The Language Poets were partly reacting against certain aspects of the
free-verse tradition, and the way language in such poems did not usually
stress the materiality of language itself. The characteristics of such free-
verse poems—and the different poetic priorities of Language Poetry and
linguistically innovative poetry—are very well delineated by Marjorie
Perloff in her excellent essay ‘After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries’
in Poetry On & Off The Page (1998, pp. 141–67). According to Perloff, free-
verse poems tend to consist of a speaking voice emanating from a feeling,
perceptive subject, are image-based, and usually syntactically regular. The
sound and visual aspect of the poems are also unobtrusive, and the poem
flows and is non-linear. In contrast, what she calls the new ‘postlinear’ or
‘multimentional’ poem tends to be more discontinuous, less linear, less
image- and line-based (there is likely to be more emphasis on overall
visual design). It contains emotions, but these are not necessarily linked to
a single perceiving subject, and it emphasises semantic multiplicity rather
than a single meaning.
Central to the focus of these poets was the political aspect of poetry: they
were interested in the social mediation of language, and the way in which
language is a determining factor in power relationships. The Language
Poets, for example, saw their work as a political struggle against what
Charles Bernstein has called ‘official verse culture’ (1992b, p. 2). Bernstein
believed that ‘ Poetry is aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new forms,
or can be’ (1992b, p. 1). He has said that ‘What interests me is a poetry and
a poetics that do not edit out so much as edit in: that include multiple con-
flicting perspectives and types of languages and styles in the same poetic
work’ (1992b, p. 2). For Bernstein cultural diversity must manifest itself
in ways which do not simply succumb to ‘the model of representation
assumed by the dominant culture in the first place’ (1992b, p. 6).
Linguistic experimentation is also an important aspect of multicultural
and indigenous writing, where poets mediate between their non-English
cultural heritage and the English language. The Australian-Greek poet,
PiO, is a good example of a poet who subverts standard English and the
whole English-based poetry tradition. PiO might not identify as a ‘linguis-
tically innovative’ poet, but we can still see his work partly in that light.
Similarly, linguistic innovation has also provided an opportunity for
women to challenge language, and the way historically it has been made by
men so that it expresses male rather than female values. Obviously women
can write poems which challenge male constructions of the female,
and can write about any topic from a feminist perspective. But this does
not necessarily fundamentally affect how they use language, or the way
poetic discourse inscribes the female. French feminist and psychoanalytic
theorist, Julia Kristeva, in her essay ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 169