The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Poetics of the New) - Tapa blanda

"The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book was instrumental, not simply to laying a foundation for an urgently needed new sense of writing, but to vividly ar-ticulating the multidisciplinary and polytextual sweep of this writing's core investigations."--Loss Peque o Glazier, Dictionary of Literary Biography "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is a perpetual intellectual delight, especially wel-come for its cogent reviews of small press publications. The editors, who are just as much at ease with Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as . . . Tom Raworth, offer a wide variety of critical materials. . . . The perceptive re-views and comments make this a small gem."--Bill Katz, Library Journal "For over twenty years, in magazines such as... L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E... this movement has given us a body of writing that may be the most signifi-cant since the modernists."--Hank Lazer, The Nation "An essential source. With its blend of voices and crisscrossing dialogues, the book has an almost novelistic density."--Voice Literary Supplement "It is one of the first journals to extend directly from a concern for language as a ground base for poetry and one of the few magazines to provide an open forum for discussions of poetics by the writers themselves."--Michael Davidson, Archive for New Poetry Newsletter "Apropos favorite books of the past year's reading ... I read more absorbedly books like L=A =N=G=U=A=G=E... than I did much else."--Robert Creeley, The Poetry Project Newsletter "Attempting to make it new."--Donald Hall, Times Literary Supplement "In 1978, a new magazine appeared on the American poetry scene. The magazine, strangely titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, became during its four years of publication a main forum for a group of young writers keen to engage in theoretical speculation and debate about their medium. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E disappeared in 1981, but its name has lingered on, mainly as a means of designating a highly varied body of work which was shaped by the emerging protocols of the magazine."--Peter Middleton, Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory

This selection of essays and poetry from the first three volumes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine dis-cusses a "spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, nor sub-ject matter." (Bernstein and Andrews) The various writers shun labels, slogans, or catch-phrases; their exploration of the ways that meanings and values are re-vealed through the written word is in-tended to open the field of poetic activity, not close it. The common thread of these essays is the multitude and scope of words' refer-ential powers-denotative, connotative, and associational; and studying these powers is ultimately a social and political activity as well as an aesthetic one.