Top
Free Shipping On Orders Over $35!
Get Rewarded for Ordering Your Textbooks! Enroll Now
Customer Reviews Read Reviews
Write a Review
|
vii | ||||
| Acknowledgments | ix | ||||
| Introduction | 3 | (18) | |||
|
21 | (16) | |||
|
37 | (13) | |||
|
50 | (13) | |||
|
63 | (14) | |||
|
77 | (11) | |||
|
88 | (13) | |||
|
101 | (16) | |||
|
117 | (17) | |||
|
134 | (16) | |||
|
150 | (17) | |||
|
167 | (12) | |||
|
179 | (12) | |||
|
191 | (13) | |||
|
204 | (13) | |||
|
217 | (16) | |||
|
233 | (16) | |||
| Conclusion: Moving beyond the Language Maps in Feminist Collaborations | 249 | (14) | |||
| Appendix: Archives and Resources | 263 | (2) | |||
| Notes | 265 | (46) | |||
| Works Cited | 311 | (22) | |||
| Index | 333 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
Cities and Communities: Circling Out of Equivalence
meeting place (fragments of "meeting" and "place" alternating as object and ground)
"They moved to another locality."
Seen as "wood of trees" given to "stand"
"Not much interest in the contest."
Seen as "to be between" given to "testify"
—Tina Darragh, Striking Resemblance
The city is a crucial factor in the social production of subjectivity. It affects not only a subject's positioning within space but also the way a subject sees others as well as the self. Elizabeth Grosz points out that, "[t]he city orients and organizes family, sexual and social relations insofar as it divides cultural life into public and private domains, geographically dividing and defining the particular social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups." It is therefore not surprising that Language writing emerged out of quite distinct community formations in San Francisco, New York, and Washington. Given that the city is the most immediately concrete locus for the production and circulation of power, all three poetry communities embraced a located politics of difference. This difference has been largely elided in literary histories of Language writing, which continue to stress parallels in poetics as well as a united front. Nevertheless, the Language communities were imagined and practiced at this regional level in highly specific ways.
Joan Retallack notes that, in the early seventies, Washington was more like a real city in that everyday life had an element of strangeness. Multiple political movements encouraged an atmosphere of radicalism, as many came to protest at the steps of the country's government. At the same time, a lively arts scene grew at Dupont Circle, which was downtown but off-center from the Federal City and the main business districts. The Community Book Shop on P Street became the sire for "Mass Transit" (1971-74), a series of weekly open readings initiated by Michael Lally, who had moved to DC from Iowa in the spring of 1971. Lally was strongly influenced by John Ashbery and other members of the New York school, including Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer. To complement the readings he began a press, publishing the first books of Bruce Andrews, Lynne Dreyer, Lee Lally, Tim Dlugos, Terence Winch, Ed Cox, and P. Inman. While Lee Lally, Winch, and Cox helped host the reading series, the press soon transformed into a collective venture among local writers and became known as Some of Us Press. Writing from the reading series also was published in a magazine of the same name. The title of both magazine and press reflected the Washington scene as a community of mobile and provisional links.
New York writers were invited to read in the Mass Transit series, and on any one night, audiences could range from twelve to a hundred. Lally tried to pair one well-known poet from out of town with a local poet. Then living in nearby Maryland, Bruce Andrews often discussed his theories of language-centered writing with Lally. Andrews was also in touch with San Francisco poet Ron Silliman, who had been introduced to him in 1971 by Jerome Rothenberg. By 1974, Andrews was corresponding with Canadian poet Steve McCaffery and developing his poetics in conversation with Ray DiPalma, another writer from Iowa. By the midseventies, Andrews had moved to New York, excited by the range and intensity of aesthetic debates. With the early Washington community established, Lally, like Andrews, began looking for a broader poetic horizon. In 1974, he made a similar migration to New York, but continued to celebrate Washington writing. Two years later he featured numerous Washington writers in his anthology None of the Above: New Poets of the USA. Lally also continued his small-press writing. Later still, he reviewed the poetry of women Language writers like Lynne Dreyer and Diane Ward in various issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
With Lally's departure, the community nexus shifted to Folio Books. While some writers from the Mass Transit days remained, new figures began taking an active role in this formation. Among the Folio group were poets such as Doug Lang, Diane Ward, Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, P. Inman, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Joan Retallack, Bernard Welt, Connie McKenna, and Julie Brown. Some of these writers would first try out their work at the Mass Transit series, but develop it more fully during this era. Baltimore poets like Anselm Hollo, Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, and Marshall Reese were also regular figures in the scene. A significant force during the Folio years was Doug Lang, who became a kind of "guiding spirit, organizer, and mentor." Lang arranged over eighty-five public readings in a period of four years, continuing Lally's practice of matching a Washington poet with someone outside the District. The writers featured were primarily associated with the New York school, but there were also many Language writers. Diane Ward recalls giving her first poetry reading at Folio paired as a nervous eighteen- or nineteen-year-old with Barbara Guest, who arrived in town with a readymade audience in tow. Lynne Dreyer gave a reading with Barbara Baracks and another with Jim Brodey. Lang is remembered by many to have generated an energetic, collaborative spirit. Inman states that, "the series, without question, created a high degree of excitement about writing & its possibilities & helped push many of us further along our various ways."
When the Folio Bookstore closed in 1978, the poetry community continued but without any centralized location. Tina Darragh remembers a reading of Hannah Weiner's in the late seventies or early eighties in DC, in which she had some of the Baltimore poets positioned in various parts of the audience to read simultaneously while she was center-stage. Abigail Child also gave a talk in the early eighties on narrative deconstruction in film. Also, several performance poetry readings were held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Much of the Mass Transit poetry had been characterized by a politicization of content. Lee Lally, for instance, investigated feminist revisionist mythmaking:
The horses have ridden off
with who ever would go.
The princes should have
been here by now.
We are no longer waiting
We are writing our own stories.
Often the poems in Mass Transit and Some of Us Press explicitly resisted existing power structures. Reversing subject positions and describing subcultural lifestyles, they paralleled similar calls within the women's movement and the civil rights movement. Other poems focused heavily on the everyday, including elements of popular culture and slang. "One might say," Retallack states, "that the unifying poetic project in an atmosphere characterized by difference was to create with language, on the page, the kind of figure-ground shift occurring in the socio-political world; to redefine what was at stake, what did or did not lie within the bounds of the poem."
In contrast, some of the poetry read at the Folio series was more recognizably language-centered. Retallack believes that this shift in poetics occurred because the years of Mass Transit and Folio interaction had generated a close-knit or high-context community. Such a community shared a common conceptual framework and could move away from a preoccupation with "discursive reference toward language and form per se." This is not to say, however, that there were not different influences. As Phyllis Rosenzweig points out, "I don't think there is a common ‘our’ lineage because I truly think we have all been influenced differently and by different writers along the way." While Rosenzweig learned from the example of poets like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, Inman cites Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Aram Saroyan as influences. Lynne Dreyer also saw Mayer as an important influence, as well as Susan Howe. Others, like Joan Retallack, were fascinated by the work of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and Oulipo.
The transition toward an investigation of form was gradual, with early or proto-Language pieces appearing in Mass Transit. One example is Tina Darragh's "Self-Portrait," a photograph of soldiers leading three formally dressed men on horses along a city street. Here, the body politic militates and subsumes the individual subject. In the same issue, she presented a diagram of horseshoes with listed descriptions. Through careful excision and rearrangement, Darragh generated unexpected absences (a loss of signification) as well as tracking sound repetitions. The continual appearance of "Toe" and "Shoe," for instance, transfers attention away from their family resemblance (belonging or appertaining to the foot) to their imperfect semantic relation.
The playful experimentation of Darragh's pieces are elaborated and refined in Dog City. Running for only two issues, Dog City was produced by a workshop that occurred at Folio under the aegis of the Poetry Factory, and included writers such as Lynne Dreyer, Doug Lang, Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Bernard Welt, and Diane Ward. The title Dog City emphasizes a poetics of humor, its initials reinforcing a located politics. Indeed, many of the poems featured in Dog City focused on the alienating effect and false consciousness of urban experience. An example is this excerpt from Diane Ward's "Home Plate":
The street sliding away on the sheet metal tops.
Tiny miniatures of real life. Siren, clouds of smoke:
inside the dove, sure solutions
bells when we wake up, bells when we hit the ground
all bodies filled with input, communicationtrons
messages from our lips, from our toes messages from the
space between each hair on our heads.
Eyes used to be. E[s]pecially internalized. Real life
becomes so real becomes unreal.
This conversation has gone back into parentheses. You don't
have to shout I won't hear you any better.
Falling in love and going back again.
Certain places become special. Not sentimental but unavoidable.
