Watten's Grand Piano

I've revised my discomfort with Barrett Watten's stance as represented in the collectively-written memoir/essay The Grand Piano. I'd seen the attempt to present a unified front for Language Writing, in the form of a story about a singular avant-garde movement appearing dramatically on the scene, as exactly the wrong move, at a time when so many writers of my age (plus or minus a decade or so) use "LangPo" as a broad stylistic term, without historical specificity, in a generalized way that misses the then-and-still-staggering breadth and variety among and within the writing of its practitioners, absorbing their work into a sound-bite series of descriptions paraphrased from two or three essays written in the early 1980s.

In the light of his contributions to GP 5 & 6, as well as his recent note on the "1970s" conference in Orono, I've come to see Watten's critical project as an effort to retain a place for radical art (and its extensions into the larger culture through poetics, literary history and criticism) at the institutional table--to keep it from being displaced entirely by official criticism, which, even at its best, is almost always far behind art, both chronologically and philosophically. As regards "Language Poetry," this is a place that's barely been gained--a tenuousness that shows in the easy reduction to formulas mentioned above.

In GP 6, Watten revisits his first book of criticism, Total Syntax (a book I've found endlessly fascinating and influential, and which absolutely deserves a reprint). He focuses on that book's distinction between "technique" and "method." "Technique" is everything about how the work is constructed, while "method" is technique's extension in the form of engagements with the world outside the work, whether through its manner of reception, the forms of its presentation, or the range of materials about which it has something to say. Technique is "the beginning of a series that provisionally arrives with the work" (p. 76), while method is what comes "after," beyond its making.

At the end of his section of #6, Watten cites Progress and Total Syntax as the "sites" he's left, places to be returned to. That the latter is included puts the "split" in his career in a new light for me. Before the split (which might be marked by Bad History), there's a concentration on the production of new work, corresponding to "technique--" the period in which he was writing poetry. After it, there's the period characterized by The Constructivist Moment (his second critical collection), as well as most of the writing on his blog. This phase addresses, in one way, the matter of method. (The use of these terms in this way cheapens them a bit, since Watten's been concerned with both all along. I'll return to them in their richer and more provocative implications in the next post).

The picture that emerges now for me is of a poet and critic whose commited and unapologetic thinking has pushed into often counterintuitive areas in which the result can't be entirely predicted. The fact that I find The Constructivist Moment less compelling, less radical than Total Syntax has as much to do with the fact that the more recent work is addressed to an institutional context in which I'm not currently involved (or particularly interested) as it has to do with the quality of that work. It's an attempt to make frames for the reception of poetry that depend on something more vital than the mere economics of publication and distribution, to expand it into the extra-poetic. I remain skeptical of most academic discourse and worried about ways in which this effort might backfire, producing a strong but undesirable reception for the art in whose name it's made--but that institutional address is a job that needs to be done in some way, and I'm glad that he's doing it.

And he does qualify the "we," in a substantial footnote, claiming that it's to be used as a "shifter" rather than a "rigid designator"--that each writer undertook different investigations in his or her own way, around some shared concerns and a number of different ones, and that these individual works were encouraged by the group dynamic. That's a distinction from the "unified front" picture, and sounds pretty damn good to me.

*

I've also just reread Watten's first two collections, Opera/Works and Decay, the former for the second time and the latter for the umpteenth. I'm still blown away by their singularity, their strangeness that hasn't faded a bit, their breadth and humor and unique form of rigor. In a recent post-reading conversation somebody claimed that Language Poetry is about "the process of the experiment" to the exclusion of the poem. When I disagreed, he said something like "nobody remembers specific lines from a Charles Bernstein poem, or a Barrett Watten poem." I realized just how wrong that is; sentences from Silliman's Tjanting, language from Bernstein's Controlling Interests, lines from Armantrout's and Perelman's work, and most definitely from Watten's Decay, Complete Thought, Conduit and others have stuck with me for a long time, still signalling what's possible.

The aggressive energy with which so many writers compulsively argue that this writing is a thing of the past, an "experiment" that long ago ran its course, indicates all on its own just how far the work is from having been absorbed.

on The Grand Piano, part 4

I find each installment of The Grand Piano more intriguing than the last.

As the project goes on, the standpoints of the participants seem increasingly to diverge (I'm not certain whether this is happening in the writing itself or as a cumulative effect of reading). There's a friction , I think, between this divergence and Barrett Watten's ongoing attempt to cement the legend of Language Poetry. In much of his writing (here and in The Constructivist Moment), Watten is concerned to solidly establish the 'we' of these writers in a history of singular avant-garde cultural formations--to present the 'Language School' (of which he's, I think, the only member to employ that phrase, comfortably and without scare quotes), with all its variety, as a unified moment and rupture, a negative expression of discursive formations in a particular nexus of sociopolitical situations. Watten wants this writing ensconced in literary history, and for that he needs a myth.*

It's this myth that most often comes under attack when people complain about Language poetry (rather than the writing itself, which most critics seem not to have read very thoroughly): the presentation of an avant-garde collective, a unified front without precedent, claiming for itself a permanently oppositional status that these critics claim has become institutionalized, gaining power in terms of social status while losing power as a radical critique. This is already a caricature of Watten's presentation; while there is a drive toward a particular kind of institutionalization (of the 'school's' cultural significance, more than of the writers and their paid positions or blogging status), he most definitely sees LP as historical, and has insisted on the relation of the work to specific contexts.** If LP needed a defense against these dismissals, though, I find the fractured picture painted by this memoir to be a more compelling one than any instance of a more thoroughly theorized coherence.

