Amrita Sharma -- From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics

Sharma-Bernstein interview appended

Routledge, 2026

Amrita Sharma interviewed Bob Perelman, Craig Dworkin, Rae Armantrout, and me for the book; the interviews are included as an appendix. Here is mine (mostly):

Almost four decades after the publication of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, would you situate the Language movement as an early defining point of your poetic career?

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a mapping of the world of poetry I was entering when I was in my mid-20s: I wanted to define it, but the mapping itself defined me.

In 2019, would you call yourself a Language Poet? Do you find your later works moving away, or improvising upon the Language poetics that you earlier evolved?

I would never call myself a “Language Poet.” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a way of bringing together a number of poets, and poetries, that were unrecognized or isolated from one another. It was creating a constellation. It was a process not a product.

Being a foundational member of the Language School, how would you describe your contributions to it in your own words, as you look back on it today?

Editor, organizer, poet, performer, anthologizer, teacher, agitator/fomenter, “mis”-leader, activist, friend, disorganizer, joker, levitator, linguabat, ideolect, dissident, supporter, agonist ...

From the 1970s to the present, how do you perceive the transformations within the poetic community that originally constituted the Language canon

I perceived transformations at every point along the way: month to month in the 70s and 80s, and constantly in retrospect. These transformations and reconfigurations are at the heart of what is most dynamic about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

Lastly, any comments on the creative Legacy of Language Poetry as you perceive it today, particularly with reference to the works by Language Poets that are now being taught as part of courses at English Departments?

Legacy is as legacy does. Let’s not bind it in hide but find it in hiding, open to new discoveries. I am less interested in a fixed set of references than an evolving (and devolving) (fort/da) constellation of a poetics of invention, where the emphasis is not of using the words to say what “I” mean but rather finding meaning in the language devised for the occasion and in the process finding who “I” is. A legacy with legs. The richest realization of a poetry so conceived and so dedicated requires immersion in the poetry made before our time –– and imagining our relation to it. The aesthetic value of invention, of the pataquerical and echoic, is always social and political. In contrast, selective redemption of works based on a Christianizing “redeeming social value” and lyric legibility –– in place of activist aesthetic value –– lobotomizes the imagination in its retreat from history.

Publisher-provided abstract (I’ve inserted additional quotations):

The introductory chapter traces the modernist and avant-garde traditions that shaped formal experimentation in twentieth-century American poetry and culminated in the emergence of Language Poetry in the 1970s. Situating these developments within broader transnational and socio-political contexts, the chapter examines how experimental literary practices generated an alternative poetic counterculture in postwar America. By mapping the intersections of aesthetic innovation, institutional change, and avant-garde poetics, the discussion outlines the emergence of a new paradigm that redefined the possibilities of poetic form and experience.

Chapter 1
surveys the field of Language Poetry through its editorial, poetic, and gendered formations. It emphasizes the importance of little magazines, presses, and editorial labor in creating the discursive conditions for the movement, while also examining the major poets whose formal and theoretical interventions consolidated its poetics. The chapter further foregrounds the work of women poets whose feminist and experimental practices challenged and expanded the movement’s dominant tendencies. Together, these perspectives present Language Poetry as a dynamic and contested network rather than a unified school.

Chapter 2
examines the defining poetics of Language writing by situating its formal innovations within their intellectual, political, and counter-institutional contexts. The chapter outlines the movement’s departures from mainstream lyric conventions, its relation to avant-garde modernist traditions, and the theoretical discourses that informed its practices. Through readings of selected texts alongside the critical writings of Language poets themselves, the discussion models interpretive approaches that illuminate the conceptual and aesthetic stakes of experimental writing.

Chapter 3
examines how the avant-garde project of Language Poetry persists through changing material procedures, technologies of mediation, and contemporary experimental practices. Focusing on print, sound, performance, collaboration, digital archives, and post-digital circulation, the chapter argues that poetic innovation remains inseparable from the material and technological conditions through which writing is produced, distributed, and interpreted.

“The integration of new media did not replace earlier commitments but reframed them, demonstrating that the experimental could evolve with the infrastructures that support it. The practices that emerged in these spaces foregrounded mutability, adaptability, multiplicity, and distributed creativity, further broadening the field in which Language Poetry continues to resonate.”

