Barrett Watten

review of
Barrett Watten's FRAME (1971-1990)
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 18-20, 2016

Yadda, yadda, my review's 'too long'. Read the full thing (entitled "Off the Watten Path OR Watten Down the Hatch") here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/462206-off-the-watten-path

This bk is published by Sun & Moon Press & is part of their "Classics" series. It was published in 1997, 7 yrs after the last of the writing presented. It's my understanding that 'classics' are things that withstand the 'test of time' by surviving in culture over centuries. The writings of Rabelais, eg, wd, therefore, be 'classic' b/c they're still being printed & read almost 500 yrs later. Hence, calling the writings of Watten 'classic' is marketing-speak on the part of Sun & Moon. It's a way of framing something as time-tested before the time has elapsed, a preemptive strike for advertising purposes. One might even say that it's pompous. However, I will say that, by my standards at least, FRAME has withstood the test of time nicely of the 19 yrs that've elapsed since its publication. This IS a great bk.

THIS was a great magazine. It was edited by Barrett Watten. It was one of my favorite poetry magazines. Now, THAT's a magazine I wish I'd had something published in. I quote from my review of Steven Clay & Rodney Phillips' A Secret Location on the Lower East Side - Adventures in Writing: 1960-1980:

"This, a magazine I've always liked very much (I have issues 4, 6, 7, & 8), is credited by Bob Perelman here as ""the first self-conscious journal of what would become known as language writing"" (p 239). That might very well be accurate. Barrett Watten & Robert Grenier were the editors. It seems to me that it was either Perelman or Watten who were outraged by the positive critical reception that Marshall Reese's bk, Writing (published by pod), rc'vd. Most, if not all, of Writing was made from "slugs", the cast-off text from the printer that Marshall worked for in the 1970s. That seemed very Language Writing to me - but, apparently, it offended the more conventional authorial position of at least one other Language Writer. I thought that was funny.

"Then again, maybe Tottel's deserves more credit even than This, having been founded a yr earlier. Ron Silliman was the editor & I've always liked Silliman's writing. "Named after the first anthology of English poetry, Tottel's Miscellany of 1557" [..] ""there can be no such thing as a formal problem in poetry which is not a social one as well."" (p 243) "The first gathering of individuals who were to become known as "language poets" was edited by Ron Silliman under the title "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets." Published in Alcheringa, it included work by Bruce Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Clark Coolidge, Lee De Jasu, Ray DiPalma, Robert Grenier, David Melnick, Silliman himself, and Barrett Watten." (p 244)" - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798066.A_Secret_Location_on_the_Lower_East_Si...

The 'problem' being, as usual, for me that "poetry" strikes me as a mediocre entry point. The back cover says that Watten "has expanded the very definition of poetry and opened the genre to history, philosophy, and politics." When poetry wasn't open to "history, philosophy, and politics" is a bit beyond me. Didn't Catullus dip his wick in it?:

"Just now I laughed at a listener,
who, when my Calvus had neatly disclosed
the charges against Vatinius,
said, inspired, his hands in a fidget,
"My god, what an eloquent midget!""

- Catullus's poem 53 (circa 54 BC) translated by Roy Arthur Swanson

Or what about Villon?:

"When I start to feel
useless and miserable,
my heart usually
tells me to cool it

"And not be feeling
so sorry for myself,
getting depressed with
so much general decay.

"It bids me remember
how poverty is
the specter of genius,
and better to be

"poor and live under
a writing table,
than rich and rot
behind nine tons of granite."

- Villon's De Povretéˆ - (15th century EV) translated by Jean Calais

Or what about Byron?:

"For six hours bore they without intermission
The Turkish fire, and, aided by their own
Land batteries, worked their guns with great precision:
At length they found mere cannonade alone
By no means would produce the town's submission,
And made a signal to retreat at one.
One bark blew up, a second near the works
Running aground, was taken by the Turks."

- Canto VII, stanza XXX from Byron's Don Juan - (1818-1823)

Or, more contemporaneously, what about Ed Sanders?:

"I will not pretend
that I was a very big part
of '68

"I surged through the year on my own little missions
most of them not much matter now

"but then I strutted through the time-track
daring to be part
of the history
of the era

"& believing that huge change was imminent—
that the United States
would become more free and sharing
that poverty would be banished
and racism ebb
very very quickly
by the time we were middle aged."

- Sanders's 1968 - A History in Verse - (1997)

You get the idea. Then again, Watten & all the rest are apparently incapable of moving past what strikes me as one of the biggest mental blocks of them all: the very notion of poetry, per se.

