Juliana Spahr
"After-Language."
earlier version was translated into Swedish for OEI 7 (2001) 70.
this version will be printed in Danish (translatedby Mette Moestrup) in Den Bla Port, 2002.

 

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s the radicalness of a poem was often evaluated. A work that was radical was a good work. At the time it was difficult to describe what being radical meant. It meant more a feeling, a hard to read feeling. Or something that one was not used to reading. It meant maybe ellipitical. Now I can define what had been meant by radical then as writing that used anglo-modernist techniques of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. At the time, a work that was radical used more anglo-modernist techniques than other works. It wasn't all that simple, I have to admit. Content did matter at the time. But often as an afterthought. Radical enough was a game that men won more than women, although there was always Gertrude Stein who always won all aspects of the game if she was brought in.

This question of radical enough was such a dominant question because of language writing, also known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing (after the magazine of the same title that was edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein). The term is used to describe a loosely affiliated group of people who began published in the same journals in the 1970s and 1980s. This work often looks at first glance as more of Stein's disjunctive morass of phrases and sentences. Yet as much as this writing is under the influence of Stein, it is also under the influence of changing models of politics that come to prominence in the United States in the 60s. Like the 60s model of grassroots organizing that was used to facilitate protests to the Vietnam war, language writing valorizes multiple and individual response. In much language writing the clear, distinguished poetic voice of most political writing is replaced with fractured words and/or sentences that lack attribution. Quotation and bricolage are dominant compositional techniques. Phrases and sentences that avoid narrative's necessary hierarchies are preferred. Antihierarchical language is a value in its own right as it refuses lineages and cultural privileges.

When I first started to read language writing, what I enjoyed about it was how it reconfigured my mind. In my thinking, I tend to begin with detail and then if I am smart enough, I move from there to the system. What was useful about language writing for me then, was that it kept demanding that I look at the system, most obviously the system of language, before I marveled at the detail. Often language writing does this by using formal restraints. For instance, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, which I find to be one of the most powerful works of the late twentieth century, was written when she was forty-five and there are forty-five sections of forty-five sentences. My Life makes autobiography into a dramatic new shape-one governed more by the limitation of the number forty-five than by narrative development. Also Ron Silliman's Tjanting in which he uses the mathematical guide of the fibonacci series to determine the number of words in the sentence (the fibonacci series is that equation where the sum of the two pervious numbers are added together so 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8). The last half, maybe more, of Tjanting is one long sentence, a wonderful metaphor for inclusion. His use of the fibonacci series, the pattern that a sunflower uses to arrange its seeds, guides me to think about the difficult and expansive nature of connection. Less mathematical but equally as transforming, was Susan Howe's attention to the system in the details of history in her work, Bruce Andrews's attention to the refuse of language and his refusal of aesthetics at every moment, Charles Bernstein's attention to parody and forms, Joan Retallack's attention to chance. I found value (and its cousin beauty) in these new forms. I found value in the retreat from individualism and idiosyncracy and in works that instead pointed to heady and unexpected and yet intimate pluralisms. And in writing that helped me to think of culture as large and connective. And in writing that comments on community and that moves poetry away from individualism to shared, connective spaces. And in writing that reveals how our private intimacies have public obligations and ramifications, how intimacy has a social bond with shared meaning. The tendency in language writing that writing not be given up to aesthetics only or even aesthetics mainly means a great deal to me.

As language writing showed me that language is a tool, it also showed me that poetry need not be merely about intimacy or personality. Much of this work suggests new forms for viewing the everyday. One effect that Hejinian's attention to a larger world and a mathematical, not a personal, limitation, has is that it comes with a gesture to share authority with readers and an accompanying abandoning of authorial privilege. As the public work is more multiply connective and less culturally referential, it is one that assumes reading is generative as well as interpretative.

But language writing for people who come after language writing (I guess that would be anyone who was, like me, still in grade school when L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E first came out) can sometimes be a difficult topic. Despite being a movement with roots in turn of the century modernism and a movement that is over twenty years old, language writing can continue to take credit for a complicated knot of emotions and reactions among those who were in grade school in the 1970s. There is still, interestingly, a lot of anger around language writing. Certain established journals, granting agencies, and MFA programs still refuse to give any attention to language writing. And while language writers have begun in recent years to receive some established grants and awards, this has been slow in coming. (At the same time, it should be noted that language writing does have its own establishment of support--there is much academic writing on language writing.)

