the sexualization of narrative, with all that that might imply, Glück then went further, insisting that “a human picture must accommodate … transgression.” This essay, along with others by New Narrative writers in subsequent issues of the journal, should figure prominently in any account of the recent expansion of poetry into cross-genre modes, resulting, for example, in such novelistic works as Renee Gladman’s Juice and The Activist, Mary Burger’s Sonny, and Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel. More recently, a poetics grounded in the interrelationship between New Narrative and Language writing is being explored in essays by Kaplan Harris, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Rob Halpern, and others.

In Poetics Journal’s third issue (May 1983), titled Poetry and Philosophy, connections with British and French avant-garde undertakings were made explicit, and they can be read in the context of Language writing’s long-standing engagements with philosophical and theoretical developments in those two countries. Key figures included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous (though interest in French feminist theory was made more explicit the following year, in the Women and Language issue), and the French Oulipo, to name just a few. With the exception perhaps of Whitehead, these and other figures are of major importance in the turn to language that philosophy had taken and that now poetry was taking. This is what “Language writing” means: writing that makes a turn to language, so as to engage in a relentless (and often inventive and playful) exploration of the forms of linguistic meaning and the meaning of linguistic forms. Lines such as the following, culled haphazardly from Ron Silliman’s 1986 anthology In the American Tree, are indicative: “Each word once the invention of another” (Silliman, Tjanting); “Now that you know what the words mean, you can leave” (Watten, “Plasma”); “Learn what it means to receive syllables” (Jean Day, “Heavy Clouds Passing Before the Sun”); “I was delighted when I managed to deprive those bewitched lines of meaning” (Harryman, “Property”); “graphemic / hinges / discourse / re-ordering / SIGNS” (Bernstein, “ST. McC.”); “We are WRITING” (Hannah Weiner, “Little Book 124”).

The “Women and Language” issue (May 1984) appeared in the context of an ongoing dialogue concerned with critiquing (and improving) power relations within the literary community and beyond. The influence of French feminist theory was of particular importance, but body, gender, identity, performativity, and sexuality were topics of lived, as well as conceptual, concern; the real problems they involved were taken up with adamant interest by both men and women in the literary community in which Poetics Journal was playing a part. It is crucial to note, meanwhile, that within that community women writers were among the most influential figures: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carla Harryman, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Theirs is the first generation of writers in the United States of which that can be said, and exercising power raised questions that demanded identification, reflection, and historical analysis. In responding to that demand, the Women and Language issue brought into play a variety of powers—introspection, dialogue and dialectic, polymorphism, invention, collaboration, improvisation—worth exercising by anyone.

Even as identity narratives raised vexing questions, so did narrative per se, and Poetics Journal returned to the question of narrative in its Non/Narrative issue (May 1985). The slash in the title was intended to signal the existence of contraries in a potent simultaneity, and the fifty-page “Symposium on Narrative” (the first of several symposia that appeared in later issues of the journal) gives some indication of how various are the sites through (or around) which narrative might pass. The complexity of its status informs conditions both within a given medium and between any of several media. The symposium included pieces by several visual artists (Doug Hall and Howard Fried), a musician (Andrew Voigt, an original member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet), and the filmmaker Warren Sonbert. Points of reference ranged from The Tale of Genji to psychoanalysis to media theory to William Burroughs to Bakhtin to Virginia Woolf to street theater to the JFK assassination to Ovid, and the issue included a section devoted to the writing, staging, and performing of Kit Robinson’s play Collateral, written for San Francisco Poets Theater and performed in February 1982.

Poetics Journal 6, Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), opened up an inquiry into the purported margins (and interstices) of language and of community as well as the relation between aesthetic and public language, the “material text,” and its communicative demands. The issue appeared at a point when Language writing was in the second decade of its history, a point at which one good reason for venturing into the margins was to breach them. In many traditional accounts of the avant-garde, a decade is more or less the life span of an artistic movement, which culminates with the establishment of the movement’s identity. The misconstrual of Language writing, however, is a prominent feature of its history, and part of the subtext to Poetics Journal 6 is resistance to the devolution of Language writing into the static condition of a mere “body of work.” In order to keep moving, it must make certain its margins don’t become limit conditions. The issue begins with a short essay by Barrett Watten (“The XYZ of Reading: Negativity (And)”), which, among other things, poses marginality as a locus of negativity, construed as a condition of demand, a condition of absence, and a condition of possibility. The second essay in the issue, Bob Perelman’s “Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Céline, and Fascism,” addresses itself to some of the worst possibilities of modernism, as cultural negativity embraced a politics that became, for those writing later, intolerable.

Poetics Journal 7, Postmodern? (1987; the title, with its big question mark, appears on the cover in Day-Glo orange overlying a grayscale image of Diane Andrews Hall’s portentously epochal diptych Monumental Response), takes on the question of historicity, but from an altogether different perspective. If history’s (unwanted) potential to serve as a limit is one of the central problems raised by the Marginality issue, its existence as pervasive (positive or negative) context and historicity’s failure to produce context are among the problems haunting Postmodern? With titles like “Truth’s Mirror Is No Mirror” (Robert Glück), “Ugly” (Kathy Acker), “The Failure of a Postmodern Aesthetic” (Harry Polkinhorn), and “From the Empty Quarter” (Duncan McNaughton), many of the essays in the issue raise a strong challenge to the notion that either modernism or its alternative was a great success. Despite (or perhaps because of) numerous manifestations of aesthetic genius, despite myriad intellectual and experiential pleasures, the celebratory stance of postmodernism could (and perhaps should) have rapidly turned funereal. As John Rapko puts it in “What Will Postmodernity Be?” (his contribution to the “Symposium: Postmodern?” section), “Experimental postmodern writing must understand itself as part of a passed future for which no one could have wished.” Perhaps the postmodern is an inaccessible ideal, as Paris-based music critic Jason Weiss puts it in “Postmodern and Music: The Reaches”: “Listening was probably the first art, awakening in us the means to assemble our knowledge. We may never have really known what music is.”

To the degree that postmodernism views the world as a site of virtually infinite data, it positions itself in a sort of “everywhere,” as a virtual place or nowhere to which everything comes. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989) attempted to refigure our contemporary situation by presenting it in terms of “elsewhere,” the issue’s title. A vision of “poetry everywhere” or even of “language everywhere” is enticing, but there is something ultimately unsatisfying (and possibly reprehensible) in the delirium of an allover equivalence. “Elsewhere” in Poetics Journal 8 has multiple sites, the first of which is a parodic and loftily celestial distance toward which a single word (the Russian iydu, “I am going”) advances via a passage through cumulous clouds; this, at least, is the view offered by the image on the issue’s cover, taken from a painting by then-Soviet artist Erik Bulatov. In addition to essays by various U.S. writers (Fanny Howe’s “Purgatory,” Norman Fischer’s “The Old City,” Andrew Ross’s “The Death of Lady Day,” among others), the issue presented contributions from several Soviet writers (prominent members of the Metarealist and Moscow Conceptualist circles) and theoreticians as well as poets from Japan, France, and the United Kingdom. It also included a special bilingual section devoted to recent Québecois writing, featuring work by twelve Francophone Canadian poets. The “elsewhere” that emerged is variously utopic, dystopic, real, virtual, desired, defied, infinite, and local.