Don't get me wrong, I like Watten's writing very much but the bone of contention is whether Language Poetry's method of stimulating an engaged reading accomplishes a deeper level of critical & political thinking than more straight-forward discursive writing does. I don't think this is an either/or situation, I think they're both valuable. To again quote from the back cover blurb:

"As Ron Day has summarized, "I would be hard pressed to think of an art writing which is more engaged with the relation of poetic method and contemporary political and cultural materials than Barrett Watten's.""

Perhaps. At any rate, that's the stance of many Language Poetry theorists - ie: that "poetic method and contemporary political and cultural materials" are inter-related in ways that're structural. Watten's 1980 "STATISTICS" starts off w/:

"There is no language but "reconstructed" imaged parentheses back into person "emphasizing constant" explanation "the current to run both ways." The ocean he sees when as "sour frowns of the ancients' 'signifier'" that person jumps in. We are at liberty "to take 'the' out of 'us,'" to have selves "not here" in the machinery of dramatic monologue to "smash, interrupt." To focus primarily "using examples of work" produces "difficulty": "you" in indeterminate distance "building a tower" as the circumstance of writing "to look over 'with concern' the bones of 'speech.'"" - p 11

I like this for the sheer writing of it: it's different from most writing, it's different in a way that interests me. I think of Blissymbolics:

"Blissymbolics is a communication system originally developed by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985) for the purpose of international communication. It was first applied to the communication of children with physical disabilities by an interdisciplinary team led by Shirley McNaughton at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre (now the Bloorview MacMillan Centre) in 1971.

"The Blissymbolics language is currently composed of over 5,000 graphic symbols. Each symbol or Bliss-word is composed of one or more Bliss-characters which can be combined and recombined in endless ways to create new symbols. Bliss-words can be sequenced to form many types of sentences and express many grammatical capabilities. Simple shapes are used to keep the symbols easy and fast to draw and because both abstract and concrete levels of concepts can be represented, Blissymbolics can be applied both to children and adults and are appropriate for persons with a wide range of intellectual abilities." - http://www.blissymbolics.org/index.php/about-blissymbolics

As I recall, Bliss was a survivor of WWII concentration camps. Part of his intention was to create an international language that demagogues couldn't use for propaganda purposes. Given that Blissymbolics is a written language rather than one to be spoken it might at least exclude the dramatic oratory common to crowd manipulation.

Watten's language is similarly unlikely to (cattle-)prod the (sheep-like) masses into genocidal frenzy. Still, what does the reader get out of it? It's my understanding that the desire is for each reader to have a more personal experience w/ it than writing that attempts to homogenize people into belief-systems. I'm all for a resistance to homogenization. If Language Writing takes the "I" out of the writing & encourages more of the "I" in the reading then what do I makes of the above-quoted excerpt from "STATISTICS"?

One thing I like to do as a writer is take stock-phrases & substitute a different word or phrase for the one standard to the stock. EG: There's the expression: "putting the shoe on the other foot" meaning 'changing a situation so that the perspective shifts from the subject to the object'. Isn't that what Language Writing purports to do? NOW, I use sports metaphors all the time. Nonetheless, I don't like sports. SO, I like to write phrases like 'putting the baseball glove on the other foot'.

The sensitive reader familiar w/ the original expression will realize that "baseball glove" is being substituted for "shoe". A baseball glove is worn on the hand, a shoe is worn on the foot. Both objects are things put on bodily extremities so they're not really so far apart & yet this shift in object changes the meaning significantly. A baseball glove worn on the foot wd make walking difficult instead of helping it - as a shoe is intended to do. The reader might imagine the body of the wearer trying to catch a baseball w/ their foot, the wearer might have to lay on their back & raise their foot in the air.

The intention is to stimulate the 'object', the YOU, the reader, into undergoing the absurd process of imagining this transformation w/o spelling it out for YOU. But now I've spelled it out & I've gone & ruined everything (sobs uncontrollably). Back to Watten:

"There is no language but "reconstructed" imaged parentheses back into person "emphasizing constant" explanation "the current to run both ways.""

Applying my own logic to this txt I might find the above sentence to be an evocation of a polemical statement: "There is not language but" might be completed, in more transparent circumstances, w/ something like 'language that leads the reader down a path' - in wch case those of us who beat a dead horse to the tune of a different drummer by staying off the beaten path to try to discover vistas that aren't preplanned by someone other than ourselves might prefer that the seemingly polemical beginning seems to get sidetracked into less familiar territory.

