Introductory Note

One of the most frequently mentioned and least understood developments in American poetry in recent years has been the emergence of an ideologically, psychologically and linguistically self-conscious movement, centered largely on the East and West coasts, which some observers have dubbed Language Poetry. Like most pioneers in new literary directions, the Language Poets, for the most part, deny that they belong to a formally constituted group and eschew the name imposed on them by casual critics. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, a shared tendency—or at the least, a common preoccupation with “the resonating of the wordness of language,” as Charles Bernstein puts it—has been recognized by the outside world, and to some extent by many of these poets themselves.

In order to learn more about the outlook and practices of these writers, we asked Bernstein, who is co-editor of the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, to prepare a relevant anthology as a special Paris Review feature. His “Language Sampler,” prefaced by a brief essay discussing the premises and aims of the authors he has selected, follows. 

Jonathan Galassi

Introduction

What we have here is an insistence to communicate. Not, perhaps, where communication is schematized as a two-way wire with the message shuttling back and forth in blissful ignorance of the (its) transom (read:ideology). There are no terminal points (me→you) in a sounding of language from the inside, in which the dwelling is already/always given. 

Hints, then of a writing that takes as its medium, or domain of intention, ever articulable aspect of language. It‘&s as if a new scanning of consciousness were possible by introduction of the music of its constituting. And by this means to make audible the thinking field: to get access to the lens (the mixed metaphor is again ideology) through which the world’s meanings are formed into audibilities. 

The work collected here can be characterized in the negative as writing that does not privilege any single mode, including the expository logic and speech-derived syntax that dominate contemporary writing practice. Distinctions between essays and lyrics, prose and poetry are often not observed. For instance, some of this hybrid work (I like to think of it as amphibious) engages critical forms of discourse in a prosodic scrupulousness of intention that relies for its coherence more on internal necessities of the poetic process of meaning than on external constraints of rationalistic argument.