-
Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 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 tendencies—language-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 journal’s work complete. A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, 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 practice 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 definitive—openings into new areas of inquiry more generally—and 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 Poetics Journal records to be one of incipience, a 2 a guide to poetics journal demand for intervention and participation in attempts to shift contemporary cultural horizons. In editing Poetics Journal, and in editing this guide and assembling the journal’s archive, we have wanted to extend the dimensions of the literary and cultural field and to alter its outline. Poetics Journal began in the cultural recession of the Reagan era, a period many writers and artists experienced as one of increased social pressure and constraint. Such negativity can give rise to what Barrett Watten has called a “constructivist moment,” which seeks, as he puts it, “both to disclose the nature of the system and to develop an imagined alternative.” Our constructivist moment was already well under way in 1982 when Poetics Journal 1 appeared. Literary practice, as undertaken by those involved in Language writing, entailed ardent (as well as arduous) formal and informal conversations among its participants, along with persistent attention to the surrounding cultural milieu. Numerous works available by 1982 (poetry, reviews, talks, manifestos, and so on) testify to this. Poetics Journal was intended to expand, clarify, and intensify our ongoing thinking about the contexts and trajectories of the work under way. As became clear over the course of the ten issues of its run, a cultural topography was being outlined and indexed, the scope and details of which surprised even us as editors. Discussion of Language writing to this day persistently remains blind to the variety of interests and the range of cultural activity that inform its creation. These contexts are central to the meaning of Language writing,and to fail to note or acknowledge them is to miss one of its central points. During the years that the journal was active, both editors of Poetics Journal were also writing poetry and editing literary publications. Barrett Watten edited the magazine This from 1971 to 1982, and This Press was active through the 1980s;it has recently published the ten-volume,ten-authored project titled The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980. My Tuumba Press, which published a sequence of fifty letterpress chapbooks, ran from 1976 to 1984...