Avant-Garde Community and the Individual Talent

The Case of Language Poetry

The term avant-garde, we sometimes forget, was originally a military metaphor: it referred to the front flank of the army, the forerunners in battle who paved the way for the rest (see Calinescu 98-99). The avant-garde is thus, by definition, ahead of its time. But not in an evolutionary sense, for the avant-garde is also invariably […]

The Portrait of the Language Poet as Autobiographer: The Case of Ron Silliman

published in Qarry West, 34: Ron Silliman Issue, ed. Tom Vogler (1998): 167-81.

One of the cardinal principles–perhaps the cardinal principle–of Language poetics has been the dismissal of voice as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface (“Language, Realism, Poetry”) to his anthology In The American Tree, Ron Silliman […]

Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject Ron Silliman’s Albany Susan Howe’s Buffalo

published in Albany, Critical Inquiry, 25 (Spring1999), 405-434.

The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body–in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is […]

The Coming of Age of Language Poetry (Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob Perelman)

Maggie O’Sullivan, ed. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK..Afterword by Wendy Mulford. London: Reality Street Studios, 1996. L9.0 paper.

Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996

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