There was less goal orientation to the editing of Poetics Journal than this account may suggest. On the copyright page of both issues 6 and 7, for example, forthcoming issues on “pleasure” and “work” were announced, but both of those topics were dropped. Instead, number 9 was addressed to “the person,” and number 10, the final issue, was addressed to “knowledge.” The cover of Poetics Journal 9, The Person (1991), shows the figure of a man (performance artist John Woodall) with his hands over his ears, wearing an outfit that could be a jester’s, or a medieval soldier’s, or a dreamed-up outfit devised by a madman; the figure is evidently screaming. Elsewhere may be progressively strange, but it is certainly no stranger than personhood. From the beginning, many of Language writing’s devices had the intention (and effect) of dismantling cultural assumptions about identity and subjectivity. Thus various challenges to conventional notions and uses of the “lyric I” in poetry had been raised considerably before issue 9 was in the works. “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” for example, a multiauthored essay that offered a strongly worded ideological critique of lyric subjectivity, appeared in the pages of Social Text in 1988, as did, on a smaller scale, Rae Armantrout in her review of The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets in Poetics Journal 6. Norman Finkelstein’s “Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry,” the first essay in Poetics Journal 9, takes up the issue in the context of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” The “problem of the self” is likewise the “problem of the poem,” in that both are political as well as aesthetic entities. By extension, then, subjectivity, even in poetry, does not function solely or even primarily as a force for interiorizing and then representing experience; its agency is far more active and centrifugal. Subjectivity is always a site of social and cultural interactions; solitariness is not its privileged mode.

Various characterizations of “personhood” emerge from the multidisciplinary “Symposium on the Person” in Poetics Journal 9, with contributions from artists working in an array of fields, including musicians Fred Frith and John Zorn, installation artists Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, the painter Robin Palanker, and performance artist John Woodall, along with ten poets, including Barbara Guest, Franco Beltrametti, and Aaron Shurin. Two other symposia also appear in the issue, one titled “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person” and the other “The Poetics of Everyday Life”; each features material originally presented in public colloquia. Placed next to Russian journalist and semiotician Yulia Latinina’s essay on the folkloric strata underlying the iconography and idiolect of Soviet propaganda, the latter symposium takes on unexpected linguistic resonances. Purportedly the cultural production of “average” or “everyday” people, Latinina asserts that Soviet folklore is also “one of the levels of the official world view.” Personhood and officialdom interact in and as the quotidian—at least in the USSR. Our inquiry into the status of “everyday life” hoped to extend the examination of this relationship in relation to ideology as we encounter it and to ideas. Throughout the issue, questions of interactivity (hence of community), ethical agency, and incorporated alterity take their place alongside questions of cognition, imagination, and what Bill Luoma (in “Astrophysics and You”) sardonically terms “perception management.” That all of this is epistemologically relevant accounts in part for our decision to focus Poetics Journal 10 on “knowledge.” But it is also the case that the kinds of poetry we have occupied ourselves with raise fundamental questions regarding the nature of “understanding” and the grounds for what might be said, ideologically and otherwise, to constitute “knowledge.”

Published in June 1998, the Knowledge issue is by far the longest, filling 294 pages of densely laid-out type and presenting work by thirty-six contributors, including a number of younger writers. The issue’s cover features a digitally modified photograph by Doug Hall titled “The Bridesmaid,” showing what appears to be a child, dressed in white and bearing some resemblance to Alice in Wonderland, with a preternaturally adult head and face. Attendant on the ritual prelude to reproduction, the blurry bridesmaid is herself a production, garbed in innocence but burdened, however unwittingly, with knowledge. In some respects, Hall’s image seems emblematic of the epistemological quandary inherent in language and foregrounded by (and as) poetics. Knowledge is not synonymous with truth, at least not unless one agrees with Wittgenstein that a truth is a reality that agrees with a sentence (or with a proposition). Poetics Journal did not in any way set out to be definitive; its goals were heuristic, its methodology procedural and interconnective, and its strategy dialogic. Challenge and debate were crucial in Poetics Journal, and they remain so in the ongoing, expanding (and exogamous) community of discussants and contributors to poetics as it continues to develop even when the utopia in which argument can proceed as a form of flourishing seems hardly to exist anymore. Hence, though many of our design decisions were, of course, determined by production costs (by the need to keep the number of pages down), the relatively stark “look” of the journal—the sans serif typeface, the closely leaded print, the lack of “white space”—was intended to be somewhat abrasive. There was always something serious at stake—cultural life (i.e., managing to sustain individual and social vitality within our cultural milieu). Poetics Journal was meant to convey our sense of the urgency of the struggle to figure out—to keep figuring out—what’s going on and what’s to be done, in the process of “making the work.”

This present volume is not intended simply to recapitulate the discussions that transpired in Poetics Journal’s ten issues. It has a different purpose and is therefore structured according to principles quite different from those governing the journal’s original issues. The Guide is divided into three sections. Part 1 includes essays from the first four issues of the Journal; in this section a number of key terms are laid out, methodological initiatives are undertaken, and important interdisciplinary connections are established. Many of these articles are by now well known in the field of contemporary poetics. In part 2, contextualization is very much at issue, as is a broadening of the field of artistic and cultural analysis. In part 3, an even greater widening of the landscape is evident, in terms of the number of new authors and the explorations of inexhaustible problems such as personhood and knowledge. The essays within each of the three sections are arranged alphabetically. Rather than organize them thematically here, we want to extend the conceptual horizons of the sections and offer a maximally open terrain in which readers encounter the unexpected points of intersection to be found as one reads through the works included here and in the archive. As Barrett Watten remarked, “It’s the space between positions that is fascinating, as much as the positions they define”; it is our belief that an alphabetical ordering can serve as a markedly productive means of discovering and opening those spaces. And though, of the nearly sixteen hundred closely packed pages of Poetics Journal 1–10, only some 20 percent are included in this book, we are confident that on its own, and in conjunction with the archive, A Guide to Poetics Journal preserves a sense of the scale of the original and offers a heterogeneous array of works that remain compelling and relevant and that can serve as a source and instigation for works to come.

—Lyn Hejinian

In its contribution to the long history of writing in poetics, from Aristotle to modernists, postmodernists, and contemporaries, Poetics Journal becomes a site for reflection on the genre of poetics and its possibilities. Immediately, one might ask: is “poetics” a specific kind of writing, after its original usage as an account of the construction and veracity of the work of verbal art that was extended, through its comparison with the visual arts, to writing on aesthetics more generally? What would necessary and sufficient conditions be for writing on poetry or art to be seen as “a poetics”? How does poetics as a kind of writing extend the making of the work of art into new grounds—for new construction, interpretation, critical thinking, cultural agency? In selecting from the variety of work published in Poetics Journal, we had an opportunity to ask: to what end poetics? While the genre of poetics surely begins with the making of a work of art and extends the act of its construction into contiguous areas of thought and knowledge, we would find a mere description of a work of art, or of the artist’s intentions in making it, not enough to account for poetics’ importance as a kind of writing. Poetics is a site for reflection on the making of the work that extends its construction into the fields of meaning in which it has its effects. Such fields of meaning are manifold, from the readers’ responses to historical contexts, social motivations, relations to other arts, and philosophical concerns, finally entailing something like a cunning of poetics: the manner in which the work of art extends its principle of construction, the way it makes meaning, through the contexts it draws from, finally, to transform them. That the work will arrive and thrive, in terms that are both analytic and prospective—winning its way, in Gertrude Stein’s sense—is the implicit argument of poetics.

It should be evident from the range of work presented here that a consideration of the genre of poetics leaves the tradition of poetics far behind. Poetics for us is closer to avant-garde manifestos, theoretical debates in aesthetics, working notes for performances, or wall texts for gallery exhibitions than the self-focused reflection on the nature of literariness that extends, from the early moderns and Romantics, to works such as William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All or Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.” Something of the possibility of poetics, in fact, changed with the modernist avant-garde: in its effort to explain their difficult writings to the general public, the modernists extended their artistic counterdiscourse into new registers of agency. The opaque writing of the modernist avant-garde becomes a site not only of disinterested appreciation but of social comprehension—or in comprehension. Of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge both placed the contemporary public’s incomprehension of the new language of poetry at the center of their criticism; what changed with the modernists was a foregrounding of the opacity of the work itself that demands this crisis be seen as general. The dawn of the material text in modernism (from nineteenth-century aestheticism and ornamental design to avant-garde typography and mass aesthetics) is relocated at the center of social in comprehension: a site for aesthetic pleasure, certainly, but also of alienation and interpellation. It is the modernists’ demand for the persistent questioning in and by the modernist work of the nature of modern communication, as a site of social in comprehension as much as transparency, that keeps its horizon permanently open. The postmoderns who followed took their departure there: the modernist work foregrounded an opacity at the heart of communication that originated in the aesthetic but quickly was articulated more generally—hence its terrific power.

