The American Century: Literature since 1945 721to present the poem as a window on experience, the language poet builds up a mosaic
structure by means of seemingly unrelated sentences and sentence fragments. This
progression of nonsequiturs frustrates the reader’s expectations for linear develop-
ment at the same time as it discloses a more complete world of reference. The stress
is laid on production rather than ease of consumption, on the use of artifice in such
a way as to force open given forms and break habitual patterns of attention. Another
poet who has served as a point of origin for the language poets, Jackson Maclow
(1922–2004), conceded that “no language is really ‘nonreferential.’ “If it’s language, it
consists of signs, and all signs point to what they signify.” However, he argued, that
hardly detracts from the core aim of language poetry which, as Maclow put it, is to
center the focus “on linguistic details and the relation among them, rather than on
what they might ‘point to.’ ” The language poet resists all inclination to totalize or
account for diversity in literary productions – or in experience – by the imposition of
unifying schemes or rigid constructs. By interrogating, subverting, or even exag-
gerating the effects of formal logic and linguistic structures on our thinking, he or
she demonstrates how those structures can have a determining influence on what we
see, how we behave – and who we think we are.
Along with this emphasis on the materiality of the signifier, what language poets
also have in common is the project of restoring the reader as a co-producer of the
text. That follows inevitably from their resistance to closure. “The text calls upon the
reader to be actively involved in the process of constructing its meaning,” as Bernstein
has put it. “The text formally involves the process of response/interpretation and in
doing so makes the reader aware of herself or himself as producer as well as consumer
of meaning.” A poem is not about something, a paraphraseable narrative, symbolic
nexus, or theme. It is the actuality of words. And those words call the reader to
attention and action. They also call the reader, as Bernstein expresses it, “to a
reconsideration and a remaking of the habits, automatisms, conventions, beliefs
through which, and only through which, we see and interpret the world.” For some
language poets, at least, the strenuous attention to opacity and openness has clear
political implications. “The question is always what is the meaning of this language
practice,” Bernstein has insisted; “what values does it propagate; to what degree does
it encourage an understanding, a visibility, of its own values or to what degree does
it repress that awareness?” “Language control = thought control = reality control” for
Bernstein, and for the more politically inclined language poets like Bob Perelman
(1947–) and Bruce Andrews (1948–). So part of their task, as they see it, is to “bring
into visibility as chosen instruments of power what is taken as neutral or given,” to
expose those language practices that distribute meaning and authority, that underpin
the system of assumptions, the series of naturalized collusions and constraints on
which their society operates. What such writers are after, as Andrews has it, is “a
conception of writing as politics, not writing about politics:” poetry that interrogates
language habits to discover whether their social function is liberating or repressive.
Perelman has put it more satirically: “Question: How do you tell a language from a
dialect? Answer: A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.” Works that
foreground the way that language works, the sense here is, reveals the weaponry thatGGray_c05.indd 721ray_c 05 .indd 721 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM