Notes : : Introduction
[1] Ron Silliman. "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets," Alcheringa, no. 2 (1975): 104-120. This essay is problematically (if most commonly) noted as the original collection of Language poetry. (While Bruce Andrew's eclectic collection in the 1973 issue of Toothpick, Lisbon, and the Orcas Islands, the writing in Barrett Watten and Robert Grenier's This, and a host of other little magazines are essential printed additions to the dialogic development of the writing already in play in Silliman's collection.)
[2] Critical battles over the definition and cohesion of "Language Poetry" were pervasive in the academic attention paid to these writers in the 80s. See, Michael Greer's article "Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, the Naming of "Language Poetry," boundary 2, no. 2/3 (1989): 335-355, for the most concise history of the unnecessarily convoluted definitional problems and polemics of "Language / language-oriented / L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry." For the remnants of the problematic naming, see the continuing popular confusion in the discussion page for the wikipedia entry "Language Poetry," http://enwikipedia/wiki/Talk:Language_poets, particularly subject heading: "The RETURN of the Hyphen; or is it an 'equal sign'?" As wikipedia warns, "This is a controversial topic, which may be under dispute." I use a capitalized "Language" throughout for adjectival flexibility and nominal clarity.
[3] As Silliman writes in his next major collection of Language writers, "Realism" for Ironwood 20 (1982) this moment plays an important role in both the naming of the Language "moment" and the formation of something less like a tendency and more like "group" of interconnected Language writers (See also Craig Dworkin's entry "Language Poetry" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, (2005): http://english.utah.edu
[4] Dworkin, 2.
[5] See Silliman's recent "profile" at ChicagoPostmodernPoetry: http://chicagopostmodernpoetry
[6] Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Future of Theory (Blackwell: Oxford, 2002), 36-46.) A sign of the temporal development cultural currency of structuralism at the time, this 1970 title, accurate to the conference of 1966 was soon inverted, the orange cover boldly exclaiming "The Structuralist Controversy" in big red letters, with a small white subtext of "The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man" for the version reprinted in
1973.
[7] Rabaté, 38. These Foucauldian essentials aside, it should be noted, Rabaté's manifesto demonstrates the many ways "the image of structuralism presented in 1966 to the American public was clearly much more complex, sophisticated, and diverse in its epistemologies and strategies than what has often been said." (Rabaté, 42)
[8] An interesting study would compare the role of Form in relation to another great little magazine from Great Britain called Screen, which, begun in 1969—on the heels of Form's closing—would assume Form's role as a vanguard forum for English translation/importation of the structuralist dialogue. Taking Form's interest in an expanded cinema back to the screen, as it were, the pedagogical and methodological drive of the magazines similar, their aesthetics and politics, contrary.
[9] Poetic License, p. 28.
[10] "Close listening" is Charles Bernstein's term for a similar practice. See the his essay "Close Listening and the Performed Word," Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), .
[11] Perloff. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 1-19.
[12] See Perloff's discussion of Fredric Jameson's "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial Sublime": Perloff (1990), 21.
[13] Marjorie Perloff. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 15.
[14] Perloff, (2004) 19. Additionally, this alignment with Perloff's differential reading would stand incomplete without invoking two D's: Duchamp and Deleuze, as she does. From her "Introduction: Differential Reading," citing Gilles Deleuze: Modern life is such that, confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications. (Perloff, xxi)
[15] Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation," The Structuralist Controversy(1973), 273.