The chapter further argues that the experimental survives less as a stable style than as an adaptable critical method capable of evolving across media environments and historical conditions.

“Together, these strands suggest that the significance of Language Poetry lies not in any fixed stylistic signature but in the methodological disposition it foregrounds, that becomes a way of working with language that treats poetry as an instrument for examining how meaning is constructed, circulated, as well as contested. The experimental becomes a mode of attentiveness that adapts to changing cultural environments while retaining its critical edge. In this sense, the legacy of Language Poetry is ongoing. It offers a framework for understanding how poetry might continue to think with the world, seeking new forms, new relations, and new possibilities of collective inquiry. This methodological horizon opens onto the broader, transnational, and future-facing concerns that follow in the remainder of this chapter.”

Chapter 4
repositions Language Poetry within a broader global and transnational field of experimental poetics. Rather than treating Language writing as a closed late-twentieth-century American movement, the chapter reframes it as an evolving practice of material, linguistic, and social experimentation whose concerns continue to resonate across contemporary literary and political contexts. It examines how institutionalization, digital infrastructures, and international experimental traditions have simultaneously transformed and extended the movement’s creative legacies.

“If the experimental ethos associated with Language Poetry once appeared grounded in a specific time, place, and network, its deeper logics, including those concerning the materiality of language, the social construction of meaning, and the politics of form, may be analyzed as having resonances beyond the frame of its American origins. Across varied cultural and historical terrains, poets and collectives have engaged with analogous problems around how to estrange the normative structures of language, how to reimagine poetic form as a site of resistance, as well as how to write in the wake of silenced histories. What emerges from these distant yet resonant scenes is not a line of influence but a constellation of counterparts, with approaches to experimental writing that, while arising independently, converge around a shared sense of language as political terrain. The poetics that developed within Language writing can thus be seen not as an exported model but as one articulation among many of a broader modernist and postmodern desire to dislodge the familiar and make form socially meaningful.”

This book is filled with details, providing a rich history of the subject, perhaps more comprehensibly than any other single account. Here is a list of books, magazines, people, plus a few topics, discussed:

