What Is "Language Poetry"?

Lee Bartlett

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry,

once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England
because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to
The CriterionBook of Modern American VerseAuden remarked that while
in England poets are considered members of a "clerkly caste," in America
they are an "aristocracy of one." Certainly it does seem to be the individual
poet-Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O'Hara, Ginsberg-who has
altered the landscape of American poetry and prosody, not the group.
And most American literary "movements," as Robert Creeley has pointed
out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together,
and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over
an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements
remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many
introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue
to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black
Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established
poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community,
which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial
categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a
useful fiction (Emerson knew this, as did Pound and Rexroth) serving
as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing.
The most recent "group" of American poets-the first since the
anthology wars of the early sixties (when many powerful aesthetics were
scrambling for position) really to be of more than passing interest and
Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986)
? 1986 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/86/1204-0003$01.00. All rights reserved.

741

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742 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention

in American poetry and poetics-is the so-called "Language" school.
Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number
well into three figures now and there have been important journals and
anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers.
Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of
the project (which is too multifaceted and diffuse to be called a project
at all), there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or
reviewers.1 What I'd like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects
of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions
which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of
the "workshop poem."
At the conclusion of his useful study, Poet'sProse: The Crisisin American
Verse, Stephen Fredman notes that the poets who seem to gather under
the Language umbrella generally privilege the critical intelligence over
the "orphic, bardic impulse in American poetry." In the writing of poets
like Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and
Barrett Watten, he argues, "critical thinking does not merely buttress the
mythopoeic imagination"; rather, these poets are "originally critical, prac-
ticing a vigilant self-awareness that calls forth language and subjects it
to an examination of its mediatory function. For these poets the critical
activity of deconstruction, of investigating a text as an endless play of
subtexts, is a means of poetic creation."2 Probably the first use of the
term "Language Poetry" as applied to the writers Fredman discusses
appeared in Silliman's selection of poems by nine poets (including Bruce
Andrews, Robert Grenier, Clark Coolidge, and Silliman himself) in Al-
cheringa in 1975. There Silliman introduces the work with the note that
these are poets "whose work might be said to 'cluster'about such magazines
as This,Big Deal, Tottel's.... Called variously 'language centered,' 'minimal,'
'nonreferential formalism,' 'diminished referentiality,' 'structuralist.' Not
a group but a tendencyin the work of many."3 Two years later, the term
reappeared in a special feature in the Canadian journal OpenLetterguest
edited by Steve McCaffery, though once again it seemed to argue not
for a movement but rather a disposition.
The designation, however, was formalized to a certain degree with
the appearance of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce
Andrews and Charles Bernstein. The first number appeared in February
1979, and over the following four years the editors published a total of

Lee Bartlett, an associate professor of English, has directed the Uni-

versity of New Mexico's creative writing program for five years. Coeditor
of the critical journal AmericanPoetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversationsin
the Workshopwith ContemporaryPoets will be published this fall. Currently
he is writing a biography of William Everson.

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 Critical Inquiry Summer1986 743

twelve issues, two supplements, and a book-length final issue produced

in conjunction with Open Letter. The lead article of the first issue was by
the poet Larry Eigner, and "Approaching things / Some calculus / How
figure it / Of Everyday Life Experience" set the tone for many of the
pieces which would follow:

No really perfect optimum mix, anyway among some thousands

or many of distinctive or distinguishable things (while according
to your capacity some minutes, days or hours 2, 4 or 6 people,
say, are company rather than crowds), and for instance you can
try too hard or too little.4

