Barrett Watten
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Barrett Watten, (b. 1948 in Long Beach, California), is a contemporary American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. Since 1994, Watten has taught modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature ; poetics ; literary and cultural theory ; visual studies ; the avant-garde and digital literature.
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[edit] Overview
After graduating from high school he attended MIT and then UC Berkeley, where he took an AB in Biochemistry in 1969. It was there he met poets Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman and studied with Josephine Miles, who recommended him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he received an MFA in English (Program of Creative Writing) in 1972. Watten later returned to the Bay Area and began to form relations with some experimental writers who would become known as the Language School. This 'school' was not a group precisely, but a tendency in the work of many of its so-called practitioners (see article on Language poets).
[edit] Work
Watten edited This, one of the central little magazines of the Language movement, and co-edited Poetics Journal, one of its theoretical venues. In 1986, he returned to UC Berkeley, earning his PhD in English in 1996. His published work includes Bad History (1998) and Frame (1971-1990) which appeared in 1997. Frame brings together six previously published works of poetry from two decades: Opera—Works ; Decay ; 1–10 ; Plasma/Paralleles/"X" ; Complete Thought and Conduit – along with two previously uncollected texts – City Fields and Frame. Two of his books – Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991) – were republished with a new preface, as Progress | Under Erasure (2004).
Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991) . He has published two volumes of literary and cultural criticism, including The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003) which was awarded the René Wellek Prize in 2004.[1]
[edit] External links
- Barrett Watten Homepage
- article on Watten at Jacket Magazine
- Detroit looks (8/6/2003) George Tysh, arts editor of Metro Times (Detroit), briefly discusses The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics
- Question of Interpretation an interactive piece at mark(s), an online quarterly [2].
- Barrett Watten and Amiri Baraka : Smackdown! [3]
- Total Syntax: The Work in the World an essay by Watten focusing on the work of Clark Coolidge[4]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Holloway Reading Series at UC Berkeley; site provide info on Watten who read there
- ^ In this piece, Watten employs or figures poetry as epigram or analog to hyper-contextualize and cross-cut the literature of the Rorschach. An example of digital poetics as it delves, perhap by way of cathexis, into what Watten refers to as "New Meaning"
- ^ This showdown (or debate) between Baraka & Watten is legendary in poetry circles. Here is the report by Kristin Prevallet — of the "fight" which occurred at The Opening of the Field: A Conference on North American Poetry in the 1960s (June 28-July 2, 2000), in Orono, Maine.
- ^ This on-line text excerpted from Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics (1998), and as originally published in Watten's book Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985)