The “expanded field” in which we hope writing in poetics will be read has a dual register. It takes its origins in a constructivist attitude toward language in modernism and extends that attitude through the writings of the postmoderns, notably in their formulation of poetry as an “open field” of meaning and agency. The inaugural moment of this invocation of the field of poetics was Charles Olson’s essay Projective Verse (1950), which worked energetically to undermine the object status of the modernist poem through an insistence on a time-valued, site-specific unfolding of poetic agency. Heraclitean flux, if not an existential Dasein, led to a widespread cultural style in the emphasis on spontaneous bop prosody in the Beat Generation and a range of poetic styles that culminated in the “Now” of 1960s counterculture. The New Americans, as early postmoderns, rightly took their place as cultural instigators as well as poetic innovators, reversing the aesthetics of modernist alienation and distancing in a demand for immanent meaning and a practice of the present. Writers who followed, who sought to extend but critique the poetics of immediate presence in the New Americans, were faced with a dilemma: how to reorient the author-centered plenitude of poets like Olson, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, or Joanne Kyger in ways that preserved their open horizons of meaning but distanced their claims to immediacy. What occurred in the Language School was a continuation but displacement of the “open field” of the postmoderns onto the horizon of language—a return, I argue, to an earlier site of social in comprehension in the modernist avant-garde. The poetics of the Language School thus reached over the New Americans to make contact with the materiality of signification evident in Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and the expatriate partisans of a “Revolution of the Word,” and later—once the pall of Cold War and segregation had lifted, as it did by degrees—in the poetry of the recovered Popular Front and Harlem Renaissance. Historically, the worldview that informed the writers of the Language School originated in the countercultural politics of the 1960s, but it resulted in a substantially more critical agenda than that of the New Americans.

The “turn to language” of the 1960s and 1970s was a site for skepticism on claims to unmediated “presence,” but it was also a return to the social in comprehension of the material text. It is here that a second, formally negative, account of the “expanded field” enters in, in a skepticism toward the (predominantly masculine) author of the postmodern avant-garde; such doubts about the nature of authorship also extend to the status of the work of art and its adherence to a particular genre—poetry or painting. The late 1960s also saw the rise of conceptual art and its influences on environmental sculpture, performance, and installation art—all genres that extended the boundaries of the work from one genre to another. Is performance art, for instance, sculpture (as it was initially categorized by art historians), or is it theater or textual improvisation? Is a language-centered work of art by Joseph Kosuth or Robert Smithson also a work of poetry? In the expanded field in this sense, the work of art itself, rather than the artist or, by extension, the author, challenges and transforms what counts as a work and as a kind of work. Conceptual art, site-specific sculpture, installation art, and improvised performance all worked to destabilize the genres of art in the 1960s and 1970s, and these moves had a formative influence on the development of language-centered writing. Rather than returning the genre of poetics to the literary tradition per se, Poetics Journal records an opening to new genres in which writing, visual art, performance, and music overlap. This indeterminacy of genre is linked directly to the “turn to language” itself; rather than seeing this turn as merely formal or literary, an unmediated return to the poetics of material signifier in modernism or to the open field in postmodernism, poetics becomes the site of the self-reflexive questioning of the nature of poetry as a genre. While responses to this question vary—from those who believe that poetry as a genre provides the necessary horizon for their activity to those who see poetry as one among many points of departure toward cultural agency—it is our claim that this productive indeterminacy leads, in many ways, to new modes of writing, not simply at a technical level but as a part of an expanded field of meaning.

The turn to language as an expanded field of meaning and agency thus combines both projective and reflexive moments. It has been a fact of artistic practice in the turn of poetry toward the materiality of language, and an enabling assumption of its theoretical framework. This progression thus had many sources in the intellectual history of the 1960s and 1970s: American neopragmatism and its interpretation of Wittgenstein; the reception of French structuralism and poststructuralism, in their historical origins in Russian Formalism and their development in the writings of Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, and écriture feminine; and debates around ideology in Western Marxism and their construction of a political postmodernism that reinterpreted the aesthetic one. In literature, the turn to language in poetry began with poetic and artistic examples (the Objectivists and the New Americans; conceptual and site-specific art), even as it took place as a part of the larger development of literary and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Poetry and poetics, then, were crucial sites where the turn to language was articulated, due to the same cultural factors that led to the rise of theory. Poetics Journal brought these debates into the journal at appropriate moments; our intention was never simply to record the development and reception of new modes of writing but also to involve that writing with the emergence of theory in the period. We saw many points of commonality for poetic and theoretical work, beginning with the Russian Formalists’ efforts to liberate the verbal sign and extending to a number of further moments: from Wittgenstein to the Frank-furt School to poststructuralism to Marxist postmodernism. Poetics becomes a site for the construction of methods as well as works—more precisely, works that entail a critical methodology in their extension and interpretation.

We began in our first issue with a set of topics that assumed nonnarrative and language-centered poetry but that also extended to larger questions. As a common source for the turn to language in literature and theory, a section from Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (1923) was selected to open our introductory issue (no. 1, 1982). It is important that Shklovsky’s development of the poetics of the material sign, while informed by the poetry of Russian Futurism, was articulated in the genre of prose fiction, both narrative and non-narrative. His account of Vasily Rozanov, a case of “minor literature” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s sense, locates the turn to language at a chaotic intersection of literary and cultural motives—Rozanov cannot be considered a formalist in any pure sense. For Shklovsky, the move toward foregrounding language performs a “knight’s move” in relation to historical context, which it represents obliquely in referential terms but “jumps over” through its processes of defamiliarization. This simultaneously formal and contextual relationship to meaning—where form is expanded to a more broadly social and historical field—was followed in many articles in our first issue, from David Plotke’s consideration of the status of language in Marxism to George Lakoff’s account of the “continuous reframing” of postmodern performance to Kit Robinson’s discussion of the use of avant-garde writing as a model for teaching. In my essay, “The Politics of Style,” I took as point of departure Charles Olson’s reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965—a grandstanding but ultimately lucid presentation of poetry as “uninterruptible discourse”—which I then read in relation to Terry Eagleton’s critique of ideology in the foregrounding of signification. In this conjunction of poetic examples and theoretical approaches, we sought to create a situation in which the implications of innovative poetry could be extended into other domains.

Succeeding issues of the journal sought to focus our efforts around key themes: Close Reading (no. 2, 1982), Poetry and Philosophy (no. 3, 1983), and Women and Language (no. 4, 1984). In each, we felt there were particular aspects of new genres of innovative writing that ought to be expanded in particular fields. The task of Close Reading, for example, was to take seriously the claim, widely circulated as a theory of how Language writing ought to be understood, that “the reader makes meaning.” Based in Barthes’s distinction between lisable and scriptible texts, this theory was, we felt, too general at best and unexamined in terms of specific acts of reading at worst, leading to a politics where the reader can make whatever he or she wants out of a text. The reader-centered theory of meaning has an important democratic aspect, but the resulting politics are as often regressive as progressive. For every instance in which the empowering of the reader as a political entity liberates him from bad authority, one could find an instance in which the reader is free to project whatever he wants onto a political position, to assume it stands for his interests regardless of content. It is easy to connect this “writerly” projection to aspects of democratic politics that have had an overwhelmingly negative effect—in the “dumbing down” of public language to the point that anything means anything, depending on your interest. In the context of the second Iraq War, this meant that the absence of weapons of mass destruction did not matter as an argument against policy; the war was its own argument. The difficult language of poetry, from the modernists onward, has intended, among other things, to question such a “dumbing down” of communication in the public sphere. Just so, the “reader makes meaning” theory needs to be qualified in terms of its specific motives and contexts.