The journal devoted itself to poetics-whether essays, notes, or reviews-

and the "house style" was, to say the least, usually as elliptic as Eigner's.
While L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published any number of writers, certain
names appeared frequently: Bernstein, Andrews, Watten, Hejinian, Sil-
liman; topics ranged from signification, sound, and schizophrenia to
analyses of work by Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Louis
Zukofsky. As the editors later explained, they hoped to emphasize "a
spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and
ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary,
grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter ... and to
develop more fully the latticework of those involved in aesthetically related
activity."Further, Bernstein and Andrews attempted to generate "discussion
on the relation of writing to politics" to the end of producing an "analysis
of the capitalist social order as a whole and of the place that alternative
forms of writing and reading might occupy in its transformation."5
The impulse behind much of this material, it seems to me, is as much
a reaction against a prevailing aesthetic, an attempt to provide a critique
of the American "workshop poem," as anything else. Bob Perelman ad-
dresses this question in his lecture "The First Person," where he quotes
William Stafford's often anthologized poem, "Travelling Through the
Dark": "Travelling through the dark I found a deer / dead on the edge
of the Wilson Road. / ... I thought hard for us all-my only swerving- /
then pushed her over the edge into the river." Perelman argues that
"this is a 'voice' poem. William Stafford has 'found his voice'"(an activity
we tend to encourage in creative writing programs across the country,
so much so that a very popular anthology text is even entitled The Voice
That Is Great Within Us). "It's all realistic, but all it leads up to is the
pathetic fallacy of 'I could hear the wilderness listen.' A typical neo-
academic dirge for nature. The poet is firmly in the driver's seat, 'I could
hear the wilderness,' and firmly in control of all the meaning, 'I thought
hard for us all'... Here, the I is in a privileged position unaffected by
the words."6
For the Language poets, such a stance as Stafford's is fraught with
difficulty, as Marjorie Perloff astutely notices in her lengthy review, "The

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744 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties." There

she quotes Bernstein's comment that "It's a mistake, I think, to posit the
self as the primary organizing feature of writing. As many others have
pointed out, a poem exists in a matrix of social and historical relations
that are more significant to the formation of an individual text than any
personal qualities of the life or voice of an author" ("WS,"p. 16). Perloff
employs Perelman's strategy, quoting from Galway Kinnell's "Memory
of Wilmington": "Thirty-some years ago, hitchhiking / north on Route
1, I stopped for the night... " ("WS,"p. 16). And interestingly, we might
dip at random into the same issue of AmericanPoetryReview which carries
her review (remembering that APR is one of the places in which "workshop"
poets-whether instructors or students-strive to appear) for a stance
similar to Kinnell's or Stafford's:

The child coughs all night;

I give her orange syrup
that sticks to her hair.
-Brenda Hillman
I have watched
Everywhere
The unregarded
Holding out
Their empty tins of justice.
-Howard Moss
I heard
that piece four times. On the last drive back
from Palo Alto each rich bungalow
we passed seemed to throb with the beat, and I
couldn't stop thinking of my wife's mouth, singing.
-Don Bogan

Again I courted the praiseworthy moon,

Passion too long neglected, calling her
Highness.
-Barry Spacks
I learned to type ninety words a minute.
I quit the band because I wasn't stupid.
At concerts no one sat with me.
-Laurie Henry7

Obviously, some of these lines appear in poems which are more

interesting than others, but they all share with Stafford's and Kinnell's
(and countless others which appear in magazines ranging from The New
Yorkerand TheNation to Ploughsharesand TheIowaReview)a Wordsworthian
sense of the poem's task-to recall through a fixed and definable identity

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 Critical Inquiry Summer1986 745

a moment in time and space. In Perloff's words, here the "experience is

prior to the language that communicates it: the story of [Kinnell's] hobo
exists in a mental realm waiting to be activated by the words of a poet
who can somehow match signifier to signified" ("WS," p. 16). A poem
exists, that is, primarily to convey from writer to reader an experience.
The Language poets find this a reductive approach, and one with political
consequences.
In his "A Thing Unto Myself: The unRomantic Self and Gender in
the Third Person," Aaron Shurin further points out that among poets
such an interest in an expanded image of the self is not recent. There
he briefly traces the "fracturingof the complacency of first person discourse"
in both Whitman and Dickinson, finding in Rimbaud especially a model
for the projection of the "self into the realm of what Emile Benveniste
calls the non or third person, whose indication is not presence but absence."8
Presence and absencehave become buzzwords, but here Shurin does have
an important point. It is no accident that in piece after piece by any
number of these writers on virtually any topic the discussion soon seems
to turn to the nature of narrative, with reference not so much to literary
tradition as linguistic inquiry. For unlike "workshop" poets, as Michael
Palmer told me in a recent interview,

I'm not interested in myself-that's just this guy who sits here
drinking coffee and making a fool of himself. If only a self got
posited in a poem we may as well be having lunch somewhere and
not bothering with poems. A self that is transformed through
language, however, interests me, though that already includes the
reader as we are all part of a shared language. It seems to me to
become reductive, however, exactly at that point where you focus
on the self and thus end up with a poetry of personality, and that
exhausts itself as soon as the personality exhausts itself.9

