Approaching Poetry Journal Culture

So far, I have been able to isolate certain texts where context and reference tell us that Barthes is relevant. It has been possible to treat an author's works, or an anthology of a group of authors in the case of ‘The Dwelling-Place’, as a unit, and to draw conclusions about that whole grouping because Barthes is invoked in one part of it. I looked at Forrest- Thomson's series of ‘twin poems’ on the basis of a Barthes reference in one of two texts, at Silliman's vast work Ketjak based on a handful of sentences, at Mayer's work based only on her teaching, and at Hejinian’s work based on consistent interest in a single remark by Barthes. These are signals of a greater engagement with Barthes in the culture of poetry as a whole, and the conclusions drawn about texts on this basis are important to reading them, but I have not inferred ‘influence’ here. No premature conclusions are to be drawn about Barthes's effect on the development of ideas about poetry held by poets themselves. In the sense in which the word is used in the title of Poetics Journal, those ideas are the poetics of these loose associations of writers. Like the latter, this chapter neither aims to ‘cover’, nor restricts itself to, ‘Language writing’; it begins with consideration of poets who were also art critics before moving on to journals associated with ‘Language writing’. Moreover, many prominent writers who are often associated with the ‘group’ are not discussed in detail, because I have found little detailed evidence of their opinions on Barthes, or on French theory more generally, beyond references to his name in their correspondence with other writers.

The subject of this chapter is a long, diverse literary and academic discourse, one which takes place in conversation, through personal correspondence, during readings, seminars, and formal discussions, and in print journals. The conversations of poets and readers of poetry are not available for study, and so the bulk of this chapter will be concerned with the poetics expressed through journals. As the inheritors of ‘all the little magazines which […] died to make verse free’1 in early twentieth-century modernism, these were usually precarious operations, but in a context where commercial success was impossible, some were able to take on the task of being stages for commercially unpalatable forms of writing.