introduction to the "language poetry" movement

Ron Silliman

• audio: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker on aspects of "language poetry" and contemporary avant-garde writing
• Jerome McGann, "Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes" - an essay introducing the "language writing" movement
• Lyn Hejinian on the concept of the personal
• Alan Davies, from "Life" (published in hole #3)
• George Hartley, "Textual Politics and the Language Poets"
• Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (peruse several issues)
• Susan Howe, "My Emily Dickinson"
• Lee Ann Brown, "Multiplicity Sisters"
• William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" + 7, compiled by Lauryl Hicks
• Frost's "Mending Wall" + 7 by Sara Rabold
• ideas for poetry experiments compiled by Charles Bernstein from Bernadette Mayer & workshop's Experiments list, and various other sources
• Charles Bernstein, "In Particular" (performed at the Writers House, September 25, 2003)
• Charles Bernstein, "In a Restless World Like This Is"
• Charles Bernstein, "Thinking I Think I Think"
• Charles Bernstein, biography
• Charles Bernstein, "I Don't Take Voice Mail" (essay)
• Charles Bernstein, "Veil" - visual writing
• Charles Bernstein, "These Horses Do Not Move Up and Down"
• Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews on reference

  Mike Magee edits Combo, with support from the Kelly Writers House: Combo is a magazine featuring emerging experimental writers

• Ron Silliman, brief biography
• Ron Silliman bibliography
• Ron Silliman, "Demo" (1995)
• Ron Silliman on William Carlos Williams
• Robert Grenier, "But" (1986)
• Robert Grenier on Stein
• audio: on the dismissal of "voice" and the rejection of ego psychology in Language poetics" (the opening paragraph of Marjorie Perloff's essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject," read by Shawn Walker): RealAudio | mp3
• Lyn Hejinian, My Life
• Stanley Fish, "Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning," a critique of biography and biographical narrative (1999)
• Ron Silliman, "Albany"
• Ron Silliman, "Albany", audio file
• Marjorie Perloff on Silliman's "Albany"
• Ron Silliman, "Oz" (from the long poem The Alphabet) - audio file
• Tina Darragh, "ludicrous stick" from the Paris Review "Language Sampler"
• audio: Bob Perelman, on modernism as an ongoing project
• audio: Bob Perelman on why Williams' "unsuccessful" poems are relevant to contemporary poetics (mp3)
• Bob Perelman, "Chronic Meanings"
• Bob Perelman, commentary on "Chronic Meanings"
• Bob Perelman reads "Chronic Meanings" (January 29, 2004)
• Bob Perelman talks about "Chronic Meanings"
• Perelman, more on "Chronic Meanings"
• Bob Perelman, "Fake Dream B"
• Bob Perelman, "Clinton Pledges to Stand Fast" (April 1999) - a poem written for the Philadelphia Inquirer with the stipulation presented by the newspaper that the poem be exactly 15 lines, no more, no less, and that it somehow "respond" to a story that had run in the paper in the previous week
• Bob Perelman, "Must Works of Art Reflect Only Marketplace Values?" (1995)
• Bob Perelman, Is there a poetry renaissance now?
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis, five short sections from Renga - Draft 32 (1998)
• Joan Retallack,
• Joan Retallack - a reading from her poetry and a discussion of relations between innovative poetry and experimental teaching - recording of a program webcast Wednesday, February 28, 2001, at the Kelly Writers House
• recording of a webcast symposium on contemporary poetry, presented from the Writers House on December 7, 1999, featuring Ron Silliman, Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, Brian Kim Stefans, hosted & moderated by Al Filreis with assistance from Shawn Walker and Heather Starr ()
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Barrett Watten and Rachel Blau DuPlessis read from their works and discuss contemporary poetry, especially in relation to the period in which the "language poetry" and other "new poetries" formed in the 1970s. This program was a PhillyTalks session at the Kelly Writers House, November 15, 1999. Click here for a fuller description of the program and a link to the webcast recording.
• Bob Perelman on Bruce Andrews's politically radical language poetry
• Ed Dorn (per Kevin Davies) on the poltiics of avant-garde poetry
• Bob Perelman, brief bio
• Bernadette Mayer, "Synesthetes at the Writers House"
• Lee Ann Brown reviewed by Robert Hass
• Lee Ann Brown, "Valentines"
• Ron Silliman, In the American Tree anthology

chance, procedure, non-intentionality

John Cage in performance. Cage arranges his "mesostics," vertical lines of capital letters (spelling out various names or words) with horizontal lines of varying lengths extending in both directions from each letter and incorporating the letters into new words. The horizontal lines are drawn from various "source texts," such as Ginsberg's "Howl," broken down by chance procedures (computer - aided "I Ching") and then further refined by Cage.