A second aspect of the Language poets' examination of the work-

shop poem develops directly out of this issue of the subjective. Again,
Silliman: "Wedo not contain multitudes so much as we are the consequence
of a multitude of conflicting and overdetermined social forces, brought
to us, and acted out within us, as language."'1 Workshop poets are not
only naive in their sense of "voice,"the implication is, but in their failure
to understand the political overtones of such a stance as well. Almost a
third of the anthology The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, for example, is
devoted to a section called "Writing and Politics." The critique is leftist
(with recurrent reference to Marx, Althusser, and Jameson) with pieces
ranging from "Writing Social Work and Political Practice" (Andrews) and
"The Dollar Value of Poetry" (Bernstein) to "Writing and Capitalism"
(Watten) and "CapitalisticUseless Phrases after Endless" (Hannah Weiner).
The ongoing political analysis is multifaceted, of course, though of these

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746 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

writers Silliman appears to be the most articulate in this area; his two
pieces on the nature of the poem as "commodity" ("Disappearance of
the Word, Appearance of the World" and "The Political Economy of
Poetry")remind us of an important, if not new, element. "Does capitalism,"
Silliman asks, "have a specific 'reality'which is passed through the language
and thereby imposed on its speakers?"11
The first essay, collected in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, opens
with epigraphs drawn from Sapir and Marx, recalling that we are all in
a real sense products of the language which inhabits us and, further,
that the material world conditions our consciousness. Attempting what
he calls Louis Zukofsky's "projection of a possible 'scientific' definition
of poetry," Silliman outlines three elements of the question:

(1) the stage of historical development determines the natural laws

(or, if you prefer the terminology, the underlying structures) of
poetry; (2) the stage of historical development determines the
natural laws of language; (3) the primary impact on language, and
language arts, of the rise of capitalism has been in the area of
reference and is directly related to the phenomena known as the
commodity fetish. ["DW,"p. 122]

This is, as Perloff notes, the classic Marxist position. There are two types
of human relationships, Silliman continues, the group and the series.
Tribal societies retain "the expressive integrity of the gestural nature of
language," and this accounts for our general inability to deal with such
language as anything other than "nonsense" ("DW,"p. 125). Capitalist
"serialization," however, "places the individual as a passive cipher into a
series of more or less identical units," as, finally, "the function of the
commoditized tongue of capitalism" becomes "the serialization of the
language-user, especially the reader" ("DW,"p. 127).

What happens when a language moves toward and passes into

a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation
of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases
in its descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the
invention of "realism," the optical illusion of reality in capitalist
thought. ["DW,"p. 125]

And, he concludes, these developments under capitalism "deform" ref-

erence into referentiality.
The question is continued in "The Political Economy of Poetry," a
less theoretical, later essay in which Silliman deals specifically with his
third point, the relation of poetry to the "commodity fetish," in terms of
contemporary American literary culture. In Capital, Marx speaks of the
"fetishism of the commodity," which William Dowling in his recentJamesbon,
Althusser,Marx explains as follows. Prior to the existence of a "market,"

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 Critical Inquiry Summer1986 747

there is of course no notion of "market value," only "use value"-"the

value that an object or product has when I have transformed it from its
raw materials through my own labor." Once a market economy is in
place, however, once we become members "of a society where even a
rudimentary division of social labor is carried out," the whole foundation
of our thought changes. Once we begin to exchange commodities on a
basis that is other than use value, we are participating in "an illusion
called market value; it really is the market, as an impersonal system
assigning commodities their worth within a system of exchange, that has
begun to determine value now."This new value, Dowling argues, "divorces
the worth of objects from the labor that went into their creation and the
use to which they may rationally be put, and therefore estranges humanity
from itself." It is Althusser's contribution to Marxist theory, he concludes,
to sense that ideology is the key; that is, "economic systems in general
and capitalism in particular work to conceal their essential operations
while presenting to those who inhabit them an illusory appearance of
things."'2
In this context, Silliman quotes Laura (Riding) Jackson's complaint
in her essay of 1926, "T. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude
Stein," concerning "the forced professionalization of poetry," a complaint
which has at its base a revulsion at a sense of poetry as commodity rather
than simply product (market value rather than use value). Examining
briefly our current situation, Silliman refers to Daniel Halpern's American
Poetry Anthology (the apotheosis of the "workshop poem," a collection
whose title obviously seeks to imply a unanimity of opinion as to the
legitimate reach of American verse) as a prime example of poetry as
capitalist commodity. (As an aside, he makes in the course of his argument
the interesting point that while large trade publishers produce less than
five percent of all poetry titles, over fifty percent of the poets included
in the anthology are derived from this material.)13 Again, however, we
might simply glance at our issue of AmericanPoetry Review to make the
same point: the newsprint pages are filled not only with poems which
are so comfortable in their assumptions that they can be read (like a
Mickey Spillane novel) with slack attention while waiting for a bus, but
also with various photographs of attractive poets alongside ads for books,
conferences, journals, and writing programs.14 The prevalence of the
photographs is especially interesting in light of the participation of the
workshop poem in the "optical illusion" of the first person; it is as if the
editors go so far as to distrust even the I of the poem and so must reinforce
the false realism by having "real" people staring back at the reader.
As Silliman concludes in "Disappearance,"

