Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten reading at the Prague Microfest in May 2011
Born	October 3, 1948 Long Beach, California
Occupation	Professor
Spouse	Carla Harryman
Academic background
Education	University of California, Berkeley University of Iowa
Academic work
Institutions	Wayne State University

Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he teaches modernism and cultural studies.

Early life and education

Watten was born in Long Beach, California in 1948, the son of a US Navy physician.^[1] As a child, he moved frequently, including time in Japan and Taiwan. He graduated high school in Oakland, California in 1965, and briefly attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] He graduated with a AB in biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley in 1969.^[2]

While at Berkeley, he met fellow poet Robert Grenier,^[3] and participated in student protests against the Vietnam War.^[1] He then attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1972 with a MFA.^[2] Watten’s association with Robert Grenier continued, when they began publishing This magazine.^[4]

Background of Language Writing

Move to the Bay Area

What is now called Language Writing, and the branch that Watten is associated with: the West Coast Language poets, had its roots in the early 1970s in the Bay Area of San Francisco during a time that corresponded to what has been called “the turn to language,” due, in part, to “the same cultural factors that had led to “the rise in theory”.” This time had been prefigured in some way, as it relates to Language Writing, at the inception of This magazine, the publication of which has been called "as much of an originary moment as Language writing can be said to have."^{[4] [note 1][note 2]}

Beginnings

After graduation from the University of Iowa, Watten returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with Grenier he continued to publish This as co-editor, and then as its sole editor from 1973 through 1982 following the departure of Grenier.

From its inception, and in the beginning stages of its growth and development, Watten played an instrumental role in the early stages of Language Writing/Language poetry that was developing in the Bay Area: a region uniquely situated as it “fostered collectivity, contention, and iconoclasm.”^[6]

Poetry, editing, and publishing

In summary, Watten's poetry and critical writings, including his editing and publishing, have been widely acknowledged, since the mid 1970s, as crucial to its social and cultural development.^{[note 3]} In all facets of Language Writing’s origin, growth, development, dissemination, and reception, Watten has played an integral part.^[7]

Career

By the mid 1970s, the template had been set for Watten’s career as a poet, critic, editor, publisher, and educator. But Watten also understood that this new kind of poetry must be sustained in its social dynamic while its aesthetic drive was taking hold. To that end, Watten could provide venues for talks, performances, editing, and publishing for this fledgling community of Language Writing and its poets and artists. He has referred to the latter as the reciprocity of practice implied by a community,^[1] even as many of the participants in this community were steadily gaining attention. Many of these participants, in retrospect, are today sometimes referred to as the “West Coast Language poets.”

But what is now called Language Writing/Language poetry had other founding members and precedent figures. For example, there were various artists, poets, intellectuals, and so on, in New York City and Washington, DC saying they were part and parcel to this “school,” this movement.^{[8][note 4][note 5]}

Through the 1970s, and by the end of that decade, this group was located in the Bay Area of San Francisco. And as Steve Benson has pointed out, by the late 1970s they already are calling themselves Language poets.^[6]

Watten does remind us, however, that this is not only “a kind of writing but a social formation, not just an aesthetic tendency but a group of writers split between its two major urban centers, San Francisco and New York.” This is an acknowledgement that has restrospective, immediate, and long term implications (past, present, and future) for understanding how and why Language Writing has had, and will continue to have, a vital, viable, and sustainable role in the social, cultural, and political discourse.^[10]

Fellowship, community, and “poetry wars” (1970s & 1980s)

In 1976, he and other poets founded the reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco that ran through 1980.^{[11][note 6]} Later, from 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period.^[11]

Community and fellowship as sustaining features of this group’s growth and continued vibrancy found support after 1976 with “Perelman's Talk Series and later by events organized at 80 Langton Street/New Langton Arts, for which Watten organized the writer in residence and literature programs from 1981 to 1994.”^[5](Debrot, p. 357)

From the 1970s through the 1980s and beyond, as Language poetry gained attention, it became a flashpoint for other poetry schools and aesthetic tendencies, leading to heated confrontations and debates. Watten found himself in the crosshairs of a particularly contentious falling out with the New American Poetry group when he and Robert Duncan were both giving talks at a colloquium on the poetry of Louis Zukofsky. Duncan interrupted Watten’s presentation until Watten was finally unable to finish his presentation. Thereafter, Watten became by default one of the central figures in “The Poetry Wars” that followed.

After Watten’s move to academia in the 1990s, these debates continued in other forums such as online venues and listservs.

1990s and Academia

In 1989, he began graduate studies at Berkeley, receiving a PhD in English in 1995.^[2] In 1995, the poetry magazine Aerial published a special issue about Watten.^[13] Between 1981 and 1998, Watten served as an editor for Poetics Journal along with Lyn Hejinian.^[14] In 2013, an anthology of essays from the journal was published, followed by an e-book of the entire journal's content in 2015.^[14]

Watten joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994.^[3] In 2019, some students reported Watten to the university administration for misbehavior and later published their collective testimonials in a blog, including allegations of Watten being "hostile, verbally abusive, and manipulative with female students".^[15] The university hired an independent investigator and removed him from teaching in November 2019.^[15][16] Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed grievances citing a lack of required due process and a restraint of free speech, and requested the restrictions be withdrawn.^[16] The details of the disciplinary action were published after a FOIA request, which was protested by Watten as "outrageous".^[16] Watten returned to teaching classes in 2023.

Major work and publications

Watten's poetry is associated with a loosely-affiliated group of avant-garde poets referred to as the West Coast Language Poets.^[1] This group includes Robert Grenier, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, and Leslie Scalapino.^[1] The group shared an opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as "skepticism about the appropriation of truth by meaning".^[1]

Since the early 1970s and up until today, the latter group of poets have been able to distinguish themselves from the preceding literary generations and movements, in particular the New American Poets, through an emphasis on self-reflexive experiences with language rather than the physical body.^[1] Watten's early creative work is collected in Frame (1971–1990), which appeared in 1997.^{[note 7]} Two book–length poems—Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991)—were republished with a new preface as Progress/Under Erasure (2004). Bad History, a book-length prose poem, appeared in 1998.

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). He has published three volumes of literary and cultural criticism: Total Syntax (1985);The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003); and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016).^[17][18][19] Watten is also co-author, with Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Steve Benson, and Bob Perelman of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006–2010).^{[20][note 8]}

He also co-edited A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) with Lyn Hejinian and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) with Carrie Noland.

Awards and recognition

The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.^[21][22]

Personal life

Watten is married to poet (and collaborator) Carla Harryman.^[23]

Notes

1. “Poetics becomes a site for the construction of examples (the Objectivists and the New Americans; conceptual and site-specific art), even as it took place as a part of the larger development of literary and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Poetry and poetics, then, were crucial sites where the turn to language was articulated, due to the same cultural factors that led to the rise of theory”. From A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998 by Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten
2. “From 1971 to 1974 he collaborated on This magazine with Robert Grenter (whose first issue was, according to Bob Perelman, "as much of an originary moment as Language writing can be said to have") and continued as the sole editor until 1982. In addition to the magazine, This Press also published many books significant for the development of innovative poetry.”^[5] p. 357
3. “The importance of Watten’s writing has been acknowledged since the mid 1970s by experimentalist poets and more recently by a growing critical and academic readership.”^[5]
4. Watten has noted that: “Language writing was at the same time a metropolitan and largely bicoastal phenomenon, reflecting the relocation of well-educated, politicized, but underemployed graduates of major universities and programs (Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago, Yale, and Iowa among them) to cities like New York and San Francisco, both of which were undergoing a period of economic and political turbulence (Washington, DC, is an important third site for Language writing).”^[9]
5. The reader of this Wikipedia article may have noted that although the term “Language Writing” is the operative word, there have been many different labels to describe this “Language movement” (the latter being one of them) that found its roots in “the Turn to Language”: Language poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, The Language school, and so on. This is not surprising for a movement that grew out of the contentious, perilous, and agonistic juncture of the Vietnam War and the Student radical and counterculture protest movements.
6. “320 poets and performers were featured in the 153 events of the series.”^[12]
7. This volume brings together six previously published works of poetry from the previous two decades: Opera—Works (1975); Decay (1977); Plasma/Paralleles/"X" (1979); 1–10 (1980); Complete Thought (1982); and Conduit (1988)—along with two previously uncollected texts—City Fields and Frame.
8. This work, which consists of ten volumes, is described as an "experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco".

References

1. Debrot, Jacques (1998). "Barrett Watten". In Conte, Joseph Mark (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II (Sixth Series). Gale. ISBN 0787618489.
2. "Barrett Watten - Professor". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Wayne State University. Archived from the original on 15 March 2016.
3. "2003 Holloway Series - Barrett Watten". English Department, University of California, Berkeley. 2003. Archived from the original on 29 October 2003.
4. Arnold, David (2007). "'Just Rehashed Surrealism'? The Writing of Barrett Watten". Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal. Liverpool University Press. p. 138. ISBN 978-1-84631-115-4.
5. Debrot, Jacques. “Barrett Watten.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 193. American Poets Since World War II, 6th Ser. Ed. Joseph M. Conte et al. Farmington, Mich.: Gale Research, 1998.
6. ‪Benson, Steve (October 10, 2023). "‬ How I Now Remember Then". ‬ SPT: The Backroom‪. ‬ Small Press Traffic‪.‬
7. Bozek, Jessica L. (2007). "Barrett Watten". Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works. MacGill’s.
8. Schwabsky, Barry (November 6, 2016). "Reader's Diary: Barrett Watten's 'Questions of Poetics'". Hyperallergic.
9. Watten, Barrett. The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry. Cambridge University Press; pp. 234 - 247
10. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics p.53
11. Harley, Luke (7 February 2013). "Poetry as virtual community. A review of 'The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography'". Jacket2.
12. "Chronology of The Grand Piano Reading Series". www.thegrandpiano.org.
13. Smith, Rod (1995). "Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory". Aerial. No. 8. ISBN 978-0-9619097-4-1. Archived from the original on 29 November 2020.
14. "Poetics Journal Digital Archive". Wesleyan University Press. Retrieved 29 September 2024.
15. Nguyen, Terry (21 June 2019). "'I Was Sick to My Stomach': A Scholar's Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope". Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 65, no. 34. pp. A26–A27. Archived from the original on 2021-02-24. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
16. Zahneis, Meghan (11 December 2019). "This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He's Being Banned From Teaching". Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on 2021-04-17. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
17. Schwabsky, Barry (6 November 2016). "Reader's Diary: Barrett Watten's Questions of Poetics". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
18. Heuving, Jeanne (December 2019). "Book Review: Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries". American Literature. 91 (4): 905–907. doi:10.1215/00029831-7917478. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
19. Williams, Tyrone (18 January 2019). "Examples of On Barrett Watten's questions". Jacket2. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
20. For additional details, commentary, and links see Barrett Watten's piece How The Grand Piano Is Being Written Archived June 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
21. "The René Wellek Prize Citation 2004". American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
22. "Comparative Literature Prizes for 2004". Comparative Literature. 58 (3). Duke University Press: xi–xiii. 2006. JSTOR 4125381.
23. Simpson, Megan (1996). "An Interview with Carla Harryman". Contemporary Literature. 4 (37): 511–532. doi:10.2307/1208770. JSTOR 1208770.

External links

• Faculty webpage
• Barrett Watten.net