• Marjorie Perloff, "cage: chance: change" (a chapter from her book Radical Artifice)
• John Cage, "A Man Inspired by Chance"
• John Cage, a selection of unaxiomatic axioms
• John Cage, brief excerpt from "Writing through Howl"
• tag clouds (2007)
• audio: John Cage on "Empty Words" and the demilitarization of language, in a radio interview, August 8, 1974
• audio: from Cage's "Themes & Variations" read by Al Filreis, Shawn Walker, and George Blaustein
• more Cageisms
• Jackson Mac Low, brief biography
• "Jackson Mac Low: Poetry as Art," by Charles Bernstein
• Mac Low interviewed by Gil Ott, 1979
• Jackson Mac Low, "Poetry and Pleasure" - a talk in which he describes his nonintentional and/or deterministic and/or chance procedures, including his "diastic reading-through text-selection method"
• Jackson Mac Low, selected stanzas from "Antic Quatrains"
• Jackson Mac Low, explanation of "Antic Quatrains" from the preface to Bloomsday (1984)
• audio: Jackson Mac Low, "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" (performed 1975)
• on Mac Low's scored piece for Peter Innisfree Moore
• an article about Peter Innisfree Moore (2004)
• on the newspaper obit
• "Performance Instructions preceded by Description and Compositional Method for A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" (1974-75)
• "A Vocabulary for Jackson Mac Low" (performed on December 9, 2004 by students & teachers of English 88)
• an English 88 class session on "Vocabulary" (December 2008) (mp3)
• Jessica Smith, "The Page Is Not a Neutral Surface" (with reference to "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore")
• audio: Jackson Mac Low, "Phoneme Dance In Memoriam John Cage" (1993)
• Charles Alexander reading "Near or Random Acts" (October 25, 2001) at the Kelly Writers House (an MP3 file)
• Charles Bernstein, (a 60-second lecture)
• Richard Schechner, Dionysus 1969 (1969)
• Jena Osman, "Dropping Leaflets"
• Dick Higgins, "New Song in an Old Style" (1967)
• Ken Friedman, "Renter's Orchestra" (1991)
• Ken Friedman, "Card Trace" (1958)
• Andrew Zitcer (and others), "Aural Text Framework" (2001)
• Andrew Zitcer's "stein-machine"
• Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West", sound recording arranged by Jim Andrews of vispo.com (with this shockwave piece, you can listen to the poem cut-up or normally)
• Ray Kurzweil's cybernetic poet
• Brian Kim Stefans, on using computer programs to create poems
• An English 88 student tries her hand at an experiment on Charles Bernstein's list
• Mike Magee, "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional (1999) [Note: click on "Handwritten Press," then choose "primary texts" at far right, then choose "Morning Constitutional" in Adobe Acrobat format. A brief excerpt from "Pledge" is here.
• Nick Montfort, "Top Row Retort" (2000)
• Tony Green's "accumulations": (1) his accumulations; (2) his piece, "Sliding Accumulation" (photo from collection of Al Filreis)
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Jackson Mac Low wins prize
• audio recording of Jackson Mac Low reading at SUNY Buffalo, 1997
• a Cage filmography
• Ken Friedman, "Thirty Events and Objects" (1959-1994) - a sampling
• Jackson Mac Low, fluxus works
• Dick Higgins, "a portrait of john cage" (1994) (Dick Higgins was one of the founders and major participants in the Fluxus movement.)
• Dick Higgins, "metadramas"
• much more on Marjorie Perloff
• Jackson Mac Low and Andrew Levy respond to each other during a November 1997 PhillyTalks session at the Writers House

some recent work ("post-Language"?)

Jena Osman - now assisant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. The poem we hear, "A Real Life Drama," was (says Osman) "constructed--meaning that I didn't write a single word of it, but I culled the language from an internet newsgroup which consists of transcripts of recent Supreme Court cases."

• Jena Osman, "A Real Life Drama"
• Jena Osman, commentary on her interest in court transcripts including an excerpt from Court Reports
• Jena Osman, further comment on her interest in court transcripts
• Jena Osman, on Dickinson's "Step lightly on / This narrow spot" from An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2994) [PDF file]
• Erica Baum: her photographic art captures alphabetically related terms and puts them into new context.
• a conversation with Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith, conducted by the English 88'ers of fall 2004, at the Kelly Writers House, December 9, 2004
• article about Goldsmith in Artforum (March 2008)
• Kenny Goldsmith, English version of introduction in Icelandic
• mp3 audio recording of the above
• Dennis Lee, author of Un, explains how and I why he wrote that book-length poem (here's another version)
  supplemental/optional readings:
• word count