As I was thinking about the prevalence of these negative emotions, I began to wonder if there is some sort of "revolutionary" (a word I use with a great sense of hesitation) potential in language writing that I might tend to overlook. Language writing still manages to be something, twenty to thirty years since we started hearing it, that sets many writers who come after it on edge. It has managed to maintain an edge that many other art forms have not been able to do. And its techniques have not been readily repackaged and sold without the politics (although there seems to be some indication that this is finally starting to happen--that is another article though). This makes me wonder if language writing might be more apart from the culture than I realize.

But mainly I worry that negative male emotion is just another way to keep everyone from noticing that one of the most important aspects of language writing is the dominant role women writers have had (and how they have used experimentation so as to investigate gender). If, as I just pointed out, what has been most important for me about language writing is that its use of large forms helped me to see language's systems with a wider vision, coming in at a close second is the model that the many women language writers provide. Women enter into poetry in the United States around modernism, with typical mixed results. But after modernism, they get tossed in the looney bin with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. So language writing's self-aware roots in modernism and, to use Hejinian's word "inquiry," rather than confessionalism, felt to me to be a way out of the sad poetess model. If I wanted to write things down, it need not be about my angst. It could be about thinking! The work that Hejinian did with Tuumba and that Leslie Scalapino does with O Books combined with their own strong and insightful work was very inspiring. Similarly the work of Carla Harryman, Susan Howe, Joan Retallack, Kathleen Fraser and many others.

I know some feel as if language writing is the end, that there is no further place to go, and that younger writers can only go back. Language writing, some feel, so disrupted the language that no more disruption is possible (interestingly, I think one could have said the same after Stein). But to me there is much new exciting writing coming after language writing. While the writers associated with language writing have done much to politicize writing, to break down hierarchies between readers and authors, and to investigate subjectivity in terms of class and gender, they have strangely avoided doing much investigation around race or sexuality. My argument here is not that language writing or writers have been racist. But rather there has been a missed opportunity to enter into the dialogue about race and privilege that has dominated United States political thought since the 1960s. Some quick history: in the late 60s in the United States, identity (racial/ethnic/gender/sexuality) concerns come to the forefront and are a crucial part of U.S. political debate. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Black Panther Party are founded and one could, although it would be reductive, see this year as the moment when American melting pot identity comes under question. Basically by the mid-60s, the possibility of a "we" has come under critique. Race and gender separatism more or less begins to dominate American politics in the second half of the 1960s. In terms of poetry, although many try to insist otherwise, there really is no longer an "American" poetry. Instead, poets often group under identity categories: feminist poets; lesbian poets; chicano/a poets; etc. The poetry written in this situation is often political and about issues that distinguish the identity group from dominant U.S. culture (i.e. Chicano/a poets writing about specific foods, specific cultural issues, about the Spanish language, about racism, about distinctive political concerns).

As concerns language writing in this history, This (a journal edited by Barrett Watten that first begins publishing a lot of these writers) begins publication in 1971 and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine begins in 1978. Language writing, written mainly by white and somewhat middle class writers, in general writes against all this attention to identity. The work tends to avoid both the conventions of confessionalism where an "I" confesses to some emotion and of more identity-concerned poetries where the "I" claims affiliation with a distinctive group. Several language writers have spoken out very strongly and dismissively against identity concerned poetries.

When I look for the legacy of language writing on writers that come after it, what is exciting to me are the large number of emerging writers who are using the concerns and intents of language writing to discuss race and/or sexuality more directly instead of avoiding this discussion about culture and seeing everything through language. Harryette Mullen's work is the often mentioned example around issues of race. Mullen is an African-American writer whose work is concerned very directly with race, class, and gender. Her work turns to puns, samplings, and other sorts of word play to examine and challenge overly limiting constructions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. In place of narrative's causal flow, the works are loosely gathered around themes such as women's bodies, clothing, and accessories in her book Trimmings, supermarket products, their marketing and packaging in her book S*PeRM**K*T, and the blues and other forms of African-based culture in her book Muse & Drudge. For example, in S*PeRM**K*T, Mullen transforms the instructions on frozen food or the pursuit of clean laundry into statements on race and class when she writes "Brown and serve, a slice of life whose side's your butter on" or "Ivory says pure nuff and snowflakes be white enough to do the dirty work. Step and fetch laundry tumbles out shuffling into sorted colored stacks." The language is highly poetic, assonant and rhythmical, but not in predictable ways.