In our issue, we assembled a wide range of examples of what such a “politics of the reader” might look like, from analyses of poetic language by a postgenerative linguist (Haj Ross) and the application of recent theories of language to poetry by Ron Silliman and me, to articles that made the act of reading itself a performative operation (Steve Benson, Alan Davies, Jackson Mac Low, Johanna Drucker). Benson’s “Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings” was originally staged as a performance at 80 Langton Street (later New Langton Arts), an interdisciplinary artists’ space where many poets of the San Francisco Language School read or performed from the late 1970s on. In his performance, equally a practical demonstration of “the reader makes meaning” theory, Benson carefully hand-copied a series of literary texts, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to Virginia Woolf and Larry Eigner, which he projected onto the gallery wall and commented on in a spontaneous improvisation. In this work, Benson established a mode of performance as dialogue between preexisting texts and spontaneous interpretations that he continues to develop in his work, adding a skeptical element in the evanescence of such readings that balanced their open and liberatory potential to “free the reader.” The open field of meaning is returned here to modernist in comprehension of the material text as it expands into new genres of performance art. The turn to the material text here reflected on contemporary practice among poets as it anticipated the critique of material textuality that would emerge in the work of Jerome McGann, Cary Nelson, Michael Davidson, Susan Howe, and others. Close Reading offers a prime example of the predictive value of the genre of poetics in terms of the development of theory and practice.

The moment of theory was our focus in Poetry and Philosophy. In that issue, we wanted to assess contemporary writers’ relations to various philosophical traditions and to pursue the relevance of philosophy to poetry in aesthetics. In a larger sense, we wanted once more to refute the banishment of the poets from questions of truth, as commonly understood (even as much revisionist work on the ancient Greeks, from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Elaine Scarry, questions the exclusion of the poets from philosophical debate). We entered into this question with few prior commitments to how contemporary writing ought to be seen in relation to philosophy. While the turn to language in poetry took place, first and foremost, as a development of literary and artistic possibilities (in experimental modernism, after Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky; the New American poetry; and new developments in conceptual and interdisciplinary art), it also took many of its cues, even central assumptions, from the rise of neopragmatist and poststructuralist theory in the 1960s and 1970s. Even so, the opening of the field of poetry that we witnessed was so powerful that there was seldom a sense that poetry needed to be mapped precisely onto another set of theoretical options. If theory was everywhere and nowhere, poetry was simply, it might be said, the shape of things to come. It is significant that the turn to language in poetry was so immediately identified with the turn to theory, in early examples such as Ron Silliman’s minianthology “Surprised by Sign” (Alcheringa, 1975), Steve McCaffery’s section of a special issue of Open Letter (1977), and Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein’s editing of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–82).

Two points are important here: first, while there was much invocation of theory in these early positions, it was always seen in relation to new possibilities in writing itself. It was also true that the turn to theory was taken to be such a violent affront, to both the poetics of presence among New Americans and the poetry of the workshops, that the Language School was often seen as being in complete denial of poetry in favor some other, “alien” discourse. Our third issue of Poetics Journal thus tried to proceed from a reimagined neutral perspective: to what extent are poets involved in theory, and precisely which theories, which traditions? The answers ranged from essays taking up the general question of poetry and philosophy (Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Allen Fisher, Bernard Noël) to accounts of philosophical influences and demonstrations of the relation of theory to poetics (Jackson Mac Low, Alan Davies, Erica Hunt). The essays exhibited an unresolved tension between Anglo-American and Continental models, while Wittgenstein was the philosopher most frequently invoked. In my essay, I looked for common grounds between conceptual art and Language writing, recognizing important distinctions of genre between them even as I sought a “total syntax” that would extend poetry into contexts in the manner of conceptual and site-specific art. In contrast to this sober analysis, Alan Davies’s performance “Language/Mind/Writing” acted out an illicit borrowing of theory by poetry and its refusal of normative forms of poetic discourse that would cause nightmares among mainstream poets.

Given the emerging sense of mission expressed in our volume titles, it was with a sense of belatedness that we took up questions of gender in Women and Language. Increasingly there was a common assumption that modernism and postmodernism maintained versions of the author that were patriarchal, homosocial, or authoritarian (granted the expanded canon of women modernists and the anticipation of second-wave feminism in the postmoderns). Poetry in the contemporary period, by contrast, was witnessing the emergence of second-wave feminism and of numerous language-centered women writers, including Kathy Acker, Beverly Dahlen, Jean Day, Lynne Dreyer, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kathleen Fraser, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Erica Hunt, and Leslie Scalapino. The reception and continuity of a language-centered poetics among women was one of the most important features distinguishing our postmodernism from an earlier male-dominated and homosocial one. In addition, gender was having a profound effect on the development of new genres of poetry and poetics, leading at once to radically self-focused lyricism (Dahlen, Fanny Howe, Day), poetry that breaks with the lyric tradition to address sources of language outside the literary (Susan Howe, Hejinian, Tina Darragh), and forms that deliberately violate the boundaries of genre (Scalapino, Harryman, Acker).

Our fourth issue of Poetics Journal was the first such collection of experimental women writers, and numerous essays in it are definitive: Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure,” which compares the horizons of “open form” (after Umberto Eco’s “open work”) with the écriture feminine of French feminism; the opening sections of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, which transformed notions of authorship in relation to the material text and led to a complete reassessment of Dickinson’s poetics; and Dahlen’s “Forbidden Knowledge,” which brought into poetics a gendered reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Also significant in the issue were articles recovering neglected women modernists, from Mina Loy (Carolyn Burke) to Laura (Riding) Jackson (Ben Friedlander), and writing by women visual and performance artists (Abigail Child, Sally Silvers, Ellen Zweig). Francie Shaw’s cover should be remembered, too, for the interpretation of the volume it offered: a mixed-media depiction of numerous men’s hats suspended in air that, paradoxically, claimed a feminist poetics in the reinscription of masculine signifiers. Françoise de Laroque’s contrarian essay “What Is the Sex of the Poets?” reinforced this gendered reinscription in her review of an anthology of contemporary French poets, largely men, that, in contrast to the rise of an essentialist feminist poetics as écriture feminine, claimed the author function to be masculine. The double ironies of such a position in the context of the numerous swappings of identity positions in the issue argued against any simplistic identity politics and for more complex understandings of the ways gender is enacted in poetry. At the same time, this was a collection that highlighted innovative writing by women. It was our first popularly successful issue—it sold out immediately, and copies are now rare—leading, we heard, to study groups in the Bay Area that met to discuss the essays.

The next triad of issues—Non/Narrative (no. 5, 1985), Marginality: Public and Private Language (no. 6, 1987), and Postmodern? (no. 7, 1988)—sought to interpret innovative poetry in relation to public discourse in related ways. We began by questioning the status of narrative in innovative poetics, in light of numerous strategies among experimental writers that questioned, undermined, or totally abandoned it. The privileging of a synchronic and atemporal horizon of “language,” rather than the causality, closure, totalization, and temporality of narrative, was an assumption shared by the majority of the language-centered writers in the 1970s and 1980s. “Language,” as we have claimed, originated first in the intensified pressures on meaning in avant-garde and lyric poetry, but it took up related concepts in structuralist and postgenerative linguistics, deconstruction, postanalytic and neopragmatist philosophy, and hermeneutics (not all at the same time!) as providing insights into the nature of poetic language. What resulted, as will be evident in any reading of work published in journals like A Hundred Posters, Big Deal, Hills, La Bas, Roof, Tottel’s, This, and others from the period of the Language School’s emergence, as well as from the writings on poetics in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, was a horizon of language in the Language School that was more spatial than temporal. For many writers (and visual artists), narrative was suspect—it was the horizon of official meaning and interpretation, the real prison house to which we have been confined by history. An open field of meaning offered a way out of the confinements of narrative and closure, and nonnarrative writing strategies (which deferred or suspended at least one of the several distinguishing features of narrative) became vehicles of choice. But what about the tricky relation of the prefix non- to narrative? Does nonnarrative writing depend on a (suppressed, underlying, denied) framework of narrative? What of the social and historical narratives the writer is in when she writes nonnarrative work? Such narratives are easy to discern in the avant-garde: there is the story of new meaning, of tradition leading to innovation, of moving toward abstraction, and so on.

