Hejinian Lyn - A guide to Poetics Journal : writing in the expanded field, 1982/1998 with the copublication of Poetics Journal digital archive

a guide to Poetics Journal

a guide to

Poetics Journal

WRITING IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

1982 1998

with the copublication of Poetics Journal Digital Archive

Edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown, Connecticut

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2013 Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach

Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A guide to Poetics Journal: writing in the expanded field, 19821998, with the copublication of Poetics Journal digital archive / edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8195-7120-5 (cloth: alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8195-7121-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8195-7122-9 (ebook)

1. PoeticsHistory20th century. 2. CriticismPeriodicals. 3. PoetryPeriodicals. I. Hejinian, Lyn. II. Watten, Barrett. III. Poetics Journal.

PN1042.G78 2012

808.1dc23 2012030738

Cover illustration by Marjorie Welish. Indecidability of the Sign: Frame 23, acrylic on panels, 2007, 18 x 28. Photo by Becket Logan.

publication of this book is funded by the

BEATRICE FOX AUERBACH FOUNDATION FUND

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

Contents

Leslie Scalapino, Patternand the Simulacral 270

How to Use This Guide

The present volume is one part of a two-part publication based on the ten issues of Poetics Journal that appeared between 1982 and 1998. The second part is the Poetics Journal Digital Archive, a resource that includes virtually all of the articles published in Poetics Journal. The guide and archive each contain an index and set of thematic links organized by keywords that will help readers make connections between articles.

This volume has been edited and organized to be read on its own, but also to be used in conjunction with the archive. It comprises an anthology of key works excerpted from the run of Poetics Journal that individuallybut, more important, collectivelyhelped define and articulate the examples and methods of contemporary poetics. The works range widely in style and approach and reflect a diversity of cultural perspectives, representing writing in poetics from North America and parts of Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia after 1980. They include essays that influenced the development of contemporary poetics; reviews and responses, both critical and theoretical, to new writing and other experimental practices; and texts that do the work of poetry and poetics simultaneously, as two facets of a single practice.

As our volumes title suggests, it is also intended as a guide, both to its own construction and to the archive. We hope that it will encourage readers to make exploratory connections between the 256 texts of Poetics Journals sixteen-year, ten-issue run. As the introduction explains, each issue was edited around a particular topic; the arrangement of the works within each issue was intended to maximize connectionsin terms of affinity or contradictionin order to catalyze discussion and creative projects. To increase the usefulness of the print volume, we have provided a series of headnotes to the individual works and a general introduction. Our goal has been to provide cultural and historical contexts for the materials as representing a larger field of writing in poetics.

The thirty-six articles selected for this guide are presented in three parts, drawn respectively from numbers 14, 57, and 810 of the journal. The twelve articles within each part appear in alphabetical order by author. Each article is preceded by a headnote and followed by publication data; a short list of keywords, which can be used to locate related articles in the guide and archive; a series of links to other works by the author and to related articles; and a selected bibliography of the authors works, foregrounding creative work, writings in poetics, and collaborative projects. Thematically organized constellations, or annotated lists of suggested further readings follow each part.

Some of the essays included in this volume are abridged versions of the originals. The archive will present nearly all of the works published in the journal, including those in the guide, in full.

We hope that the combined publication of the guide and archive will provide a model for the continued accessing and circulation of similar bodies of work in a way that foregrounds the historical contexts for their production as well as their relation to each other. The writing that appeared in Poetics Journal reflected the development of a range of creative and critical approaches in avant-garde poetry and art in the 1980s and 1990s. In making the content newly available for creative and critical use, we hope to preserve the generative enthusiasm for new writing and art it represents, while encouraging new uses and contexts.

Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten

a guide to Poetics Journal

LYN HEJINIAN AND BARRETT WATTEN

Introduction

I

The first issue of Poetics Journal appeared in January 1982, in the midst of a period of intense poetic productivity, with several North American geographical centers (the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., being the most notable) and with corollary developments, both historical and contemporary, taking place elsewhere in the world. It was no accident that, from its inception, one of our chief editorial aims was to articulate the linkages between this multicentered Language writing movement and parallel developments in other avant-garde practices. In the intervening years, Poetics Journal witnessed the development of writing on poetics from a wide range of aesthetic tendencieslanguage-centered, ideology-critical, performance-based, New Narrative, hybrid genre, new lyric, textual materialist, and conceptual/documentary, to name only a few. Our tenth and final issue of Poetics Journal appeared in June 1998, but we do not consider the journals work complete. A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 19821998, along with its companion Poetics Journal Digital Archive, are intended as a resource for further work, by us and by readers who will take up the various challenges these materials and their interconnections offer.

Poetics as a contemporary genre of writing and artistic-intellectual prac-tice was (and is still) just beginning to discover its possibilities, even as it was attempting to create terminology, name its objects of concern, devise methodologies, and generate an arena for collaborative (and sometimes contentious) conversation. This volume is intended not merely as a contribution to literary history or cultural studies; indeed, we think it is primarily not that. Many of the works in it, though thoughtful in character, are polemically charged, and many of the questions they raise remain open. Otherwise put, many of the writings here signal the beginning of new modes of inquiry or creative approaches. This volume makes available a number of the perspectives that were initiated in the pages of Poetics Journal, but at many points the works are (as they were intended to be) suggestive rather than definitiveopenings into new areas of inquiry more generallyand readers will discover not only an account of paths taken but also a clear indication of paths to be explored. We take the moment that