I have had a terrible time in trying to find a capsule history of Language Poetry as it emerged in the early 1970s and matured at the end of the decade. Even the previous sentence might be seen as a naive maturity-narrative. In any case, there was a movement that we might fruitfully understand as Language Poetry or Language Writing. Some of the writers often included in the designation bristle at the term or the notion that it was a formal movement (it wasn't), but that's always the case with writers, artists, musicians, computer programmers, etc.
For Thursday's seminar read the following four pieces:
1) Luke Harvey's prolix review of The Grand Piano on Jacket2, Poetry as Virtual Community. (This is a very long review by any standard, print or online. You might want to copy-paste the text into a more readable format.) It's likely that you'll miss many of the references to people/places/poetry movements/etc. You should, however, be able to discern the central issues and controversies. Pay special notice to the Duncan/Watten Debacle (keep reading).
2) Lyn Hejinian's introduction to her essay collection of the same name, The Language of Inquiry.
3) Barret Watten's prolix commentary about the equal-sign logotype, especially as it appears in the Wikipedia entry.
4) The Wikipedia entry for Language Poetry that Watten refers to. Do I really need to link to that?
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