Vito Acconci, Theodor Adorno, Against Conceptual Poetry (Silliman), The Age of Huts (Silliman), a.k.a. (Perelman), Alcheringa, Donald Allen, All the Whiskey in Heaven (Bernstein), The Alphabet (Silliman), Bruce Andrews, Guillaume Apollinaire, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Asylums (Bernstein), Attack of the Difficult Poems (Bernstein), Tom Backett, Bad History (Watten), Karen Barad, Amiri Baraka, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Beat poets, Bed Hangings (Howe), Susan Bee, Walter Benjamin, Gwendolyn Bennett, Jane Bennett, Steve Benson, Bill Berkson, Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Between Page and Screen (Borsuk & Bouse), The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Howe), Paul Blackburn, Black Mountain Poets, Robin Blaser, BLAST, “Blood on the Cutting Room Floor” (Bernstein), Jay David Bolter, Bruce Boone, Amaranth Borsuk, Christian Bök, Bowery Poetry Club, Braille (Perelman), The Bridge (Crane), British Poetry Revival, David Bromige, Buffalo Poetics Program, Burning Deck, William S. Burroughs, CAMBRIDGE M’ASS (Grenier), Carnival, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Laura Chester, City Lights Pocket Poets (Ferlinghetti), The Clairvoyant Journal (Weiner), Close Listening, conceptual writing, Concrete Perl (Montfort), Constructivism, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Watten), Container Press, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Bernstein), Controlling Interests (Bernstein), Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Hart Crane, Robert Creeley, Cubism, E. E. Cummings, The Cybertext Yearbook 2002 (Eskelinen & Koskimaa), Dada, Tina Darragh, database logic, Michael Davidson, Alan Davies, Day (Goldsmith), A Day at the Beach (Grenier), The Death of the Subject, Decay (Watten), Michel de Certeau, deconstruction, Steve DeJasu, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, Designated Heartbeat (Andrews), Christopher Dewdney, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno), Emily Dickinson, dictionary-based writing, digital poetics and archives and electronic poetics/aesthetics, digital communities, Ray DiPalma, Diane Di Prima, Hilda Doolittle, Ed Dorn, Lynne Dreyer, Johanna Drucker, Marcel Duchamp, Duino Elegies, Robert Duncan, Duration Press, The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets (Silliman), Craig Dworkin, Ear Inn, Eclipse archive, Umberto Eco, écriture, Larry Eigner, Electronic Literature Organization, Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), TS Eliot, Lori Emerson, Clayton Eshleman, Eunoia (Bök), The Europe of Trusts (Howe), William Everson, experimentation, Expressionism, Extremities (Armantrout), Ex Why Zee: Performance Texts (Andrews), Fashionable Noise, feminism, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, field reading, Al Filreis, Allen Fisher, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Forms (Levine), Michel Foucault, The Four Horsemen, fragmentation, Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (Howe), Frankfurt School, Kathleen Fraser, Erich Fromm, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry (Messerli), Futurism, The Gathering Cloud (Carpenter), Gauss PDF, generative text experiments, A Geology of Media (Parikka), Gephi, GI Bill, Allen Ginsberg, Girly Man (Bernstein), Loss Pequeño Glazier, global legacies, Kenneth Goldsmith, Michael Golston, Google books, Michael Gottlieb, The Grand Piano, Great Refusal, Green Integer Press, Ted Greenwald, Robert Grenier, Richard Grusin, Barbara Guest, Gutenberg Revolution, Jürgen Habermas, Donald Hall, Harlem Renaissance, Carla Harryman, Ian Hatcher, Katherine Hayles, Hearing Voices (Bernstein), Bernard Heidsieck, Lyn Hejinian, Ernest Hemingway, Lee Hickman, Christopher Higgs, Hinge Picture (Howe), Matthew Hofer, Horatian, Max Horkheimer, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), Langston Hughes, Herbert Huncke, A Hundred Posters (Davies), Erica Hunt, hybridized literature, I Don’t Have Any Paper so Shut Up (Andrews), Imagism, Peter Inman, In the American Grain (Williams), In the American Tree (Silliman), The Invention of Hunger (Armantrout), Kenneth Irby, Jacket2, Roman Jakobson, Fredric Jameson, January Zero (DiPalma), jazz-inflected rhythms, Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K” (Schelling & Friedlander), Jack Kerouac, Ketjak (Silliman), Eleana Kim, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Friedrich Kittler, Kenneth Koch, Kootenay School of Writing, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Williams), Julia Kristeva, Joanne Kyger, Tom LaFarge, Michael Lally, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Bernstein & Andrews), language-games, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, The Language of Inquiry (Hejinian), Language Poetries (Messerli), Frankfurt School, gender dynamics and female voices, Marxist theory and Structuralism within, Language Sampler (Bernstein), Bruno Latour, Denise Levertov, Caroline Levine, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Kate Lilley, LINEbreak, Tan Lin, Little Books/Indians (Weiner), Local History (Hunt), Federico García Lorca, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Jean‑François Lyotard, Jackson Mac Low, The Maintains (Coolidge), Tom Mandel, Lev Manovich, Herbert Marcuse, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Perelman), Marxist cultural