Language Poetry

Language poetry, also written L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry after the movement's own journal, was an American avant-garde poetry movement that emerged in the 1970s, drawing on poststructuralist literary theory to challenge the idea that language transparently communicates a poet's meaning or experience, and instead foregrounding language's own materiality, its grammar, syntax and the reader's active role in constructing meaning from a text. Associated poets including Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews, several of whom co-edited the movement's namesake journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978-1981), drew explicitly on the earlier Objectivist poets, particularly Louis Zukofsky, as well as on Russian Formalist and French poststructuralist theory, producing famously difficult, syntactically fragmented and often politically inflected poetry that resisted conventional narrative or lyric coherence. Centered initially in San Francisco and New York, the movement became deeply influential in American academic poetry and poetics from the 1980s onward, provoking substantial debate over the relationship between poetic difficulty, politics and accessibility.