By recognizing itself as the philosophyof practice in language, poetry

can work to search out the preconditions of post-referential language
within the existing social fact. This requires (1) recognition of the

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748 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

historic nature and struggle of referentiality, (2) placing the issue

of language, the repressed element, at the center of the program,
and (3) placing the program into the context of conscious class
struggle. ["DW,"p. 131]

The workshop poem, with its insistence on translatable experience, fails

to question the historical, social, and economic context, merely accepting
as given the prevailing "market value." It refuses to recognize, Bernstein
argues in "The Dollar Value of Poetry," that "we speak of poetry as being
untranslatable and unparaphrasable, for what is untranslatable is the
sum of all the specific conditions of the experience (place, time, order,
light, mood, position, to infinity) made available by reading." And it is
for this reason that many of the Language poets insist on a poetry which
resists any "normative standardization in the ordering of words in the
unit or the sequencing of these units"; resists, that is, the APR poem.'5
This is not to argue. however, as Silliman noted as early as his
Alcheringa collection, that writing can be entirely "nonreferential," even
if that is its aim. In a brief piece called "'Language-Centered,'" Jackson
Mac Low, an experimental poet (though not really of the Language
group in that his works are more often chance-generated), takes to task
a number of unspecified "practitioners and sympathetic critics" whom
he says posit nonreferentiality. "All signs point to what they signify," he
explains. "All signs have significance."'6 But in fact in his note Silliman
says flatly, "Words are not, finally, non-referential. For they originate in
interactions with the world" ("DP," p. 104). Palmer agrees, arguing, "I'm
not interested in making poetry if I cannot explore the areas of signification
that are less available in other areas of discourse. I want language to
signify and be functional, and in that respect I have to investigate all
aspects of the non-logical and the discontinuous" ("CMP,"p. 79). Silliman
takes Robert Creeley's well-known statement, "poems are not referential,
or at least importantly so" to be close to the mark in that the Language
poets seek simply to diminish the importance of reference:

By the creation of non-referring structures (Coolidge, Di Palma,

Andrews), disrupting of context (Grenier, DeJasu), forcing the
meanings in upon themselves until they cancel out or melt (Watten,
the poem Tri, and, elsewhere, in the work of Michael Palmer). By
effacing one or more elements of referential language (a tactic
commonly employed by the Russian Futurists), the balance within
the word shifts, redistributes. ["DP," p. 118]

Bernstein notes, "Not 'death' of the referent-rather a recharged use of

the multivalent referential vectors that any word has.""17The issue is not,
then, reference per se, but a reaction to a prevailing poetics which seems
to be unaware of the social implications which hover just above its ac-
ceptance as a first given of an unquestioning referentiality.

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 Critical Inquiry Summer1986 749

These critical issues thus far have provided the focus of attention
for the Language poet theorists. There are, of course, others. For example,
among these poets there is a general insistence on the text as text, opposed
to an earlier generation's sense of the text as score for oral performance.'8
Yet, as Fredman notes, the nature of the text is problematic, as there is
little interest in establishing a hierarchy of modes or even in distinguishing
between prose and poetry. As Bernstein remarks in his preface to a Paris
Review gathering of this poetry, "There is a willingness to use, within
the space of a text, a multiplicity of such different modes, which counts
more on a recognition of the plastic qualities of traditional genres and
styles than on their banishment."'9 Works like Gertrude Stein's Tender
Buttons and William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell thus provide models
for such "poet's prose" as John Ashbery's ThreePoems, Silliman's Tjanting
and Ketjak, Hejinian's My Life, and Rodefer's Four Lectures:

A determinist ethic holds sway as the great masses of the people

wait to be interviewed. References don't check out. Heads involve
hobbles. The employable count up on the hands of one finger.
The elegant outlet, all plugged up nice-their own reward for
mascara. A coat, to coast, glittering entombment to the last. These
white chests perspire with fading industry.20

Further, this lack of concern over definition of mode opens for the
Language poets the whole area of "intertextuality." In a brief "Statement
on Reading in Writing," Jed Rasula declares "READING IS TRADI-
TIONALLY THE MOST NEGLECTED OF ALL ARTS."Arguing against
Harold Bloom's notion of "anxiety," Rasula suggests poets need to move
(as Robert Duncan does) "towards a more affirmative stance as readers
... Originality, while not a useless word by any means, is profoundly
artificial. Insofar as the 'original' writer becomes the aristocratic dispenser
of trinkets, originality has got to go," for "to be a reader is to be the
willing receptor of transformative agencies destined to either alter or
confirm one's position in a social circuitry."2' Michael Palmer admits,

I like the possibility of inter-textuality. I am a reader, perhaps too

much of one, and I live to some degree in the book. I like the
possibility of bringing in other people's words to reflect the fact
that for me experience flows at all levels, whether it's hearing a
car out the window or reading something that is affecting me
profoundly. Reading becomes co-extensive with the other experi-
ences in my life, and it enters the poem like any other object or
experience. It becomes a kind of layering of the text. Maybe it is
also a directive to people to go out there and look at that in the
way that a lot of the stuff Pound threw into the Cantos was to get
people to read a wonderful Chinese or Provengal poet. So the
poem becomes then a shared place among a variety of texts, without,
I hope, ever becoming simply a collage. ["CMP," pp. 84-85]

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750 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

The poet, in other words, must enter into a "multi-discourse" (Bernstein)

which interweaves "politics, autobiography, fiction, philosophy, common
sense, song, etc.," and engages in a Poundian "layering"wherein experience
of reading carries equal weight with experience in the physical world.
Finally, in a longer essay such issues as "reader-response,"the viability
of "sound poetry" and minimalism, and "decentralizationof the audience,"
among others, might be pursued. Also, the line of literary influence-
the impact of the Russian Formalists (critics on whom Barrett Watten
has written numerous interesting pieces), as well as of Stein, Zukofsky,
Williams, O'Hara, Creeley, and Ashbery-needs to be examined, as does
the relationship of the Language poets to the eighteenth-century rhetorical
tradition. Are Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer, two poets of the
generation immediately preceding who are taken by the Language poets
as of their number, sincere in their current efforts to distance themselves
from this activity? And further, as Marjorie Perloff asks, are the Language
poets in fact naive in their failure to question the practical aspects of
their political rhetoric? (She wonders, for example, if Silliman is "implying
that in contemporary China, 'the optical illusion of realism' has given
way to a valorization of 'gestural poetic forms"' ["WS," p. 21].) And
perhaps most important of all, are these writers, theory aside, producing
poetry that matters?
Obviously, this last question is the most difficult, and as usual we
would be wise to let time sort it out. I personally find much of this work
of continuing interest, and certainly suspect that Michael Palmer at least
(whom I do regard as a member of this group) is already emerging as
an American poet of the first rank. But even if the group is theoretically
top-heavy,22 and even if in time the poetry fails to hold a place in our
imagination, as an ongoing corrective to the prevailing workshop aesthetic
it serves as an important irritant in its unwillingness to let us deny the
myriad mysteries embedded in the very fabric of the poem.

1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman,
Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge, 1983) and Marjorie Perloff's review
"The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," AmericanPoetryReview
13 (May/June 1984): 15-22. All further references to Perloff's article, abbreviated "WS,"
will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and
anthologies, see my chapter "American Poetry, 1940s to the Present" in AmericanLiterary
Scholarship:An Annual/1983, ed. Warren French (Durham, N.C., 1985), pp. 349-74.
2. Fredman, Poet's Prose, pp. 134-35.
3. Ron Silliman, intro. to "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets," ed. Silliman, Alcheringa n.s.
1, no. 2 (1975): 104; all further references to this article, abbreviated "DP," will be included
in the text.
4. Larry Eigner, "Approaching things / Some calculus / How figure it / Of Everyday
Life Experience," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1 (Feb. 1978): 1.

