722 The American Century: Literature since 1945gives it social weight. More generally, they show language as a field of ideological
contention, not a monolithic system; as a series of constructed practices, neither
innocent nor inevitable, but a symptom and agent of power.
Even those language poets who do not share this political edge or intention tend
to privilege the marginal over the mainstream. This is if only because the limits of
structure and ideology come into view most noticeably at the point where structure
and ideology break down: where, as in language poems, instead of disappearing into
the unstated assumptions of an activity, they appear all too clearly as evidence. So,
one of the finest language poets, Susan Howe (1937–) has explained that her poetic
project is to piece together and “lift from the dark side of history, voices that are
anonymous, slighted – inarticulate.” They include the numerous, unnamed victims
of economic depression and world war or women slighted by history. The Europe of
Trusts (1990) addresses the anonymous victims. The Liberties (1980) is one among
many of Howe’s works to consider marginal female figures: in it, Esther Johnson,
known to history as Jonathan Swift’s Stella, takes center stage. No longer Swift’s
creature, she speaks with words of her own, Swift himself appearing only as a ghost.
Similarly, Lyn Hejinian (1941–) has constructed a discontinuous narrative of her
own childhood in My Life (1987). “Repetition, and the rewriting that repetition
becomes, make a perpetual beginning,” Hejinian has written. True to that formula,
and to her belief that “language itself is never in a state of rest,” Hejinian creates
autobiography through a mosaic of discontinuous sentences and glimpses, in which
the title of one section of the book-length sequence finds its way into the text of
another. The result is fugitive and absorbing, producing a jumpiness of word and
mood that Hejinian has described as “so natural to my ‘real life’ experience” as to
“seem inevitable – and ‘true.’ ” In her own way, with disjunction of surface and voice,
Hejinian uses her own slighted, elusive life experience to pursue the central project
of language poetry which, as Bernstein once expressed it, is “to cast doubt on each
and every ‘natural’ construction of reality.”
Historically, that project began around the early 1970s. In 1971 the first issue of
This appeared, co-founded by Robert Grenier (1941–) and Barrett Watten (1948–).
“I HATE SPEECH,” Grenier declared in an essay in that issue. It was his particular
aim, in saying this, and the aim of This generally, to reject a poetics based on the
assumptions of speech; to raise the issue of refernce and to suggest that any new
direction would require poets to look at what a poem is actually made of – language
itself. The resistance sounded here to the simple, seemingly obvious idea that words
should derive from speech and refer to things was followed up on the west coast, in
San Francisco by writers like Perelman, Watten, Hejinian, and Carla Harryman
(1952–). From 1977 to 1981, for instance, Perelman founded and curated the San
Francisco Talk Series, then edited Writing/Talks (1985), a collection of talks and
writings from the series. The “talks” consisted of a presentation by the poet, during
which the audience responded with their own thoughts. Then, on the east coast, in
and around New York City, a number of writers converged: among them, Bernstein,
Andrews, and Ray Di Palma. From that convergence came L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
the first American journal of poetics by and for poets. Its editors said that they wereGGray_c05.indd 722ray_c 05 .indd 722 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM