Alexei Parshchikov 2008 (photo by Eugene Ostashevsky)

Back in the early 1980s, before I had heard such names as Zhdanov, Kutik, Iskrenko or Kondakova, I twice used the term “realism” to describe what has come to be known as language poetry, first in Ironwood in 1983, as the title to a selection of poems by my peers. My preface to In the American Tree, published in 1986, is entitled “Language, Realism, Poetry.” In both instances, I was trying to underscore the fact that there was nothing un- or anti- realistic about this new American writing, but rather that it was questioning, here directly, there obliquely, much that we had been taught to think reactively about realism, and indeed about the real.

When I learned through Lyn Hejinian that there was a group of poets in the then-Soviet Union who were known as “metarealists,” I was immediately intrigued. The realism I got, and also the meta-. Metarealism is one of those terms – social formalism is another – that I have always thought could have just as easily, and just as accurately, been deployed to characterize language poetry.