didn’t put into practice, at least not in his best poetry.^12 By the 1990s, in any
case, all three of the Language principles that McCaffery put forward had
been subtly transformed even as their force remains implicitly operative to-
day. The referential fallacy, to begin with, has given way to a more nuanced
emphasis on the how of poetic language rather than the what. The dismissal
of instrumental language as the commodity fetish has come under criticism
from both Left and Right, as readers have realized that so-called innovative
writing—writing that is fragmented, asyntactic, non-sensical, etc.—can be
just as fetishized as any thing else. And the emphasis on readerly construc-
tion, an article of faith in the semiotic theories of Barthes, Foucault, and Eco,
and, in the United States, of reader-response theory, has given way to a re-
newed perception that the alleged authority of the reader is, as Ron Silliman
has remarked in a recent essay, merely a transfer of power whereby, in ways
Barthes could not have foreseen, “the idealized, absent author of the New
Critical canon has [merely] been replaced by an equally idealized, absent
reader.”^13
Language poetics, let’s remember, had a strong political thrust: it was es-
sentially a Marxist poetics that focused, in important ways, on issues of ide-
ology and class.^14 But it was less attuned to questions of gender and race:
indeed, in the case of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, although one senses that every
effort was made to include “innovative” women poets—for example, Rae Ar-
mantrout, Barbara Baracks, Abigail Child, Lynne Dreyer, Johanna Drucker,
Barbara Einzig, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Bernadette
Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Rosmarie Waldrop, Diane Ward, and Hannah Weiner—
the more overt theorizing itself was left, with rare exceptions, to the men in
the movement.^15 Thus, students in the eighties were usually introduced to
Language poetry by such “reference books” as Barrett Watten’s Total Syntax,
Charles Bernstein’s Content’s Dream, Steve McCaffery’s North of Intention,
and Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence, all published between 1985 and 1987.
The dominance of these founding fathers can be seen in the British reception
of Language poetics, a reception coming largely from the Left, which was
keenly interested in but also highly critical of the doctrines put forward in
“The New Sentence,” “Arti¤ce of Absorption,” or “The Death of the Sub-
ject,” but had little to say about speci¤c poems.^16
What, then, of the women poets in the original movement?^17 Interestingly,
their background was more literary and artistic than that of, say, Andrews
and Bernstein, who had studied political science and philosophy, respec-
tively. Susan Howe began her career as a visual artist and was very much in-
®uenced by Concrete poetry, especially the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and
162 Chapter 8