A writer who uses language. A writer who uses language
and emotion. A writer a language an emotion a philosophy a
wit a system a theory. A writer drinking a writer not
answering the phone on the table with two cups of coffee
a writer taking a shower Shelley standing clear
The home plate, the point of safety and closure in baseball, is ironicized through Ward's puns on plate—from the metal plates for industrial protection to the domestic plates matching the coffee cups. Here the message becomes lost in the surrounding noise, whether it be the ringing sound of a siren in the distance or of a clock nearby. The limits of language are apparent, as she ends the poem, "No words for what you want to say." Language, emotion, philosophy, and humor are all disconnected. The external becomes internalized, undercutting the Romantic vision of the artist raised above the material world.
Phyllis Rosenzweig turns instead to the divisions and categories that a city constructs:
This is my friend This is my boyfriend
This is my desk where I work
This is my job
This is me
This is the way things go
Merrick Parkway Utopia Parkway
This is the fourth page
This is the fifth page
They offered me a lot of money
so I agreed to do it
Cook an egg Cook another egg
These are the vitamins in your life
You could line people up
Is this pink?
Is this blue?
Is this worth continuing?
* * *
The teeming metropolis
This is real wool
This is my one true bargain
Everything in your life is fast
but not me
We eat out too much but good food
is good when good food is good
You want to talk about it
and I want to get off the train
Easy directions Easy to follow
It is about perception which is
not memory; to be alone to eat
a cookie to get dressed up
Assuming for the sake of argument
Supposing for the sake of argument
That everything (perception) is based
on endless temporary experiences
An absolute fulfillment of human desire
Stolichnaya. Scientific Valentine.
Venus in a terrifying light.
Rosenzweig highlights how distinctions are made even when there seems little difference in language use, whether in relationships (the difference between friend and boyfriend), street directions (Merrick Parkway from Utopia Parkway), or work (between desk and job). Clichés of consumption are transformed through a sexual economy—the vitamins of an egg blur into the egg's role in sexual reproduction. Fast food is compared to the fastness of a girl. Rosenzweig leaves us to wonder whether eating a cookie might be somehow linked to getting "dressed up." Through her poem, easy directions become complicated. She seems to suggest that if these everyday distinctions were no longer habitual but viewed as an endless series of temporary decisions, the feminine might appear revamped: "Venus in a terrifying light."
While Dog City featured numerous collaborations between Washington writers, others took place outside its pages. Darragh, Dreyer, and Rosenzweig worked together on a detective story. Dreyer recalls that it became a source of immense enjoyment for the three of them. Yet, when finally performed for the workshop group, their idealized and idolized male character was met understandably with less than enthusiasm by many of the men. Such performances, as well as the more public readings, are examples of collaborations that demand a different kind of involvement from their audience. Nick Piombino points out that poems such as Joan Retallack's Errata suite are best read aloud so that both poet and listener can work together to expand the boundaries of written and spoken language. Retallack, like other Washington women writers, uses "words as they appear to us in the inchoate flux of everyday experience, very much including the experience of silent and spoken reading, as well as associative thinking." This creates "a kind of music that challenges us to listen to the entire complexity of experience in its full density."
The Folio series and Dog City would be supplemented by EEL. Originally named Everybody's Ex-Lover, the first issue appeared in 1973 and was co-edited by Lang, Inman, and Lisa Shea. Inman then became sole editor for the remaining three issues, although Tina Darragh "was very much involved w[ith] the magazine as well." Following Inman's own interests, the magazine shifted from the surreal to more abstract work. It featured many Folio writers, as well as Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Hannah Weiner. In the second half of the decade, Douglas Messerli produced Là Bas and Sun & Moon magazines out of College Park, Maryland.
All four magazines (along with two reading series) strengthened ties between the New York and Washington poets. Like Bruce Andrews and Michael Lally, Diane Ward eventually moved to New York, where she became involved in Roof Books. Washington writers also built upon connections between their work and that of the San Francisco Language writers. This, however, was largely through contributing to West Coast journals and presses like This, Tottel's, and Tuumba, and occurred during the second half of the seventies. Both groups of writers had created high-context communities. However, for the Bay Area writers, the group politics and radicalism of poetics saw them gain increasing notoriety during this period. The oppositional stance that they were often forced to adopt led to a different, more complex function of community from that of the Washington group.
Unlike the crystallization of a community in San Francisco and Washington, Language writing remained initially marginal and dispersed in New York. This was partly because the New York scene was simply so much larger than anywhere else. St. Mark's Poetry Project was in many respects the powerhouse of the poetic community and still the stronghold of a second-generation New York school. Lyune Dreyer points out that while people in Washington felt that Language writing was "really new right here at this time in this space," New Yorkers felt that such innovation "had been there all along and this was just a New Phase." In May 1974, Barbara Baracks told Ron Silliman of the indifference to language-centered writing produced by people such as Andrews, the exception being Clark Coolidge, who was already widely known and had a more varied style. At the end of 1974, Charles Bernstein moved back to New York from Santa Barbara, where he had been working and keeping up a correspondence with Ron Silliman (to whom he had first written in 1973). The following year, Ray DiPalma also moved to New York. "We've got nothing like the sense of community here as you've got," Charles Bernstein nevertheless wrote to Silliman, "at most a few people who read as friends." This lack of community, however, reflects the quality of the city—"Fragmented, decentralized, atomized."