There was also, in much work we published, a resistance to dominant narratives—of opposing the Vietnam War and supporting the civil rights movement, for instance—that gave meaning to the artistic strategies of the counterculture. Seeing these strategies as historical and yet diverging from any singular meaning or larger grand narrative suggested, as well, an emerging consensus for a postmodern refusal of narrative. Fredric Jameson’s notion of “the waning of affect” among postmoderns—who could not hold the present together with the protensions and retentions of history and were thus confined to mere intensities, nostalgia, pastiche, and spatial dislocation, a notion put forth in his “Postmodernism” essay—offered a direct challenge to our work. Finally, there was an immediate challenge to Language poetries and nonnarrative raised by writers of the New Narrative tendency in San Francisco—Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, to begin with, and Kathy Acker, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Michael Amnasan, and Camille Roy later on—who, following the debates between Georges Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre against the poetics of surrealism, called for writing that was embodied, committed, concerned with sexuality and with gendered (particularly queer) identity, transgressive in terms of genre, and narrative.

Non/Narrative thus raised the question of the rejection or affirmation of narrative in innovative writing within the horizon of an emergent postmodernism. The issue begins with a series of essays by writers who see themselves as suffocating in the prison house of narrative and who try to formulate strategies that negotiate between continuity and discontinuity. As Steve Benson writes in “Mediations in an Emergency”: “The sequence of events one encounters and tells oneself of and links in association may be made narrative, by condensation and displacement, much as I tell myself the story of my life, moment to moment, in as many voices and forms and styles as I may know” (7). Between writing and reading, narrative is a necessary sense-making activity that must be negotiated. Leslie Scalapino’s “Poetic Diaries” takes up the narrative of Tales of Genji and extends it to language-centered prose texts such as Clark Coolidge’s Mine: The One That Enters the Stories, seeing narrative as an exteriorization of subjectivity:

Therefore my thought, and events which are painful to me—and the world, are the same. Very painful events may seem to have longer reverberations. Which cause their own reordering. This implies a syntax which in being read would require that the reader go through the process of its thought, have that thought again—and it’s therefore an act, one which has not occurred before. A thought of the writer isn’t going to be duplicated. (20)

For Scalapino, narrative is a necessary reliving of traumatic experience in a way that is dissimilar to its past moment; narrative joins with nonnarrative at the site of trauma. Ed Friedman’s “How Space Stations Gets Written”—a narrative of a writing project that works between transcripts of the Apollo lunar mission and his own diaries—takes a more ameliorative approach to narrative, which he sees as distributed among the many voices of the ongoing experiment. Between taped voices of “Mission Control” and his own responses, Friedman constructs a textual feedback system in which he monitors sensory inputs, ongoing data analysis, response formulation, implementation of strategies (“the ability to put plans into action”), and overviews of the project as a whole. Narrative takes place as moments of decision making in the ongoing work that are at the same time distributed in the total form of a process-oriented project. The therapeutic benefits of such a form of self-monitoring are crucial, as discussed in relation to the psychoanalytic tradition by Nick Piombino. Between the stream of associations of the psychoanalytic session and the forms of scientific intuition, narrative is a necessary mediation: “The mental need of transitional language to bind together very brief intervals of inner experience into a recognizable, describable unit of perception causes a continuous shift in perspective from intuited thought to communicable thought.” Narrative dislocates rather than totalizes, but the ability to work with its demands leads to an optimal balance between “the fragmentary experience of disjunctive association”—an effect many texts of Language writing imitate—and the capacity of “identity to experience cohesion and still retain the needed sensitivity to change which promotes new configurations.” The issue continues with a series of positions that investigate the tension between the need for narrative and the need to escape its confines: in “The Knowledge of Narratives,” Peter Middleton defends the importance of narrative for science; Michael Anderson’s “Framing the Construals” rejects narrative as a universal element of communication and calls for a semiotics of interpretation; while in his piece “And Who Remembers Bobby Sands,” Steve McCaffery rejects univocal narrative as a socially distorted overriding of plurality:

Narrative is now autotelic inside its own repetitions. Its concern is strictly with its own reproduction as a model of communication. It no longer offers a commodity world of bounded stories and events but hypersimulates its own form as the abstract form of reproduction. In this eclipse of representation, meaning is no longer consumed (as in the realist novels of the last century) nor is meaning produced (as in the struggles of much post-modern narrative and non-narrative); it is reflected without absorption. Hence the entropicity of the late night news. (67–68)

Theoretical overviews of narrative in relation to postmodern knowledge were matched, in our issue, by a forum on poetics and narrative that asked a series of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and performance artists, “What is the status of narrative in your work?” Responses ranged from descriptions of the place of narrative in artistic practice (Alan Bernheimer, Michael Davidson, Maxine Chernoff, Rae Armantrout, Diane Ward, Alice Notley, Tina Darragh) to enactment of nonnarrative strategies (cris cheek, Fiona Templeton). Two important dimensions of the forum were the extension of the question to visual artists (Doug Hall, Howard Fried), musicians (Andrew Voigt), and filmmakers (Warren Sonbert); and a set of theoretical positions that either supported the New Narrative (Bruce Boone, “A Narrative Like a Punk Picture: Shocking Pinks, Lavenders, Magentas, Sickly Greens”; Robert Glück, “Baucis and Philemon”) or worked between narrative and nonnarrative (Carla Harryman’s “Toy Boats,” which begins, “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it”). Following the forum is a series of articles of a recent production of Kit Robinson’s theater piece Collateral by the San Francisco Poets Theater. An emergent genre that involved both Language writing as text and narrative construction in production, Poets Theater located its aesthetics squarely on a dividing line between discontinuity (abrupt shifts of narrative frame, nonsense, surprise, Witz) and continuity (contingent framing, local coherence, emerging thematics, insight). In this forum, Kit Robinson and director Nick Robinson work through the decisions that take them from text to production, a discussion that may be read in a larger sense as about the interpretation of radical texts in their horizons of meaning. The work of Poets Theater, which featured productions of works by Eileen Corder, Kit and Nick Robinson, Alan Bernheimer, Bob Perelman, and Carla Harryman, and its challenge to static, exclusively language-centered interpretations of experimental writing, was a central influence on our questioning of the status of narrative.

Finally, the issue ended with a series of reviews, controversial in the way reviews of contemporaries seldom are, on writers such as Robert Creeley, Stephen Emerson, Lydia Davis, and David Antin who explore the poetics of narrative. Two reviews of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one by David Bromige and the other by David Lloyd, divide on a fault line between valorizing the “open form” of its poetics and demanding that it be considered as a species of ideology. For Bromige, the turn to language in poetry counters its degraded status in the lifeworld: “Between a stultifying insistence on an impossible accuracy, and an intoxicated assumption that one knows what is meant (and which turns out to be what, one way or another, one wanted to be meant), we live…. Or we might so live, sufficiently reminded.” Lloyd, on the other hand, is skeptical of a claim to such an alternative: “In the currently institutionalized forms of the discourse of poetics, a matrix of forms secretes the hidden ideology of aesthetic thinking.” This tension between open form and discursive closure is also evident in Bob Perelman’s “Exchangeable Frames,” his review of Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage and Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. What Perloff ignores, for Perelman, is precisely the social and historical narratives that make indeterminacy legible, in a complex dialectic of determination and interpretation: “Comforting as Perloff’s procedures of close reading is to the writer (and distressing, too, when she won’t read the form), Jameson’s lesson needs to be learned. Writing does not occur only on the page, in the words themselves.” In concluding, Perelman aligns his position with the crux between narrative and nonnarrative our issue intended to explore: “Anything is a story if it’s seen as one. Yet any narrative can be dissolved into a wider scheme. So there are no ‘such things’ as narrative or nonnarrative. Narrative is not immanent, but social.”

