Poetry and Language Writing

de David Arnold

"It has been variously labelled 'Language Poetry', Language Writing', 'L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing' (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and 'language-centred writing'. It has been variously defined as non-referential or of diminished reference, as textual poetry or a critique of expressivism, as a reaction against the 'workshop' poetry enshrined in creative writing departments across the United States. It has been variously described as non-academic, theory conscious, avant-garde, post-modern, and oppositional. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism a la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that 'it' has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s."--Jacket.