collective of left-wing, intellectual poets who formed what is sometimes
called a ‘postmodern avant-garde’ (the avant-garde was originally identi-
fied with modernism, but has had continuing effects on experimental
work during the postmodern era). They promoted experimental work
through their poetry and theoretical essays. These outlined their poetics:
that is, their theories about textuality and its political import and context.
The Language Poets included Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn
Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Leslie Scalapino
and Rae Armantrout. These poets were part of an alternative tradition in
American poetry, and tended to identify with the heritage of poets such as
Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, Charles Olson or Louis Zukofsky, rather
than T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath.
In England a similar movement (though with its own distinctive char-
acteristics) has come to be known as ‘linguistically innovative poetries’.
Poets who have been active in this field include Ken Edwards, Allen Fisher,
Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, Frances Presley, Maggie O’Sullivan, Denise
Riley, Robert Sheppard, Geraldine Monk, Caroline Bergvall, Bill Griffiths
and cris cheek. They see their work as substantially differentiated from
that of well-known British poets such as Craig Raine, Philip Larkin, Carole
Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage or Andrew Motion. In Australia the poetry of
John Forbes, joanne burns, Anna Couani, John Tranter, Pam Brown and
Gig Ryan (amongst others) contained linguistically or formally experi-
mental elements. But there is also a new wave of poets, such as John
Kinsella, Peter Minter, Amanda Stewart, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell,
Emma Lew, Geraldine McKenzie and myself, who have taken various kinds
of experimentation on board.
These language, and linguistically innovative, poets argued that lan-
guage had been fetishised, commodified and consequently devalued, and
that in order to change the world we have to radically change the way we
use words. In other words, when we use language we are normally hardly
aware of the words themselves and the forms they take. We think mainly
about the content of what we are saying or writing, and the words simply
become containers for meaning. These poets believed it was necessary to
defamiliarise language, so that we meet language as if for the first time. In
order to do this, they often subverted the conventions of grammar, syntax,
spelling, punctuation and vocabulary. Their handling of language was
acrobatic, often including linguistic handstands, cartwheels or splits.
However, any particular mode of defamiliarisation can in time become
familiar, and itself a convention. The subversion of linguistic norms, which
the Language Poetry movement emphasised, has now become a familiar
and recognisable mode of writing, though an extremely varied, flexible
and evolving one.
168 The Writing Experiment