critique, John Mason, sound, voice, and performance, material specificity, Material Turn, Henri Matisse, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bernadette Mayer, Steve McCaffery, McCarthyism, Michael McClure, Gerome McGann, Jerome McGann, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Kirschenbaum), Holly Melgard, David Melnick, memory, Douglas Messerli, MFA programs, The Middle (Harryman), Mimeograph Revolution, Minima Moralia (Adorno), Modern Age, Modernist Archives Publishing Project, ModPo, Harriet Monroe, Nick Montfort, Marianne Moore, Hilda Morley, Motion of the Cypher (DiPalma), Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Sloan), My Emily Dickinson (Howe), My Life (Hejinian), My Way: Speeches and Poems (Bernstein), narrative disruption, Near/Miss (Bernstein), negativity, networked poetics, The New American Poetry (Allen), New Left, new media poetry, New Poets of England and America, The New Sentence (Silliman), New York School, Lorine Niedecker, N/O (Silliman), nonnarrative, non‑referentiality, Northern Soul (Silliman), North of Intention (McCaffery), Alice Notley, Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp), Oakland (Grenier), Objectivist poetry, Objects in the Terrifying Tense (Scalapino), Observatory Gardens (DiPalma), Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Open Letter, open text, Opera—Works (Watten), George Oppen, Orphism, Maggie O’Sullivan, Our Nature (Armantrout), Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (O’Sullivan), Maureen Owen, Owl/On/Bou/Gh (Grenier), Robert Pack, page as material field, Michael Palmer, Paradise (Silliman), Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis (Andrews), Jussi Parikka, Allison Parrish, Parsing (Bernstein), Paterson (Williams), PennSound, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, philosophy of language, Pablo Picasso, Pierce‑Arrow (Howe), Nick Piombino, Pitch of Poetry (Bernstein), Vanessa Place, Planh (DiPalma), Plotinian, poetic discourse, Poetic Justice (Bernstein), Poetic Modernism, A Poetics (Bernstein), Poetics Journal, Poetics Journal Digital Archive, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Monroe), Politics and Poetic Form (Bernstein), The Politics of the Referent (McCaffery), Francis Ponge, post‑digital poetries, postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Ezra Pound, Praxis (Andrews), Precedence (Armantrout), Larry Price, Primer (Perelman), print technologies, Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (McCaffery), procedural writing, Progress/Under Erasure (Watten), Projective Verse, prosody, pseudo‑lexicographic surface, queer avant‑gardes, Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (Watten), Raik (DiPalma), Carl Rakosi, Rita Raley, Rational Geomancy, Tom Raworth, Reading Writing Interfaces (Emerson), Reagan era, Realism: An Anthology of “Language” Writing (Silliman), Recencies Series, Red Shift (Inman), referential fallacy, The Rejection of Closure, remediation, Representative Works (Mac Low), Joan Retallack, Revelator (Silliman), rewriting, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), Kit Robinson, Stephen Rodefer, The Role of the Reader (Eco), Roof (magazine), Russian Formalism, San Francisco Poets Theater, San Francisco Renaissance, Aram Saroyan, Saussurean model, Leslie Scalapino, Mark Schorer, James Schuyler, Peter Seaton, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing (Clay & Phillips), Segue Foundation, Semiotics, Sentences (Grenier), Series: Poems 1967–1971 (Grenier), Amrita Sharma, James Sherry, Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog, Sally Silvers, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Danny Snelson, Gary Snyder, Soap (Ponge), social materiality of language, Soli (DiPalma), Soliloquy (Goldsmith), Sonnets to Orpheus, The Sophist (Bernstein), sound, sound writing, Space (Coolidge), SpecLab (Drucker), speech‑based poetics, Jack Spicer, Statement of Facts (Place), Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Stochastic Poetics (Drucker), Igor Stravinsky, Stephanie Strickland, Structuralism, Sulfur, Sun & Moon Press, Surrealism, Swoon Noir (Andrews), Tactical Media (Raley), Tagvverk, Temblor (Hickman), Tender Buttons (Stein), Text and Context (Andrews), textual activism, The Language Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman (Hofer & Golston), theoretical writings, fragments, This, Tjanting (Silliman), Topsy‑Turvy (Bernstein), Total Syntax (Watten), To the Reader (Perelman), Tottel’s, Troll Thread, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Perelman), Richard Tuttle, Tuumba Press, Yuri Tynianov, Poetics List, UbuWeb, Under Albany (Silliman), Under the Bridge (Harryman), Universe (Silliman), unreadability, Veil (Bernstein), Versed (Armantrout), Ann Vickery, Vietnam War, Virtual Reality (Perelman), voice, Vorticism, Voyant, Anne Waldman, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Diane Ward, The Waste Land (Eliot), Barrett Watten, Hannah Weiner, What (Silliman), John Wieners, A Wild Salience: The Writings of Rae Armantrout, Raymond Williams, William Carlos Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Woundwood (Silliman), Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology (Barthes), writing experiments, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Hejinian), Writing/Talks (Perelman), Xing (Silliman), Geoffrey Young, 0 to 9, Louis Zukofsky.