Recent Books
and Edited Volumes
Literary and Cultural Criticism
Poetry and Poetics
Progress/Under Erasure
(Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004)
Progress/Under Erasure re-presents in a new edition, with a new preface, two innovative long poems by one of the best-known poets and critics associated with "Language" writing. Upon its original publication in 1985, Progress was greeted with enthusiasm and public debate. Its linguistically charged, emotionally relentless, and culturally reflexive nonnarrative form was pitched against the media saturation and political banality of Reagan era. If Progress is a nonnarrative directed toward the end of history, Under Erasure (published in a limited edition in 1991) was written during its purported realization at the end of the Cold War in 1989, an event it records. [Back cover]
When Progress was first published in 1985, it arrived
at a moment of high literary tension: the moment in which the poetry of the
Language School decisively broke through the cultural gatekeepers’ iron fence
and, to a wider audience than its immediate members, offered new paradigms for
poetic form. . . . Fifteen years later, in the company of a number of other long
works written by contemporaries in the 1980s, the poem continues to argue for a
contextual and constructivist mode of poetry, drawing as it does from the
cultural concerns of the modern epic or “long poem” rather than the
subject-centered expressiveness of the lyric poem. . . .
The writing
of Under Erasure took place in a leap, as it were, across the epochal
chasm that ended the decade in which Progress was written. . . .
Representations, of history and culture, occur precisely at the point at which
their prospective necessity is displaced by the inert residues of their material
fact. If language, as a form of representation, were to be understood
historically, then it must take into account the vast forgetting of context and
experience that has taken place; this is so even for any word that enters the
dictionary, much less the complex formulations that enter a poem. . . . The poem
addresses such mechanisms of forgetting, and measures the chances of recovery.
[From the preface]
Review of original publication by Ron Silliman (17 November 1985)
Facsimile of "Progress" 1 and 2 by Jackson Mac Low (1986)
The Constructivist Moment: From
Material Text to Cultural Poetics
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno—each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies. [Wesleyan catalogue]
Review in American Literature (December 2005)
Special issue on "The Poetics of New Meaning," ed.
Barrett Watten
Qui Parle (University of California, Berkeley) 12, no. 2 (Spring/Summer
2001)
The essays presented here are, in related ways, investigations of the poetics of the new, researches into the literary and cultural status of new meaning. The authors are each innovative poets and critics who have weighed in the balance the present possibilities of their work with the claims to innovation of earlier periods, particularly the generation of poets and critics immediately preceding theirs. Committed both to innovation and its historical tradition, what position do they find themselves in? Is innovation still a primary goal, or is the new at this late date a nightmare of precedence, a mere renewal of earlier possibility, or a cataclysmic break? [Introduction]
Contents: Barrett Watten, "The Poetics of New Meaning"; Sianne Ngai, "Moody Subjects/Projectile Objects: Anxiety and Intellectual Displacement in Hitchcock, Heidegger, and Melville; Steve Evans, "'A World Unsuspected': The Dynamics of Literary Change in Hegel, Bourdieu, and Adorno"; Benjamin Friedlander, "A Short History of Language Poetry / According to 'Hecuba Whimsey'"; Lytle Shaw, "Proximity's Plea: O'Hara's Art Writing"; Lisa Samuels, "If Meaning, Shaped Reading, and Leslie Scalapino's way"; Vincent Cannon, "Spectres of Christ: Love, Christianity, and the Political in Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute"
Links: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~quiparle
Bad History
(Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 1998; 2nd printing 2002)
In a famous modern definition, an epic is a poem including history. In Barrett Watten's Bad History, history includes the poem. Begun to mark the first anniversary of the Gulf War, the poem looks back on the decades previous and forward toward—a duration of events which, because the poem is in history, do not cease to occur. The poem, too, becomes the event of its own recording. [Back cover]
Links: http://www.atelos.org/badhistory.htm
http://slought.net/toc/events/exhibitions/online/welish/pdf/welish-watten.pdf
http://www.arras.net/pdfs/notes_to_poetry.pdf
Frame (1971–1990)
(Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1997)
In Frame, Barrett Watten crosses shifting cultural terrain by means of deliberate engagements in language. His thought, embodied with visionary clarity, passes forcefully between differing modes of experience. His innovative techniques recall the poetics of André Breton's points sublimes. Frame brings together six previously published works from two decades—Opera—Works, Decay, 1–10, Plasma/Paralleles/"X", Complete Though and Conduit—along with two previously uncollected texts—City Fields and Frame Each of these works constructs a horizon of language at the boundary between politics and art. 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. [Back cover]
Links: http://www.sunmoon.com/classics.html
http://slought.net/toc/events/exhibitions/online/welish/pdf/welish-watten.pdf