Whereas Dreyer disliked the "high strung" feeling of the New York poetry scene, for others, like Bernstein and Diane Ward, there were advantages. With a concentration of all the arts, Bernstein felt that poets have less a sense of "their own culture import on a glamour or status scale, or, for that matter, public scale." The presence of so many artists means "you can't help but feel as much of a relation to workers in other fields as to people writing poetry, more relation in many cases, & this fact tends to decentralize the poetry community focus (much less the ‘language writing’ poetry community focus)." Diane Ward points out that St. Mark's offered the chance to read to a knowledgeable audience and generated publicity for lesser known poets.
Andrews and Bernstein would try to foster a community, first through Legend, a five-way collaboration between themselves and Ray DiPalma, Ron Silliman, and Steve McCaffery. Although the project was carried out between the east and west coasts, and across national borders, the distance involved led Andrews and Bernstein to consider the idea of a distribution service. This would strengthen affinities of interest by making available work that was hard to come by or not yet published. Making available back issues of Big Deal, This, Tottel's, and Toothpick, the service also offered photocopies of out-of-print chapbooks, such as Andrews's Edge and Vowels, Lynne Dreyer's Lamplights Used to Feed the Deer and Stampede, Lyn Hejinian's A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking, and Bernadette Mayer's Story. Furthermore, it offered photocopies of manuscripts by writers like Barbara Baracks, Ray DiPalma, Jackson MacLow, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, and Hannah Weiner. The pricing of material covered copying charges as well as a royalty to the author. Unfortunately, the service did not gather much consumer interest, and by early 1980 they began to close it down. Bernstein went on to edit the catalog at Segue with James Sherry and Diane Ward. The major small-press distributor on the East Coast, Segue sought a similar "aesthetic commitment with its choices." It also kept track of "a shifting community of readers" by circulating a mailing list to its affiliated presses.
Besides the distribution service, Andrews and Bernstein envisaged a newsletter that would cut across communal divisions. Finding form as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—one of the best-known instruments of Language writing—the introductory letter outlined the newsletter's aim to emphasize
that spectrum of work that places its attention in some primary way on language, ways of making meaning, that takes neither form ... or content ..., or their relation, for granted. Focusing on this kind of poetic activity, and related aesthetic & political concerns, we hope to open things up more publicly to your correspondence, break down unnecessary self-encapsulation of ... person from person, scene from scene ...
Circulated to about two hundred writers, it would "include information of magazines & books (price & where to locate) and ... feature texts (with bibliographic information) on a number of writers." Content was to be "a mix of short essays, texts, letters, statements, reader comments, journal excerpts & reviews (especially of new books etc., by less well-known younger writers—and related non fiction)." Reviews did not have to be expository or evaluative.
Bernstein hoped that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E would include work that did not usually appear in a "poetry" context, such as art, music composition, performance art, philosophy, or sociology." Accordingly, he envisaged something structured like the poetic scene in New York, contingent and cross-disciplinary in association. However, the writing itself was always to be prioritized, rather than (as in some performance texts or conceptual art) supplementary to the idea. Critical pieces would be chosen for the quality of writing, not merely for their argument.
Despite the general aim to deconstruct community boundaries, Bernstein thought their first issue should establish some roots and sources. New York writers predictably dominated this vision of origins, but perhaps more surprising is the lack of women. Bernstein suggested that in addition to work by the editors, the issue should feature writings by Larry Eigner, Carl Andre, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Grenier, Steve McCaffery, David Antin, something on Gertrude Stein or Louis Zukofsky, Samuel Beckett, John Enslin, and Ray DiPalma, as well as some intermedia work and found texts. Although Mayer was the only contemporary woman writer listed, Bernstein was hesitant about including her more recent work, which he felt was oriented more toward the New York school. It was envisaged that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E would distinguish a poetics separate from the New York school (unlike in Washington, where Language writing and the New York school were invariably featured side by side).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LEAVING LINES OF GENDER by Ann Vickery. Copyright © 2000 by Ann Vickery. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Need Help? Copyright © 1999-2025