3 portions of Watten's opening sentence are in quotation marks: ""reconstructed"", ""emphasizing constant"", ""the current to run both ways."" Quotation marks can be sd to say that the enclosed language is a quote. Single quotation marks are usually meant to imply a questioning of the enclosed. EG: imagine this phrase presented 2 different ways: "The reader is stupid" vs 'The reader is stupid'. ""The reader is stupid"" implies that someone has made this claim. "'The reader is stupid'" implies that someone is questioning that claim.

BUT, it doesn't 'have to' work that way. Watten might be using the quotation marks to throw the reader off the beaten path. All 3 of these txts might be quotes - after all, someone has certainly sd or written the word "reconstructed"; someone has certainly sd or written the phrase "emphasizing content"; & someone has certainly sd or written the phrase "the current to run both ways[.]" BUT given that no attribution is given the txts just 'float there', they have no special meaning other than what they're ordinarily taken to mean, they're just isolated by the quotes. "the current to rub both ways" might be from a technical manual for an AC set-up, "emphasizing constant" might be reference to DC. All 3 quotes cd be taken from a technical manual, removed from their original context, no longer serving their original master.

"The ocean he sees when as "sour frowns of the ancients' 'signifier'" that person jumps in. We are at liberty "to take 'the' out of 'us,'" to have selves "not here" in the machinery of dramatic monologue to "smash, interrupt." To focus primarily "using examples of work" produces "difficulty": "you" in indeterminate distance "building a tower" as the circumstance of writing "to look over 'with concern' the bones of 'speech.'""

Watten's txt cd be read as a manifesto of writer-reader relationship that's expressed thru doing more than thru saying, to have subjects removed from "the machinery of dramatic monologue" - or maybe I'm reading too much into it & getting too little out of it in the sense of getting out of the txt altogether. BUT, of course, I don't want to get out of the txt nor do I want to go w/ the flow so Watten's txt is 'perfect' for me b/c the flow, such as it is, is a whirlpool w/o a center, an obstacle course rather than a joy ride.

I find the 1st stanza of "NON-EVENTS" incredible - by wch I don't mean that I don't believe, there's not necessarily anything to believe. The hypothetical desired critical reading process of Language Poetry is exemplified here:

"Morning turns inside out, The engine
is diseased, as it spreads along
approximate ice. High contrast
geometry of person straightens out from
meandering road. Desperate focus
never looks back. Progress makes possible
a paralyzed attendant, set apart
an end to himself (moral noise)." - p 13

Then again, it cd just be seen as just-another stanza as this sentence can be read as just-another sentence as this paragraph can be read as just-another paragraph.

Does one sentence a paragraph make?

Just what is this stanza? Is it simply another instance of poetry exercising its right to be abstruse? I wdn't call it "surreal" wd YOU? I was recently a, b, or c OR x, y, or z -mused (or was it ab used?) by Richard Kostelanetz's entry for "LANGUAGE-CENTERED POETRY" in the 2nd edition of his A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes:

"Whether this constitutes a genuine artistic category or simply an opportunistic banner is a good question. Excessive mutual backslapping, very much in imitation of earlier "New York Poets," raises suspicions, especially in America, because the work paraded under this newer rubric is quite various (while the work of others working in esthetically similar veins, but not included, is often superior). The interior mental states of Hannah Weiner's (1929-1996) poetry, for instance, scarcely resemble the dry experimentalism of Bruce Andrews (1948), whose poetry has little in common with the fragmented, elliptical narratives of Michael Palmer (1943) or Barrett Watten's (1948) extracting phrases from ulterior texts. (If any artists' group lacks esthetic principle, it is really functioning as an exclusive club more worthy of acknowledgment in a history of false snobbery. Willfully excluding individuals who might by esthetic right belong smacks too much of elitism for common comfort. And people behaving like an army inevitably raises questions about what others think of military mentalities.) In the earlier edition of this Dictionary, I questioned whether this entry would ever be reprinted—whether the term would survive; the doubt is raised again."

WHEW! Alright, I was a subscriber to, & minor contributor to, "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine, arguably the primary theoretical journal of Language Poetry of its time, & I have all of the issues from April 1978 to October 1979 & I've read them all. Texts are printed from (in order of 1st appearance (ie: names aren't repeated (not intentionally at least)) in the issues I have) - some in reprints (not provided by the original authors: EG: Barthes & Crosby):

issue 2:

Roland Barthes
Bob Perelman
Barrett Watten
Craig Watson
Ed Friedman
Michael Lally
Ron Silliman
John Perlman
Charles Bernstein
William Corbett
John Taggart
Susan Bee Laufer
Bruce Andrews
Michael Gottlieb
Steve Mc Caffery
Ted Greenwald
Barbara Baracks
Jackson Mac Low

issue 3:

Bernadette Mayer & the members of the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop
Alan Sondheim
Rosmarie Waldrop
Harry Crosby
Abigail Child
Keith Waldrop
Lyn Hejinian
Loris Essary
Nick Piombino
Ernest Robson
Douglas Messerli
Ray Di Palma
Ted Pearson
James Sherry
Peter Seaton

issue 4:

Robert Grenier
Ronald Johnson
Alan Davies
Fredric Jameson
John Ensslin
Stephen Fredman
micha(f)l fr(f)d(f)rick tolson (f)t al (incorrectly attributed to "MICHAEL FREDERICK TOLSON"
Eric Mottram
Richard Foreman
Peter Mayer
Joseph Timeo
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

issue 5:

Jed Rasula
Ted Pearson
Carole Korzeniowsky
Dick Higgins
Geoffrey Cook

issue 6:

Gertrude Stein
Michael Davidson
Larry Eigner
Peter Seaton
Rae Armantrout
Carl Andre
Steve Benson
Rod Mengham

issue 7:

Bill Berkson
Tina Darragh
Susan Howe
Kit Robinson
Kirby Malone & Chris Mason
Bernard Noël

issue 8:

Jerome Rothenberg
Lynne Dreyer
Clark Coolidge
Madeleine Burnside
Milli Graffi
Robert Kelly
David Bromige

issue 9/10:

Kathy Acker
Barbara Barg
Bruce Boone
Don Byrd
cris cheek, Kirby Malone, Marshall Reese
Mark Chincer
Terry Eagleton
Brian Fawcett
P. Inman
John Leo
Chris Mason
Robert Rakoff
Lorenzo Thomas
Hannah Weiner

In issue 8, Charles Bernstein, the co-editor of "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" (along w/ Bruce Andrews) wrote an article entitled: "THE CONSPIRACY OF "US"" wch began thusly:

"I don't believe in group formation, I don't like group formation, but I am constantly finding myself contending with it, living within it, seeing through it. "Okay, break it up boys." First, there is the isolation of the atom, looking for some place to feel housed by, a part of. & every which way the people passing seem to have that--"see it over there"--"look". But every group as well has the same possibility for insularity as each individual: this new "we" having the same possibility for vacancy or satisfaction, a group potentially as atomized in its separation from other groups as a person from other persons. This is the problem of family life. Property, territory, domain. But, "for us now", group (family, aesthetic, social national) is merely another part of our commoditized lives--for we consume these formations, along with most other things, as commodities, & are ourselves consumed in the process."

W/ all due respect to Kostelanetz who's been 'at it' for a long time & who's certainly dedicated to the Avant-Garde, I think he completely misses the point. When I was writing my 1st bk (from 1975-1977) I was largely isolated from any intellectual community sympathetic to my concerns (in fact, I still am 40 yrs later). William S. Burroughs's systematic resistance to control thru language was about the closest I'd come to finding a like-minded thinker (altho I must've known about Concrete Poetry by then too) Meeting people like Kirby Malone & Jackson Mac Low & finding out about "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" was exciting!… (plus d'informations)

Questions of Poetics by Barrett Watten is an excellent look at Language writing both historically and theoretically. The presentation is both microscopic (specific incidents) and macroscopic (movements both past and future) in nature which should allow anyone with an interest in poetics an avenue into his argument.

For me, the immediate takeaway on first reading is the situating of the origins of Language writing and its development. This is also the aspect of Watten's poetics that led to the "debate" with Amiri Baraka in 2000. Perhaps an important point to always remember when assessing a broad theoretical concept derived largely from a person's own experiences is that it will be based on that particular perception of events, and thus a specific type of response. It certainly does not invalidate the ideas but rather cues the reader to seek other ideas that might have been formed from a different response to the same events.

If you're familiar with Watten you will already be familiar with many of his ideas on particularity, negativity and formal agency. I found of great interest the use of these ideas, which he has previously used in elaborating on Language writing, applied to the idea of various avant-garde movements (I think I prefer, in this context, to use avant-garde moments). I make no claims of fully grasping all of the details or nuances and look forward to re-visiting this book many times.

This will certainly be of interest to scholars and academics interested in poetics, avant-garde and Language writing. I think this will also find favorable reception among those who enjoy the historical and theoretical aspects of the literature they might read largely for enjoyment. This might be a bit detailed for a casual reader of literary theory but is written clearly and if one wanted to learn these ideas this would be a wonderful book for study.

Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (plus d'informations)