Visit barrettwatten.net for new entries,
links, documents, and events.

Recent publications:

Diasporic Avant-Gardes:
Experimental Poetics
and Cultural Displacement,
ed. with Carrie Noland
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

The Constructivist Moment:
From Material Text to Cultural Poetics
(Wesleyan UP, 2003)

I read Grand Piano 1–7, chronologically,
writer by writer, instead of volume by volume, lying in bed, on a Sunday.
—Suzanne Stein, on FaceBook

A vital contribution to the collective memory
of the poetry of that period. . . . The relationship
of the individual to the society and its intermediate institutions, such as the Grand Piano readings,
is relevant to any thoughtful analysis of the
place of poetry writing and production today.
—James Sherry, Jacket 34

Plasma/Parallèles/"X",
French trans. Martin Richet
(Le Quartanier, Montreal, P.Q.)

 Progress/Under Erasure
(Green Integer, 2004)

The collective autobiographers are less
interested in revising the past and more
interested in using the narratives of their history
to further contextualize the complex poetics
and communal history of that poetics for the future. . . to nurture an arena of possibilities
where ideas can be exchanged.
—Rob Fitterman, “Futuring The Grand Piano”

The Grand Piano is itself a veering off
and an investigation and a playing or
experimenting with the materials of
language, history, textuality, and
temporality, the personal and political,
poetry and community . . . . There is an
abundance to linger over in The Grand
Piano even as and perhaps because of the
large gaps and contradictions.
—Robin Tremblay-McGaw, How2