Mullen's work is distinctive, but there are also numerous younger writers who are taking the attention to the systemic of language writing to write about culture and their relation to it. Many of these works seem to be written under the sign of Hejinian's My Life. I would include Pamela Lu's Pamela: a Novel, Renee Gladman's Juice, and Summi Kaipa's Epics in this category. All are written in sentences, are somewhat fragmentary, and avoid conventional narrative. All three of these writers lived in San Francisco while writing these works. All of these works are concerned with role of an individual in a modern and changing world. Lu's Pamela, for instance, is in great part about, if it is about anything at all, a funny feeling among five friends, called by the initials L, C, R, A, and the narrational I. This funny feeling seems to somewhat be the result of how San Francisco is turning into the dot com capital of the world around them. The stories that are told tend to be mundane and disconnected ones. The characters talk a lot with great self reflexivity. They go to restaurants. They walk around the changing city. In style, the disconnected sentences look at first glance like language writing. But the novel is clearly not language writing. It is too involved in its story. Its effectuations do not really point to larger language structures. Instead they move the story along. And it also holds onto the I, even if it is an alienated I.

Spinning off from these writers, I would also include work done by Catalina Cariaga, Myung Mi Kim, and Edwin Torres who also use an attention to language's structures to investigate culture, all in unique ways. Cariaga, for instance, in "The Mercy" in her book Cultural Evidence moves between English, Tagalog, and Japanese in order to discuss her mother's immigration from the Philippines to the United States. Myung Mi Kim uses the metaphor of translation in her books to discuss the movement between Korean, her first language, and English. The poems are mainly in English, yet in an abstract English that is attentive mainly to fragmentation:

ap
ac

Pock

ji-wuat-dah erased
ji-eu-dah shouted

Regarded among penury
Numb pie mum pie

jip-sae-gi ji-pah-raeng-e : show here

Look at that noise!

Numb pie mum pie

Torres, who begins his career as a writer in the slam scene at the Nuyorican poet's café, writes poems that practically catalogue language play and often move between English and Spanish as if there was no boundary.

All of these works I find profound for their willingness to negotiate both language and culture, for their refusal to see language politics as just one dimensional or monolingual. It is often noted that in the United States poetry scene there is not poetry, but poetries. It seems to me that poetry is currently the most anarchist of art forms in the United States. By anarchist I mean self-governing and decentralized. Poets have since the 1950s gathered themselves into a series of locally grounded collectives that reflect various specific cultural, political, and aesthetic concerns, with many of these collectives distinctively combining several of these concerns at once. There is no single way of writing that can be called "American" poetry. Instead there are unique aesthetic characteristics and concerns to groups such as the Chicano/a poets, cowboy poets, the Dark Room Collective, Hawai`i's Local poets, Nuyorican poets, slam poets, etc.

I certainly hope this is true. I have found myself over the last five years listening mainly to Hawai`i's local poets who write in pidgin and yet reading mainly still the more experimental writing of writers on the continent of the United States. My writing has been an attempt to negotiate between these various categories and schools who often make it a point of ignoring that the other exists. My most recent book, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, attempts to look at the word "we" as large and inclusive and various. This attention to words, to "we," and to large social structures is something that I learned was possible for poetry from language writing. Yet in large part this book is also an attempt to extend language writing's at times narrow world view and to treat the pidgin word "da kine" or native Hawaiian gathering rights with the same attention that language writing gives to various European continental theories.

Close associations of the sort that lead the language writers to co-author essays of self definition such as "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto" written by Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten in 1988 seem almost impossible for me to imagine. I cannot imagine that any of my fellow writers would even consider joining me in such a project. But it isn't that we've got it all figured out. Much still remains to be done, to be changed. Poetry remains in danger in the United States of answering only to myopic concerns, of addressing narrow, issue-specific interventions. Yet I feel hopeful that this is only momentary because this new work, influenced by language writing's attention to the systemic, is constantly thinking about new connections and opportunities.