This project is an effort to elucidate some characteristics of American language poetry.
“American Language Poetry in Hatred of Communicative Speech: Its Viability” examine the birth and development of the Language movement which started in the earl ...
This project is an effort to elucidate some characteristics of American language poetry.
“American Language Poetry in Hatred of Communicative Speech: Its Viability” examine the birth and development of the Language movement which started in the early 1970’s by the most experimental avant-garde poets of their day, to subvert so-called “official verse culture.” The Language movement is so diverse in its arguments and practices that we have difficulty in defining its construction and scope, but in a loosely collective way, over thirty years, its practitioners have developed various theories and poetries which could be summarized in four distinct features. First, Language poets fundamentally question the referential function of language; second, they consciously avoid exerting the lyrical subjectivity in their poetries; third, they show a Marxist critique of capitalistic culture; and fourth, they often ignore traditional classification of genre, and combine theory and poetry.
“The Attack of Difficult Poems on ‘Official Verse Culture’: Charles Bernstein” is an effort to understand why Charles Bernstein, a leading Language poet, has chosen to write difficult poems of his own to the extent of no intelligibility. To do this, first, it examines his critique of the “official verse culture” and the education of standard English for their degrading influence on poetry, by investigating his proses and conversations; second, it analyzes how his experimental language makes sense depending on its nonreferential materiality such as visual design and sound; and third, it traces how his difficult poems develop new strategies of reading and writing with readers sustained in difficulty.
“History and Reality as an Open Field: Susan Howe” tries to examine how Susan Howe develops a radical critique of history in her experimental language by analyzing “Thorow,” one of her longer poems. Technically, she often seems to be more focused on sound and form than on meaning, and, for the visual effect, deliberately pastes scissored phrases and lines on the page, which makes her stand high in estimation among contemporary avant-garde poets. She crosses genres and disciplines, and sometimes scatters, overlaps, even inverts, the words, phrases, or sentences from different sources. Her work is multi-layered and allusive owing to its heavy dependence on various texts from early American history and primary documents. In addition, her poetry gets much harder to read when its fragmented language ignores the standard of orthography and typography.
“’The Rejection of Closure’ and the Poet’s Life: Lyn Hejinian” Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure”(1983) to look into her view of language, and considers her My Life as an open text where memory, growing to a realm of metaphor or metonymy, provides an implicit vision of life.
“The Space between Sentence and Sentence: Ron Silliman’s Tjanting” is an effort to find a better way of reading Ron Silliman’s experimental language by analyzing what he considers as characteristic of “the new sentence” in The New Sentence and by examining how they are true of his prose poem Tjanting.
“American Language Poetry: Its Strategy of Referential Opaqueness and Openness of Life” tries to look over some characteristics of American language poetry. It will first examine how language poets write difficult poems for political purposes in other ways than modernist poets. Secondly, it will look into some causes for which they deliberately ignore traditional genres to compose a hybrid of poetry and prose. And thirdly, it will clarify that their poetry pursues singularities rather than a structural core, realizing their anti-reductionist impulse. The strategy of non-referentiality, on which language poets heavily rely, will be considered as effective in breaking the capitalistic logic of mainstream culture and extending the openness of life.