#language poets

[aether--or]

“I am always looking at your work, stealing from it & using it in a hundred ways even tho a lot of the time I can't read it & basically don't know what you're doing”

Ron Silliman, Tjanting

[assemblage2011]

I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertainty that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed they would appear to expand though they lay half-smothered in local history."

Susan Howe, "Personal Narrative," The Quarry. Comes out November 2015

[viperslang]

The implausible gives pleasure. The unfamiliar gives pleasure. Lack of homogeneity gives pleasure. Disillusionment gives pleasure. Popping out of the stitches of suture gives pleasure. Carved out of their usual representational contexts, the language goes to work all the more extravagantly on our nerves.

— from “THE POETICS OF L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” by Bruce Andrews

[poetryandmorepoetry]

[Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews] founded L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, the name of which became associated with a now-famous group of avant-garde writers. Leftist in politics and post-structuralist in theoretical outlook, the Language poets foregrounded the materiality and constitutive power of language. They extended and radicalized the language-centered poetics of the modernists Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff, and the New York school of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

from Norton Contemporary's introductory page on Charles Bernstein (edited by Ramazani, Ellmann, and O'Clair; Third Edition, page 909, if you want to read more)

[poetryandmorepoetry]

Words

Poets are, possibly, the most self-conscious users of language of any type of artist or craftperson. Since poetry exists--as does drama--both on the page and in the reading of the words from the page, language functions both as sounds and as units of visual meaning. The Language Poets (1970s, including Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein) resist telling narrative stories in their poems, perhaps foregrounding the material of their poetry to an extent not seen since high Modernism (I say perhaps because, as with everything, there are exceptions). The Language "school"--a loose-knit group whose styles varied quite a bit in practice, is well-summarized here:

Rather than poetic voices, language poetry directs us to pay attention to the materials of language itself: the structures of sentences, the bits of expressive language we encounter in a day, the way our lives encounter multitudes of linguistic fragments that prompt unpredictable associations with other fragments. Language poetry thus involves a combination of using unusually familiar language for poetry such as bits of commercial writing one might encounter in contemporary life and making such language unfamiliar by taking away the connected, personal narratives that we often find even in contemporary poetry.

As a result, surprisingly, language poetry can be unusually alienating for readers or listeners who want literature to provide those personal narratives, but it can also be an unusually inviting kind of writing, as it asks readers or listeners to participate in the process of making unconventional associations with fragments of language.

But, of course, many poets focus on words as such, or highlight through their poetry alternate meanings and ways of reading (puns, eye-rhyme, etc.). This is an essential element of poetry: its ability to re-exist in a new way in each reading, like drama, and like some prose (particularly children's stories, meant to be read aloud).

Yesterday I went to a reading by Robert Pinksy, and I was struck by his fascination with the history of language. In his recent poem "Creole," he looks at how the mixing of peoples created our language; here are the last eight lines:

Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing.

Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat,

I imagine, and made loans or change. Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn”

Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place:

Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while.

Schiavone means “a Slav.” Milford is a variant on the names of poets—

Milton, Herbert, Sidney—certain immigrants gave their offspring.

Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.

Pinsky recommended that all his listeners visit the website favoritepoem.org (he even wrote it on the chalkboard for us), and in so doing I found a very moving video of a financial consultant reading an Eavan Boland poem. I can't link to particular videos on the site, but I'd recommend looking at a few of them.

Boland, like Pinsky, writes affecting, historical poems that look at the role of memory and writing in shaping our contemporary understanding of the world and ourselves. Like Pinsky, she's often interested in the words we use and how they affect those interpretations of our world.

Here's a poem of hers that seems, in these ways, Pinsky-like--though I'd say overall their styles differ in some other ways, particularly Pinksy's tendency to list as a way of playing with sounds and meanings:

How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

By Eavan Boland

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

For more Boland, see here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/eavan-boland

For more Pinksy, see here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-pinsky

And if my brief summary of the Language Poets wasn't enough (which it likely wasn't), here are some more places to look/listen/read:

A Brief Guide to Language Poetry

Penn Sound's Hejinian page

Connections: A Hypertext Resource for Literature

Electronic Poetry Center's Bernstein page

[cosmicvernacular]

"Bardo"

I’ve spent my life in a lone mechanical whine, this combustion far off. How fathomless to be embedded in glacial ice, what piece of self hiding there. I am not sure about meaning but understand the wave. No more Novalis out loud. No Juan de la Cruz singing “I do not die to die.” No solstice, midhaven, midi, nor twilight. No isn’t it amazing, no none of that. To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble. The trees the air warms into a bright something a bluish nothing into clicks and pops bursts and percussive runs. I come with my asymmetries, my untutored imagination. Heathenish, my homespun vision sponsored by the winter sky. Then someone said nether, someone whirr. And if I say the words will you know them? Is there world? Are they still calling it that?

           Peter Grizzi

[neitherandboth]

or how the remains silent when it is necessary to speak and not when it is necessary to be silent (silent) about which too much has already been said.

Joan Retallack, How to do Things With Words

[chatylorens-blog]

Ron Silliman's "BART"

Found this typewritten version of “BART” in a PDF of BEZOAR, apparently a poetry “magazine” of sorts published in 1976—the same year Ron Silliman composed BART onboard BART.