My discussion of the debates around Non/Narrative may give a sense of how we tried to construct each issue of the journal: as a network of intersecting arguments within a larger frame, something like a poem, in fact. In retrospect, it seems that Non/Narrative marked a crisis in aesthetics among language-centered writers and a defining moment of the journal’s project in its situating of nonnarrative in theory, practice, and comment. It was truly controversial: as difficult as it is to criticize toward larger aesthetic or political ends, and not simply descriptively or supportively, there is a human tendency to sustain the continuity of our hard-won meanings, nonnarrative included. Historically, something of the assumptions that were common to language-centered writing seemed to change about the time of Non/Narrative, and it might be useful to wonder why. Was it, in fact, the challenge of the advocates of New Narrative, who insisted that the turn to language did not adequately offer a politics of gender? Was it a moment in which a nonnarrative openness of form and meaning found its limits in a demand for historical legibility and the periodizing of a postmodern culture? Was it the tension over the politics of the literary and aesthetic in relation to culturalist approaches that became increasingly important in the 1980s? Was it the arrival on the scene of institutional criticism and critics who would interpret our efforts? Something snapped in terms of the immanent consensus shared by members of the writing community, and perhaps this was a good thing.

Marginality: Public and Private Language (no. 6, 1986) begins with just such an entropic moment, in which the assumptions of nonnarrative writing encounter normative modes of communication in moving from the hermetic and private to the public and accessible. Again, this move was controversial: if poets agreed to place their work in the context of public discourse, much of its originality and nuance might be compromised. Yet the benefits seemed to us to outweigh the risk and produced an important range of positions in the issue for assessing the status of poetic language as public communication (many of which are included in this guide): Bruce Andrews’s call for a poetics as social action, “Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis”; Rae Armantrout’s send-up of the public pretensions of “private” concerns in poetry, “Mainstream Marginality”; Michael Davidson’s investigation of the poetics of individual languages and sociolects, “‘Hey Man, My Wave!’: The Authority of Private Language”; Johanna Drucker’s valorization of a visual poetics of radical idiosyncrasy, “Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître’s Roman Hypergraphique”; and Bob Perelman’s “Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Céline, and Fascism,” a thorough treatment of modernist poetics in relation to social narratives, as he had called for in the preceding issue. Also featured were George Lakoff’s application of frame semantics to private language, “The Public Aspect of the Language of Love”; sections from Jackson Mac Low’s “Pieces o’ Six,” in which he moves from chance procedures to a poetics of real-time association; Andrew Ross’s “The Oxygen of Publicity,” which brought the poetics of deformed media language into the context of poetics; and my own “XYZ of Reading,” which meditated on the fate of radical writing at the site of public in comprehension.

The call to expand the field of poetry from the literary to the cultural continued with Postmodern? (no. 7, 1988). Here, what was influential in the 1980s was not only Fredric Jameson’s challenge to narrate the nonnarratable but also a widespread perception in the visual arts of a turn from expressivist aesthetics toward more public, anti-individualistic concerns. This challenge could be discerned in Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay, which juxtaposed language-centered poetry (Bob Perelman’s “China”) with examples of schizophrenic language, narrative pastiche, postmodern architecture, and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. While Jameson, to be sure, thought he was simply periodizing in characterizing symptoms of postmodern distress in Perelman’s poem as schizophrenic language, the implications of such a move—that Language writing was merely symptomatic—had to be countered. And was not the discourse of postmodernism one that innovative writers wanted to claim for their own? The fault line, here, appears in the word itself, postmodern, which various essays in the issue affirmed, contested, or nuanced—beginning with George Hartley’s detailed “Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier,” which sought to uncover the historical and theoretical reasons why Jameson had written such a one-sided account.

Generally positive overviews of the postmodernism debate were offered by Ron Silliman in “‘Postmodernism’: Sign for a Struggle, Struggle for the Sign,” which affirmed the significance of the postmodern, however contested, for language-centered writing. My own contribution, “The Literature of Surface,” argued that a further historical distinction ought to be made between an embodied, spontaneous, immanent Postmodernism I (an “Early Postmodernism”), seen in a range of art practice from the New Americans to minimalism, against a simulacral, nostalgic, pastiched Postmodernism II (the “Late Postmodernism” of Jameson, Lyotard, and Baudrillard) that was taken up by the art of the 1980s. Kathy Acker’s “Ugly,” a prose fiction that fantasizes revolutionary, Third World violence, or Leslie Scalapino’s “Pattern—and the Simulacral” both strongly affirmed postmodernism in literary practice, and by women. However, skeptical notes emerged in Larry Price’s “Contingency Caper”; Allen Fisher’s “Postmodernism as Package”; Harry Polkinhorn’s “Failure of a Postmodern Aesthetic”; and reviews of Andrew Ross’s Failure of Modernism and Charles Bernstein’s Content’s Dream. Anti-postmodern positions were also represented by Alan Davies’s intellectually violent “Strong Language”; Duncan McNaughton’s “From the Empty Quarter”; and Bill Berkson’s “Stick” (countered, in our mini-forum on the postmodern, by Kathy Acker). Perhaps an element of language-centered nominalism (the Language School is always “so-called,” never adequately named) accounts for writers’ misgivings about being located in an historical period, however “post-”; such resistance may also be a residual effect of modernist poetics, or even poetry itself when compared to other genres.

The final triad of issues internalized the cultural turn of the preceding three issues and partly returned to literary practice as the ground for poetics, from Elsewhere (no. 8, 1989), to The Person (no. 9, 1992), to Knowledge (no. 10, 1998). This was a moment that coincided with numerous writers of the Language School taking up positions in academia and with the emergence of a new generation of post-Language poets and critics. Elsewhere began with the question of radical alterity—the “other” as fundamentally compelling and finally unknowable—as a motive for experimental writing that trades in language-centered alterity. After the cultural turn, such an alterity reflects diverse subjectivities and literary traditions as “other”: our issue foregrounded work from an “other” culture at the end of the Cold War, the newly accessible community of post-Soviet poets and artists Lyn Hejinian made contact with in her 1980s travels in the Soviet Union and helped bring into translation. In this moment of cultural opening, a number of Russians would present their work during the same period at New Langton Arts, the Poetry Project, and the New Writing Program (University of California, San Diego), and in turn they organized the 1989 international conference of avant-garde poets and critics that led to the writing of our multiauthored text Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (with Michael Davidson and Ron Silliman, 1991). The literary and cultural issues that surrounded this exchange were many: on the one hand, we had begun our journal by invoking the poetics of Russian Formalism, which post-Soviets shared but from a radically different perspective, in that they had received much of their information about the Soviet 1920s from the West and had rejected any sense that experimental writing and the Soviet state were connected.

The aesthetics of the post-Soviets, at least in poetry, might be characterized as a kind of hyperrealized metapoetics—an inward-turning “beyondsense” generally unlike the material texts produced by the Language School in the same period. One may argue over the reasons for the difference between our aesthetics—and we did, in countless meetings with our counterparts on both sides of the collapsing border between antagonists. Whereas the dissolution of Cold War tensions has now been seen as linked to an assertion of “identity politics” in language-centered writing (in an interesting but speculative essay by Walter Benn Michaels in The Shape of the Signifier), the publication of Elsewhere, Hejinian’s translations of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and her own Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, Kit Robinson’s translations of Ilya Kutik, and my own Under Erasure are marked sites of a poetics of alterity at the Cold War’s devolution. The “end of history” loudly proposed as the triumph of neoliberalism after 1989 was, from the perspective of poetics, no end at all but an opening to multiplicities that were held in check and even suppressed by the great power politics of the era. After the collapse of this constitutive antagonism, our issue took up numerous “elsewheres” of identity and difference in various contexts, from the “l’existence est ailleurs” of the surrealists to Robert Smithson’s use of the landscape of New Jersey. Significant alterities in the issue included essays on British and Canadian experimental writing (Jeff Derksen, “North Of”; Paul Green, “Literate Tones”); writings by French poet Emmanuel Hocquard and “Penultimate Witness,” Jerry Estrin’s essay on Hocquard’s work; essays on religion, myth, and alterity by Nathaniel Tarn, Norman Fischer, and Fanny Howe; Laura Moriarty’s account of sex in the poetry then being published by Detroit’s In Camera Press; Andrew Ross’s reading of race and gender in Frank O’Hara’s “Death of Lady Day”; an anthology of Québecois poetry in translation assembled by Michel Gay; discussions of alterity as an element of performance art and film (Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Abigail Child); and my account of the poetics of social space in Detroit.

This move to alterity permitted, in turn, a new assessment of subjectivity and identity, which we pursued in The Person, an issue that presented the subject not as the ground of lyric aesthetics but as a site of anxiety, contestation, trauma. In language-centered writing, it may be said, the subject is “under erasure” in a distancing aesthetic, and we were not advocating any return to the embodied subject of the New American poets, much less the self-presentations of the Confessional poets. On the other hand, the separation between language-centered writing and the aims of poetries that invoked identity politics (African-American foremost among them, with race, class, and gender in general as constituting identities) had to be addressed. As a concept, “the person” combines the positivity of diverse subject positions with the sense that all identity claims are rifted with nonidentity: “the person” is the site of identity as a construction and of nonidentity as its constitutive ground. Our issue thus sought to affirm a necessary relation between poetries that claimed identity and poetries that radically textualized it. This was not a simple task, as the insightful but difficult dialogue between Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, “What Person?,” demonstrates. Scalapino had objected to an essay Silliman published in Socialist Review (1988) that claimed a necessary difference between the respective aims of “dominant” and “marginal” groups in innovative poetry, with white male heterosexual (WMH) poets proposing a poetry of nonidentity because theirs was not in question, and women, poets of color, and gay and lesbian writers needing to “tell their stories” in a more identitarian manner. Scalapino saw this argument as denying the capacity of minority identities to claim the same “high” aesthetic values (distance, objectification, textuality) as WMHs, and objected to Silliman’s perspective as, precisely, the identity claim of a WMH. Silliman, in response, tried to unpack and defuse any such identity claims as ultimately relative to the particular social circumstances of one’s upbringing, in his case in terms of class. A minor scandal was the result, with both poets claiming identity and nonidentity simultaneously but in denial (and assimilation) of the other’s. As William Carlos Williams wrote in “To Elsie” on the hidden injuries of race and class, “some-how it seems to destroy us”—but it was precisely this agonizing space between identity claims we sought to confront.

To assess the issue of “personhood” from the perspectives of as many “persons” as possible, our issue contained work from thirty-six authors, with three symposia: “The Person,” which asked a number of artists and poets, “What is the status of the person in your work?”; “The Poetics of Everyday Life,” which discussed the relation of postmodern poetry to experience; and “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person,” which focused on a single author. (Given the multitude of authors in the issue, the decision to include a symposium on Creeley was a contrarian impulse, but one that recognized the importance of his work for a poetics of personhood.) In the lead article, “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry,” Norman Finkelstein theorized the inescapable horizon of the person in lyric poetry, no matter how strenuously some poets would seek an alternative to self. “It’s all person,” his argument implied, but if so the next question might be “What person?” In our view, experimental poetics contests the normative account of the person, seeing it as a site of difference, nonidentity, and conflict as much as identity. Kofi Natambu’s “Multicultural Aesthetic” and Harryette Mullen’s “Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborg” argued for a poetics of culturally diverse and mediated personhood, while Kit Robinson’s “Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing” saw the person as necessary for social structures of late capitalism as a baseline psychological reality. Race, class, and social structure are thus embedded within any construction of the “person,” which becomes the site for social reading as much as subjective investment. By comparing, for instance, the hypersubjectivism of Dragomoshchenko’s “I(s),” on decentered subjectivity in post-Soviet writing, with Hejinian’s more self-reflexive framework for personhood in “The Person and Description,” one could map a divergent set of cultural assumptions. Charles Bernstein’s “Professing Stein/Stein Professing” foregrounds authorship as a site of social construction in which reading Stein, reproducing Stein in the academy, and claiming authorship after Stein come together, while Ben Friedlander’s “Lyrical Interference” shows how lyric poetics—as exemplified in his own work, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and lyrics by Ernest Tubb and Louis Armstrong—creates a space for a reinvestment of personhood as alterity in lyric form. Accessing a completely different mode of writing, Dodie Bellamy’s “Days without Someone” draws on the genre of popular romance in her account of the time and space of an affair as a site for accessing personhood in terms of absence, desire, and longing. Finally, two essays strongly argue for the social constitution of the person: Félix Guattari’s “Language, Consciousness, and Society,” a text that Guattari was prevented from presenting at the 1989 Leningrad conference but that was circulated clandestinely by post-Soviet writers; and Yulia Latinina’s “Folklore and ‘Novoyaz,’” which recovered survivals of Russian folklore in the 1930s discourse of the Stalin cult, one of the most repellent constructions of “the person” in modern history.

Given these multiperspectival and constructivist accounts of the poetics of personhood, one might predict that the forum on the work of Robert Creeley would be an occasion to denaturalize readings of his work, to question its assumptions of immanence and autobiography. Creeley is particularly important for these debates as the poet who fashioned the most durable account of identity among the New American poets, but who likewise anticipated the “turn to language” in poetry, most particularly in Pieces (1969). In introducing this debate (originally a panel discussion at the Poetry Project, New York, in 1991), I asked how Creeley’s work might be read as historical despite his explicit disavowal of history outside the scope of autobiography—a question meant to be provocative. Susan Howe and Alan Davies responded with defenses of Creeley’s authorship, while Richard Blevins argued for a poetics of mastery in his historical account of Creeley’s formulation of “the single intelligence.” Ted Pearson’s “Form of Assumptions,” on the other hand, opened up Creeley’s lyricism to alterity in its account of gender and sexuality, disclosing a set of discrepant impulses the form must master and contain, even disavow. However contrarian, his reading of “When he and I …” (Pieces) opens the way for a reading of Creeley’s work in a new sense—one that does not end in the reader’s production of the author as site for subjective reinvestment. In this sense, the combined testimony of the multiplicity of persons who responded to our symposia “The Person” and “The Poetics of Everyday Life” demonstrates how a constructivist account of “the person” can be put forward as an open form.