Watten's approach has its varied antipodes and alternatives in The Grand Piano. Ron Silliman tends toward a more modest mode of historiography, crisp and straightforward (his entry here concentrates on the "talks" series, often unjustly overshadowed, in discourse about LangPo's theoretical production, by The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, perhaps because the printed records of the former are simply harder to find). Rae Armantrout's contributions are condensed, wry, direct and full of uncertainty. "I guess," "I hope so," and "I don't know"appear frequently, and (as in her poems) there's a discomfort with easy categories and answers. Here her recent bout with cancer and the relation to mortality that comes with that (which, incidentally, her most recent poems treat with a humor that astounds me) are juxtaposed with a nostalgia for an infinite, open time to place 'everyday life' (this volume's central concept) at a distance. Steve Benson's mode is an increasingly incisive self-questioning. Lyn Hejinian continues the philosophical investigations that have always characterized her work (though in a new and more explicit way since Happily), here meditating on the nature of memory in relation to the everyday and placing reminiscences about Tuumba Press beside events in the newspaper from 1977 to 1979. Kit Robinson (an exemplary poet with regard to the relation of writing to the everyday) here looks at poetry and jobs; as with the majority of his entries and his poetry, this one is characterized by a 'keeping-on-one's toes' sort of restlessness, an attention that wanders while remaining attentive. Carla Harryman's contributions are unsummarizable. They're regularly the most wide-ranging and self-sufficient of the bunch and, regardless of their position in the order of a given volume, seem to elicit the most response, from outside readers as well as from the other participants. They deserve their own blog post.***

Bob Perelman is certainly the most direct and skeptical questioner of the 'myth' (and has been so increasingly for at least a decade now), and of his own status in relation to it, both as participant and as critic. In book 4, Perelman introduces 'utopia' into the conversation, with its unstable relation to the concept of everyday life ("utopias aim at a clarified, just version of what everyday life could be; and in bad times, everyday life can seem like a utopian prospect" (GP4, p.116)). In this history, is utopia being treated as something that's already happened? Language poetry as entrenched, protected, "an unimpeachably recognizable object of study" (p.119)? Perelman's account of the panel "Language Writing and the Body" reproduces, in a displaced way, the same variety of investments in accounting for this writing that one finds in The Grand Piano, contrasting Steve Benson's self-critical performance, Leslie Scalapino's implied critique of narratives like GP, Maria Damon's feminist analysis of women's avant-garde writing (including Harryman's contributions to the collective autobiography, which contain the lion's share of its explicit instances of feminism), and Bruce Andrews' apparently 'LangPo-canonical' presentation. Perelman contrasts this event, in which he finds an uncomfortable 'MLA-like' character, with the Talks, which he found much more open, unstable, in process, utopian. He then recounts a conversation with Andrews at the after-party about whether there is, or has been, any 'Language writing' per se, and the answer is highly ambiguous. In conclusion, he asks who holds the "two-edged sword" that carves "the trench that founds Utopia... King Utopus or His Majesty the Ego"[?] (p.126).

It's less the opposition of this skepticism and uncertainty to Watten's heroism that makes up The Grand Piano's picture of a collective than it is the kaleidoscopic differences among all its contributors' work. As the project progresses, the 'collective' known as 'West Coast Language Poetry' loses, not its reality, but its subsumption of its individual members under a single umbrella (or piano).*****
The collective is coming to seem like something that happened (happens? happens here again? in any case, an in-motion occurrence rather than an organic entity) between its participants, in the crossing of the various shifting lines of friendships, collaborations, events, writings, responses, individual relations to separate social contexts overlapping and diverging. The collective subsists (subsisted? in any case, rather than 'exists,' 'existed') in the proposal of it, the calling it into question, the interest in it as an event and the lack of that interest as central, in singular/exemplary works and in ongoing processes--in the shifting relations between all these. Instead of a force, a wedge, a school, a set of rules--something being done, a real epiphenomenon of actual things being done and imagined.

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Two notes unattached to particular moments in this post:

--As this divergence occurs, Watten's own contributions become more specific, more essays in their own right; though they've had this characteristic all along, the deliquescent "we" dominates his tone to a lesser extent in GP 4, even though it does end with "we were just about to make a big noise" (p.85). Here he makes brilliant statements on the relation of writing to the everyday, on negativity and art, in relation to a series of presentations he gave in December 1979, culminating in the premiere of 1-10, one of those exemplary moments in contemporary poetry.

--I'd guess I'm more attracted to this dispersed picture of a writing community than to Watten's partly because I discovered Language Writing with a group of friends in Urbana back in 1995 or so (none of us had any idea who these people were, and the writing didn't tell us that either), in the context of a less lasting but just as multiple nexus of collaborations, enthusiasms and interrelationships, in which some of us (including myself) were given to bold theoretical pronouncements, others not, and in which all of us had different kinds and degrees of investment. The fact that this poetry took us by surprise, seemed so strange and estranging, seemed to come out of nowhere, that it didn't seem to form a unity at all, has become progressively more valuable to me as I encounter more and more people who came to the same writing in universities, presented with a small bit of the theory first, had it packaged for them--people who were given the arguments for the writing before they had a chance to encounter the writing itself.

*I want to point out that "myth" doesn't equal "lie," and that my preference for the presentation that emerges from this collective memoir doesn't equal a wholesale dismissal of Watten's project in this regard.

**There's also, in many of these criticisms, the always-disturbing hatred of what's passed, the reviling of the old, the "over" (which is not only cold but inaccurate, since some of these writers are, I'd argue, producing their finest work now).

***I haven't said anything here about the other two participants, Tom Mandel and Ted Pearson. It's only for reasons of space, but it's unfortunately typical; they're writers who have received less attention than the others in general.

****Either one will protect you from the rain; the piano is bigger, less mobile, and more canonically musical (the umbrella would require the invention of new techniques, and probably a contact microphone). Furniture and the Sitting vs. the Portable Object and the Walk?