Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

In the spring of 1999 I was invited to give a paper at a conference called
“Page Mothers” (the title refers to women editors of little magazines and
experimental poetry journals), held at the University of California, San Diego.
In my essay I discussed the origins of Language poetry—a movement whose
original theorizers were a group of male poet-intellectuals. When I expanded
the essay for presentation at the Barnard College conference on “Innovation
in Contemporary Poetry by Women” (1999), I went on to trace the gradual
transformation of early Language theory into a more inclusive “experimental”
poetics that opened up the field to women and minority poets. But I con-
cluded with a caveat—a caveat that aroused some resentment in my
audience—as to the current demand on these “experimental” poets to write
theoretical essays as had the founders of the Language movement. Edward
Foster and Joseph Donahue requested the essay for their 2002 collection, The
World in Time and Space: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry in
our Time.

8

After Language Poetry

Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents

Are you sure, she asked, you’re talking of ideas? Dark, emptied of touch

would be entire, null and void. Even on an island.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Split In¤nites

Innovate: from the Latin in + novare, “to make new, to renew, alter.” In
our century, from Rimbaud’s “Il faut être absolument moderne!” and Ezra
Pound’s “Make It New!” to Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (Grove
Press, 1960) and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A
New American Poetry, 1960–1990 (Sun & Moon, 1994), novelty has been the
order of the day. Think of the (now old) New Criticism, the New Formal-
ism, the New Historicism, le nouveau roman, and la nouvelle cuisine. As I
was writing this essay, a message came over the Internet announcing the
British poet-critic Robert Sheppard’s Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Po-
etry, 1978–1997.^1 And in recent years, two important anthologies of women’s
poetry—Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in