Knowledge (no. 10, 1998), the final issue of the journal, appeared after a hiatus for both editors. In the space between The Person and Knowledge was—what? History? A reorientation of cultural politics with the end of the Cold War and the first Iraq War? Life? The institutionalization of the Language School and the arrival of new groups of poets? Let us imagine that the gaps between history, life, and poetry, which cannot be fully represented, will continue to produce new knowledge. Knowledge of the unrepresentable? Yet was that not what we were doing all along with the “turn to language”? The moment of reassessment in such terms—and they were not explicitly articulated—became a moment of opening up to discrepant projects, both creative and critical, that we organized around the (non)theme of all themes, given its ability to include everything in its scope: “knowledge.” Louis Zukofsky, in his turn to language, had asserted that he had “done away with epistemology”; from then on only poetry would endure. Skeptical of any such claims, in postmodernity, to an “end” (of history, person, knowledge, or our project), we wanted to open language-centered poetics to the questions of epistemology they assumed. At the same time, we could not adopt any one perspective or method from which such an inquiry would be pursued, since poetry and its community are multiperspectival. Pierre Alferi’s contribution, “Seeking a Sentence,” opens the issue with a series of meditations on linguistic form as a site of inquiry; while Hejinian’s “La Faustienne” contrasts Western epistemology in the figure of Faust with a feminine allegory for knowledge in Scheherazade. The urge to look and to tell become sites not of transparent communication but of agitation and desire. As evident in the compressed form of Ted Pearson’s “Things Made Known,” poetics itself, as an object of knowledge, is unsettled and agitated.

Gendering epistemology are Joan Retallack’s “Blue Notes from the Know Ledge,” which extends the uncertainty over whether the color blue can be said to exist in analytic philosophy into a demonstration of poetic inquiry, and Dodie Bellamy’s “Can’t We Just Call It Sex?,” which claims calling sexuality by its right names as fundamental to aesthetics. Reva Wolf, in “Thinking You Know,” interrogates knowledge construction in literary and art history through a close reading of John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rootabagas in a Landscape” in terms of its intertextuality, and looks particularly at whether Ashbery cited a painting by Andy Warhol that contains a fragment of language (and an image of Popeye) that appears in the poem. Herman Rapaport’s reading of Ashbery along with Clark Coolidge and Leslie Scalapino sees lyric poetry as a site of disseminated, temporalizing effects; his deconstructive reading may be juxtaposed to George Hartley’s “Althusser Metonymy Wall,” which charts the “abyss of representation” via post-Marxist ideology critique after Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. More than earlier issues, Knowledge juxtaposes creative and critical texts, with poetry by Michael Davidson, Dan Davidson, Jean Day, Michael Gottlieb, Pamela Lu, Travis Ortiz, Lisa Samuels, Leslie Scalapino, Rod Smith, Lorenzo Thomas, Hung Q. Tu, and Chris Tysh, along with a chapter from Michael Amnasan’s Joe Liar, which explores the inauthenticity of postmodern experience. Essays by Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy,” and David Benedetti, “Fear of Poetic (Social) Knowledge: Why Some People Don’t Like (Language) Poetry,” on the other hand, reflect the tensions around the institutionalization of language-centered writing, while contributions by Ilya Kutik and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko maintain the focus among post-Soviet writers on a hypersubjectivity that contests normative discourse. My essay, “What I See in How I Became Hettie Jones,” sees the question of knowledge as leading to a revisionary, gendered account of authorship, which I read as a question of poetics in Hettie Jones’s relationship with LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka and as a parallel to the canon formation of the New American poets, from Olson and Edward Dorn to Jones/Baraka. In perhaps the wildest essay in the entire run of the journal, Dennis Barone recovers an instance of eighteenth-century language-centered writing from a Philadelphia newspaper, which he presents in its entirety. Meditations by Kit Robinson on alienation in postmodern social space, “Pleasanton/Embassy Suite”; Aaron Shurin on the poetics of the AIDS epidemic, “Orphée: The Kiss of Death”; Robert Glück on the cultural imperative for “location, location, and location” in the arts; Jim Rosenberg on the coming horizon of digital poetics, “Openings: The Connection Direct”; and Lytle Shaw’s and Steve Evans’s reviews of new writers—indicate the multiplicity of directions we felt had to be pursued. After the “end of history,” we discovered a plurality of poetics that we were able to organize under the rubric of a postmodern turn to “knowledge.”

The possibility of continuing our project now, through a selection of representative works from the journal, comes at a somewhat darker historical moment. What looked like an agitated but relatively happy pluralism in the mid-1990s was forever bracketed and contained by the turn to corporate militarism, advanced media hypocrisy, and cultural repression after September 11 and the second Iraq War. We may add to that the specter of global environmental and economic collapse that coincided with the end of the Bush era. In the arts through the end of that period, we saw denial and business as usual and a concomitant hardening of lines, the drawing up of defensive perimeters between positions. It is our sense that the radical openness of modes of poetic inquiry we engaged in the journal have never been more necessary as an instigation to continue the work of immanent critique, in and through the language and culture we live within. At the same time there is a purely practical sense that this writing provides paradigms for poetic inquiry that may be offered to readers more generally and taught in the classroom. Finally, the run of the journal offers a valuable historical record of a period of intense speculation and reflection in poetics and among language-centered writers.

How then should we proceed? It was suggested to us that the run of the journal, as a historical document, could only really be preserved in its entirety, and since that would currently be unfeasible in printed form, it ought to be digitally scanned and published online—but we were certain to reject that option. For one thing, this work is anything but ephemeral; it is a historical record, and needs to be presented as such; for another, digital media are less stable than print, and it is anyone’s guess what will become of digital archives in as short a time span as two or three decades. In bringing together a representative sample of writings from the journal in the available means of publication, then, we faced hard choices. To begin with, we decided that we should not represent the work of the journal in a developmental or linear series; rather, we would focus on a matrix-like array of positions. In order to obtain such an array, we unpacked the run of the journal and reordered it, often experimenting with arbitrary game structures in order to create multiple, lateral, and variously contingent relations between authors, essays, and themes. A differently imagined kind of argument emerged from this dissolving of the temporal series that had been so carefully edited in the journal; at the same time, we wanted to preserve a sense of the writing’s historical specificity. Thus the essays have been arranged into three sections, while the linear relations between them has been dissolved, and links and keynotes are provided that will help the reader access contiguous discussions in the guide and the online archive.

What we see in Poetics Journal is, on the one hand, a written record of poetics and the arts that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, through a dialogue among poets, critics, and artists and focused by the various themes we proposed. More important, however, we see a redefinition of poetics as an expanded field that extends from the radical focus on poetic language to a reflexive genre of cultural critique. In a radical opening from the literary themes of our introduction and first triad of issues, transformed by the demand to account for social and cultural forms in the second, the journal developed a polyvocal, multigeneric, interdisciplinary form of inquiry. In addition to the description, critique, and celebration of new forms of writing, the journal developed numerous new modes of thinking in and as poetics, including prose and performance writing that combines improvisatory form and gender critique; essays in lyric aesthetics as philosophical and methodological investigations; critiques of postmodern politics and social agency extended from innovative poetry; literary polemics that defend the literary and cultural values of formal experiment; genealogies of the turn to the material text as both visual poetics and historical record; time-based and site-specific improvisatory poetics and cultural writing; language-centered texts that claim critical agency in their resistant facticity; theories of public language that have their origins in the analysis of poetic language; writings in poetics that disclose literary assumptions of various national traditions toward a global horizon; postmodern critiques of cultural form and the historical horizons of late capitalism; the poetics of nonnarrative and New Narrative forms; the aesthetics of racial, class, and ethnic difference as mediated in mass culture and poetic form; a historical critique of the forms of modern and postmodern authorship and authority; dialogic exchanges between poets; new media writing; and the emergence of a new generation of language-centered writers.

Each position in this multifaceted debate in some way links to others; so for each of the essays we were able to include in this collection, we have constructed a short bibliography of works by the given author and links to other writings in the journal. We have chosen a hybrid organization of the material, first into rough historical periods, and then, within those periods, by alphabetical order, which is to say arbitrarily rather than chronologically or thematically. Finally, we have made available the entire run of the journal (including full-length versions of articles that have been edited) as a companion Poetics Journal Digital Archive and provide a short section titled “How to Use This Guide” in order to bridge the gap between the guide and the archive. Our hope is that, with this experiment in dual print and digital publication, the writing we assembled in the journal and the activity in innovative poetics it represents will be made newly available for use.

—Barrett Watten