My first thought when reading K. Silem Mohammad’s “A Language Poetry Dossier” was that Kasey had, a la some Mark Peters’ projects, run the phrase “language poetry” through Googlism & used that as the basis for constructing the later sections of his piece. But when I attempted to replicate the experiment, or what I thought was the experiment, the results of which follow this preface, it instantly became clear to me that Kasey’s piece is far deeper, more methodical, funnier & more sinister than that program can achieve. Yet doesn’t that first sentence in this list show up verbatim in Kasey’s text? (It is taken in its entirety from Eleana Kim’s “Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Making of a Movement” in Gary Sullivan’s ezine, Read Me) Doesn’t the second? Doesn’t the third? That fourth item is of greater interest to me if I think of “q” as “Q,” the recurring character on Star Trek modeled after Milton’s Satan.

 

Ultimately, my itchiness over all this really has to do with my own discomfort at statements of agency ascribed to any abstraction or group noun. I cringe when W tells us what terrorists or “evil doers” or even “old Europe” are thinking & I cringe at any other assertion that “Group noun is X,” regardless of what Group noun or X might be. In the truest sense, every single sentence in Kasey’s text is wrong. Simply & completely wrong. Yet a number of them are, in the same moment, in some sense, often qualified or partial, also true – that is what is so creepy.

 

Then I realized that what Kasey had done wasn’t Googlism, but Google itself, searching the phrase “Language poetry is.” That yields some 524 hits, notably better than Googlism’s 51, and closer to the number of sentences that actually occur in Kasey’s work. And isn’t Google what Mark Peters did also, now that I think of it?

 

Then I thought to myself – why is Kasey focusing on a phrase that is over a quarter of a century old? What is this obsession with those of us “of a certain age?” So I try it with “New Brutalism is” & it’s true, I get only 32 hits, two of which also come from Kasey’s site, but none better than another ascribed to, of all people, Rob Lowe: New Brutalism is like chewing aluminum foil.

 

Which brings me back to my old feeling that anti-group behavior has never served any younger poet well. It’s not simply that this retro-rugged individualism is a part of the (literal) anti-commun(ism) that accompanied the rejection of the left after the 1970s (tho that’s a side of it also). You just can’t discuss what you can’t name, regardless of how much you may brutalize a concept like langpo in the process. And if you can’t talk about it, does it even exist?

 

Googlism: language poetry

 

language poetry is constructed as a niche market

language poetry is seen as political act in the deepest sense

language poetry is futile without publicity

language poetry is q

language poetry is about going beyond the boundaries “traditional / conventional" language usage places on notions of meaning

language poetry is a movement of convincing authority in contemporary poetics

language poetry is concerned

language poetry is its meticulous

language poetry is one in which there is a number of established poets operating in diverse ways

language poetry is held out to be one of the poetic modes of the present moment

language poetry is indicated in the only epigraph in the book

language poetry is also often seen as elitist because it never dealt adequately with issues of race

language poetry is all about the sound of the words together

language poetry is a cryptic and highly theoretical literary form grounded in philosophical discourse

language poetry is to meet some actual examples of it

language poetry is relatively recent

language poetry is academy

language poetry is not "literature

language poetry is vibrant

language poetry is highly structured

language poetry is said to be at the intersection of literature and graphic design

language poetry is in its heyday

language poetry is highly personal

language poetry is his attentiveness to the texts

language poetry is wordplay

language poetry is iambic pentameter

language poetry is

language poetry is something of an artistic dead end

language poetry is also provided

language poetry is a way of expression open to anyone who chooses to use it

language poetry is twenty years

language poetry is heir to

language poetry is essentially no different from any other formal poetry

language poetry is in for one helluva ride

language poetry is its sophistication

language poetry is written in iambic pentameters

language poetry is correlative to no object

language poetry is undoubtedly the most self

language poetry is shit or that it is the shit – and no doubt that will be educational and maybe even fun sometimes

language poetry is diverse

language poetry is always the one you can feel more intensively

language poetry is tae hae its first owersettin intae chinese

language poetry is autobiographical at its fundament

language poetry is no harder to "get" than cubism; the other weird thing is that it's lasted as long as it has without the support of

language poetry is in 839

language poetry is normally recited

language poetry is influenced by theory

language poetry is ordered by production rather than reproduction

language poetry is much more philosophically

language poetry is here evoked

language poetry is often