Авангардты американдық ақындар тобы

Group of avant garde American poets

The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh. Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work. It plays down expression, seeing the poem as a construction in and of language itself. In more theoretical terms, it challenges the "natural" presence of a speaker behind the text; and emphasizes the disjunction and the materiality of the signifier. These poets favor prose poetry, especially in longer and non narrative forms. There is also debate about whether or not a writer can be called a language poet without being part of that specific coterie; is it a style or is it a group of people? In his introduction to San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets (San Francisco, City Lights, 2001 p. vii) David Meltzer writes: "The language cadres never truly left college. They've always been good students, and now they're excellent teachers. The professionalization and rationalization of poetry in the academy took hold and routinized the teaching and writing of poetry." Later in the volume (p. 128) poet Joanne Kyger comments: "The Language school I felt was a kind of an alienating intellectualization of the energies of poetry. It carried it away from the source. It may have been a housecleaning from confessional poetry, but I found it a sterilization of poetry." Online writing samples of many language poets can be found on internet sites, including blogs and sites maintained by authors and through gateways such as the Electronic Poetry Center, PennSound, and UbuWeb.

Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work. It developed in part in response to what poets considered the uncritical use of expressive lyric sentiment among earlier poetry movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, certain groups of poets had followed William Carlos Williams in his use of idiomatic American English rather than what they considered the 'heightened', or overtly poetic language favored by the New Criticism movement. New York School poets like Frank O'Hara and the Black Mountain group emphasized both speech and everyday language in their poetry and poetics. In contrast, some of the Language poets emphasized metonymy, synecdoche and extreme instances of paratactical structures in their compositions, which, even when employing everyday speech, created a far different texture. The result is often alien and difficult to understand at first glance, which is what Language poetry intends: for the reader to participate in creating the meaning of the poem. Watten's & Grenier's magazine This (and This Press which Watten edited), along with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, published work by notable Black Mountain poets such as Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner. Silliman considers Language poetry to be a continuation (albeit incorporating a critique) of the earlier movements. Watten has emphasized the discontinuity between the New American poets, whose writing, he argues, privileged self expression, and the Language poets, who see the poem as a construction in and of language itself. In contrast, Bernstein has emphasized the expressive possibilities of working with constructed, and even found, language. Gertrude Stein, particularly in her writing after Tender Buttons, and Louis Zukofsky, in his book length poem A, are the modernist poets who most influenced the Language school. In the postwar period, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and poets of the New York School (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan) and Black Mountain School (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan) are most recognizable as precursors to the Language poets. Many of these poets used procedural methods based on mathematical sequences and other logical organising devices to structure their poetry. This practice proved highly useful to the language group. The application of process, especially at the level of the sentence, was to become the basic tenet of language praxis. Stein's influence was related to her own frequent use of language divorced from reference in her own writings. The language poets also drew on the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially the concepts of language games, meaning as use, and family resemblance among different uses, as the solution to the Problem of universals.

In many ways, what Language poetry is is still being determined. Most of the poets whose work falls within the bounds of the Language school are still alive and still active contributors. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Language poetry was widely received as a significant movement in innovative poetry in the U. S., a trend accentuated by the fact that some of its leading proponents took up academic posts in the Poetics, Creative Writing and English Literature departments in prominent universities (University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Buffalo, Wayne State University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Diego, University of Maine, the Iowa Writers' Workshop). Language poetry also developed affiliations with literary scenes outside the States, notably England, Canada (through the Kootenay school of writing in Vancouver), France, the USSR, Brazil, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia. It had a particularly interesting relation to the UK avant garde: in the 1970s and 1980s there were extensive contacts between American Language poets and veteran UK writers like Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher, or younger figures such as Caroline Bergvall, Maggie O'Sullivan, cris cheek, and Ken Edwards (whose magazine Reality Studios was instrumental in the transatlantic dialogue between American and UK avant gardes). Other writers, such as J. H. Prynne and those associated with the so called "Cambridge" poetry scene (Rod Mengham, Douglas Oliver, Peter Riley) were perhaps more skeptical about language poetry and its associated polemics and theoretical documents, though Geoff Ward wrote a book about the phenomenon. A second generation of poets influenced by the Language poets includes Eric Selland (also a noted translator of modern Japanese poetry), Lisa Robertson, Juliana Spahr, the Kootenay School poets, conceptual writing, Flarf collectives, and many others. A significant number of women poets, and magazines and anthologies of innovative women's poetry, have been associated with language poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. They often represent a distinct set of concerns. Among the poets are Leslie Scalapino, Madeline Gins, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Jean Day, Hannah Weiner, Tina Darragh, Erica Hunt, Lynne Dreyer, Harryette Mullen, Beverly Dahlen, Johanna Drucker, Abigail Child, and Karen Mac Cormack; among the magazines HOW/ever, later the e based journal HOW2; and among the anthologies Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan for Reality Street Editions in London (1996) and Mary Margaret Sloan's Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Jersey City: Talisman Publishers, 1998). Ten of the Language poets, each of whom at one time curated the reading series at the San Francisco coffee house of that name, collaborated to write The Grand Piano, "an experiment in collective autobiography" published in ten small volumes. Editing and communication for the collaboration was accomplished over email. Authors of The Grand Piano were Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, Ted Pearson, and Kit Robinson. An eleventh member of the project, Alan Bernheimer, served as an archivist and contributed one essay on the filmmaker Warren Sonbert. The authors of The Grand Piano sought to reconnect their writing practices and to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s." Each volume of The Grand Piano features essays by all ten authors in different sequence; often responding to prompts and problems arising from one another's essays in the series. Some poets, such as Norman Finkelstein, have stressed their own ambiguous relationship to "Language poetry", even after decades of fruitful engagement. Finkelstein, in a discussion with Mark Scroggins about The Grand Piano, points to a "risk" when previously marginalized poets try to write their own literary histories, "not the least of which is a self regard bordering on narcissism".

Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry 1945 1960. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Bernstein, Charles, ed. "Language Sampler," Paris Review, 1982
"43 Poets (1984)." boundary 2
The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. New York: Roof, 1990. Hejinian, Lyn and Barrett Watten, eds "A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998." Wesleyan University Press, 2013
Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1994. Messerli, Douglas, ed. Language Poetries. New York: New Directions, 1987. Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono, Me. : National Poetry Foundation, 1986; reprint ed. with a new afterword, 2002. An anthology of language poetry that serves as a very useful primer.

Andrews, Bruce. Paradise and Method. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Beach, Christopher, ed. Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998
Bernstein, Charles. Content's Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985
A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992
My Way; Speeches and Poems. University of Chicago Press, 1999
Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. University of Chicago Press, 2011
"Pitch of Poetry." University of Chicago Press, 2016. Davies, Alan. Signage. New York: Roof Books, 1987. Friedlander, Ben. Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1988. Rpt, New Directions, 2007. The Birth Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Huk, Romana, ed. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Lutzkanova Vassileva, Albena, "The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History." New York: Bloomsbury, 2013
McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986. New York: Roof Books, 1986. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001. Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Piombino, Nick. Boundary of Blur. New York: Roof Books, 1993
Theoretical Objects. Green Integer Press, 1999. Ratcliffe, Stephen. Listening to Reading. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000
Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987. An early collection of talks and essays that situates language poetry into contemporary political thought, linguistics, and literary tradition. See esp. section II. Scalapino, Leslie. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Elmwood: Potes & Poets, 1989. Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place. Roof Books, 1994. The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence. Wesleyan University Press, 1999. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Litmus Press, 2011. Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Ward, Geoff. Language Poetry and the American Avant Garde. Keele: British Association for American Studies, 1993. Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. See esp. chaps. 2 and 3. Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Armantrout, Rae. True. Berkeley, CA: Atelos | (Small Press Distribution), 1998. Armantrout, Rae. Collected Prose. San Diego: Singing Horse, 2007. Davies, Alan. Candor. Berkeley, CA, 1990. Mandel, Tom. Realism. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Perelman, Bob, et al. The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006. Described as an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. The project will consist of 10 volumes in all. Piombino, Nick. Fait Accompli. Queens, NY: Factory School, 2006. Scalapino, Leslie. Zither & Autobiography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2003. Silliman, Ron. Under Albany. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2004. Watten, Barrett. Bad History. Berkeley, CA: Atelos | Small Press Distribution, 1998.

Andrews, Bruce, "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E", in The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, ed. Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Available online via Andrew's faculty page at Fordham University: Fordham English Connect. Bartlett, Lee, "What is 'Language Poetry'?" Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 741–752. Available through JStor. Bernstein, Charles, "The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," in Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale (London: Routledge, 2012). Greer, Michael, "Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, the Naming of "Language Poetry," boundary 2, vol. 16, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring, 1989), pp. 335–355. Koirala, Saroj, "Linking Words with the World: The Language Poetry Mission", Tribhuvan University Journal, vol. 29 (2016), no. 1, pp. 175–190. Perloff, Marjorie, "The Word as Such: LANGUAGE: Poetry in the Eighties", American Poetry Review (May–June 1984), 13(3):15–22.