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 CriticalInquiry Summer1986 751

5. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, "Repossessing the Word," in The

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews and Bernstein (Carbondale, Ill., 1983), pp. ix-
X.
6. Bob Perelman, "The First Person," Hills 6/7 (Spring 1980): 156.
7. Brenda Hillman, "A Life of Action," American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 1984):
3; Howard Moss, "The New York Notebooks," AmericanPoetryReview 13 (May/June 1984):
13; Don Bogan, "Pedlar," American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 1984): 14; Barry Spacks,
"Courting the Moon," American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 1984): 38; Laurie Henry,
"Downtown Newberry Destroyed by Tornado," AmericanPoetryReview 13 (May/June 1984):
48.
8. Aaron Shurin, "A Thing Unto Myself: The unRomantic Self and Gender in the
Third Person," in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, Io series no. 30 (Richmond,
Calif., 1983), p. 185.
9. Lee Bartlett, "A Conversation with Michael Palmer," AmericanPoetry 3 (Fall 1985):
77; all further references to this article, abbreviated "CMP," will be included in the text.
10. Silliman, "Realism," Ironwood 20 (1982): 65.
11. Silliman, "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, p. 123; all further references to this article, abbreviated "DW,"
will be included in the text.
12. William C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser,Marx: An Introductionto "ThePolitical Un-
conscious"(Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 81-82. Most recently, however, this idea of use value
is being modified. In a 1984 interview, Steve McCaffery explained,

In hindsight, I can admit to certain naiveties in that approach. This writing was all
produced before any of us had discovered Baudrillard's seminal work The Mirror of
Productionwhich challenged with an incontrovertible conviction the subliminal valorization
of production and use value as a privileged positional opposition to consumption and
exchange. In the light of the Baudrillardian "proof" that use value is but a concealed
species of exchange value, I would say now that the gestural "offer" to a reader of an
invitation to "semantically produce" hints at an ideological contamination. [Andrew
Payne and McCaffery, "'Nothing is forgotten but the talk of how to talk,'" Line 4
(1984): 75-76]
13. See Silliman, "The Political Economy of Poetry," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 4 (Winter
1982): 52-65.
14. Eliot Weinberger makes a number of similar points, especially about the "workshop
poem," in his scathing review of Carolyn Forche's The CountryBetween Us. On the subject
of photographs of poets in particular,

there is the book's cover: a photograph of what might be Hugh Hefner's last girlfriend.
It is, of course, the author herself, in a misty Extreme Close Up, with head tilted up,
eyes looking dreamily toward the light, full lips slightly parted. Why would Forch6, a
leftist and a feminist, allow herself (possibly choose) to be marketed in this manner?
[Weinberger, review of The CountryBetween Us, by Carolyn Forch6, Sulfur 6 (1983):
160]
15. Bernstein, "The Dollar Value of Poetry," in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, p.
139. See also Perloffs review of Amy Clampitt's Imagoin which Perloff argues that "everything
here will yield to 'translation' provided one uses one's dictionary and encyclopedia. Given
this emphasis on translatability, I take the Amy Clampitt cult as a sign of our current
nostalgia for the good gone days when POETRY WAS ABOUT SOMETHING" (Perloff,
"The Case of Amy Clampitt: A Reading of Imago," Sulfur 10 [1984]: 176).
16. Jackson Mac Low, "'Language-Centered,'" L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 4 (Winter 1982):
23, 24.
17. See Bernstein, "Thought's Measure," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 4 (Winter 1982): 7-
22.

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752 Lee Bartlett What Is "LanguagePoetry"?

18. I am thinking here of poets like Charles Olson or, just later, Gary Snyder, Philip
Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. This doesn't imply, of course, that Language poets don't
give readings or perform. See, for example, Steve Benson, "Ketjakin San Francisco," in
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, pp. 272-73.
19. Bernstein, intro. to "Language Sampler," Paris Review 86 (Fall 1982): 76.
20. Bernstein, "Ward of the Worlds," in ControllingInterests(New York, 1980), p. 61.
21. Jed Rasula, "Statement on Reading in Writing," in TheL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book,
pp. 52-53.
22. In fact, Silliman argues that this charge, often made, is unfair: "With more than
50 books between them, Segue, Asylum's, L, Roof, The Figures and This Press have yet
to publish one volume of criticism. While theory is not without importance... its dominance
here is a fiction" (Silliman, "Realism," p. 63).

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