Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten is Professor of English at Wayne State University, an internationally recognized poet and award-winning critic. He is the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan UP; 2004 René Wellek Prize, ACLA) and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (U Iowa P, 2016), as well as numerous volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971-1990), Bad History, and Progress/Under Erasure. With Carrie Noland, he co-edited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2008); and with Lyn Hejinian, he is coeditor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-98 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan UP, 2013/15). In 2022–23, he produced Grand Piano TV, a ten-part online reading series with the ten authors of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980 (available at bit.ly/3S7f7ae). In 2024–25, a bilingual selection will be published in English and Russian: Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты; followed by a volume of recent and recovered work from Chax Press (Tucson, AZ): Zone (1973–2021).

He was awarded sabbatical leave for F24 and returns to teach in W25. 

Research interest(s)/area of expertise

20th/21st century literature; modernist and avant-garde studies; postmodern and millennial literature and culture; poetry and poetics; visual culture; digital culture. 

Education

 Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1995

Awards and grants

• Academy of Scholars, Wayne State University, 2014
• Millay Colony Residency (Austerlitz, N.Y.), August 2010
• Fulbright Senior Fellowship, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany, Fall 2005
• The René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association, 2004
• Fellowship in Creative Writing, National Endowment for the Arts, 1979–80

Selected publications

Literary and cultural criticism

• Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016)
• The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
• Total Syntax (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985)

Edited volumes

• Poetics Journal Digital Archive, digital archive of Poetics Journal (1982-98), co-edited with Lyn Hejinian (Wesleyan University Press, 2015)
• A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–98, ed. with Lyn Hejinian (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)
• Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, ed. with Carrie Noland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
• The Poetics of New Meaning, with introduction, Qui Parle (University of California, Berkeley) 12, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2001; appeared Fall 2001)

Chapters (last six years)

• “Global Parataxis: From documenta to The Beirut-Hell Remix,” in Globalizing the Avant-Garde, European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies, ed. David Ayers and Sascha Bru, vol. 8 (Berlin: De Gruyter, in press 2024)
• “The Dark Night of the Universal: transition (1927–38) as Region of the Modern,” in Anabela Duarte, ed., Music, Avant-Gardes, and Counterculture: Invisible Cities (London: Palgrave, in press 2024)
• “Jackson Mac Low as Reading Machine: Bob Brown, Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Sampling, and Data Culture,” in Jackson Mac Low: Between Writing and Performance, ed. Tyrus Miller and Carrie Noland (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation Press, 2023)
• “Holism, Antagonism, Proto-Poetics, and Pedagogy Among the Beats,” in The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, ed. Erik Mortenson and Tony Trigilio (Clemson, S.C.: Clemson University Press,, 2023)
• “Poetry as a Scene of Decision: Larry Eigner as Distributed Author,” in George Hart and Jennifer Bartlett, eds., Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021)

Articles (last six years)

• “Scaffolding Repetition: Gertrude Stein, Language Writing, Electronic Dance Music,” in special issue on “Poéticas e Políticas da Repetição” (Poets and Politics of Repetition), ed. Bruno Ministro, eLyra 22 (Porto, Port.; December): 29–55; online: https://bit.ly/3THq8lG
• “Liberation and the Historical Present: Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour,” in “Feeling in Time: Radio Free Stein,” special section ed. Adam Frank, Textual Practice 36, no. 1 (December 2022): 2038–59; print and online: https://bit.ly/3CcnR8q
• "Практическая утопия языкового письма: Oт книги Ленинград до Движения Оккупай" (Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia: From ‘Leningrad’ to Occupy), trans. Vladimir Feshchenko, Новое литературное обозрение (New Literary Review, Moscow) 168 (February): 200–217
• “Modernity @ Zero Hour: Three Women (Lee Miller, Hannah Höch, Anonyma),” in special forum, “Modernity @ Zero Hour: The Question of the Universal and the Origins of the Global Order,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 4, no. 1 (June 2020)
• “Ashbery Alpha and Omega: Presentism, Historicism, and Vice Versa,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Changsha, China) 2, no. 2 (December 2019)

Creative works

• Zone (1973–2021) (Tucson: Chax Press, forthcoming 2024)
• Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты, ed. Vladimir Feshchenko, trans. Feshchenko, Ruslan Mironov, Ekaterina Zakharkhiv et al. (Moscow: Polyphem, in print 2024)
• The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980, with Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson, parts 1–9 (Detroit: Mode A, 2006–10)
• Progress/Under Erasure (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004)
• Bad History (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 1998; 2nd printing 2002)
• Frame: 1971–1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997)
• Under Erasure (Tenerife, Canary Is., Spain: Zasterle Press, 1991)
• Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. With Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Michael Davidson (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991)
• Conduit (San Francisco: Gaz, 1988)
• Progress (New York: Roof Books, 1985)
• Complete Thought (Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba, 1982)
• 1–10 (San Francisco: This Press, 1980)
• Plasma/Paralleles/”X” (Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba, 1979)
• Decay (San Francisco: This Press, 1977)
• Opera—Works (Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky Books, 1975)

As editor

• Poetics Journal 1–10, with Lyn Hejinian (1981–98)
• This 1–12 (1971–82; with Robert Grenier, 1971–73)

Selected critical discussion

Chapters and articles

• Hejinian, Lyn. “The Sad Note in the Poetics of Consciousness.” Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 2023.
• Sokolova, Olga V., and Ekaterina Zakharkiv. “Лингвопрагматические сдвиги в новейшей поэзии: Российско-американские параллели” (Linguopragmatic Shifts in Recent Poetry: Russian-American Parallels). Литература двух Америк (Literature of the Americas) no. 12 (2022).
• Kreiner, Timothy. “The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History.” In Annie McClanahan, ed., special issue on “Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work.” Post45 no. 1 (1 January 2019). Link here.
• Brito, Mañuel. “Nonnarrative and History in Barrett Watten’s Under Erasure.” Atlantis: Revista de la asociatión española de estudios anglo-norteamericanos 40, no. 1 (June) 2018.
• Wedell, Noura. “Progress Toward New Sentimental Educations: How Contextual and Constructivist Poetics Reframe Issues of Distribution.” Special issue, “Poètes et éditeurs: diffuser la poésie d’avant-gare américaine.” IdeAs/Idées d’Amérique 9 (Spring2017). Link here.
• Fischer, Norman. “Total Absence and Total Presence in the Work of Barrett Watten.” Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, & Religion. Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 2015.
• Chaitas, Lilian. “The Duncan/Watten Debat/cl/e” and “Stalin as Linguist.” Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century American Poetic Avant-Gardes. Leiden, Neth.: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017.
• Brito, Mañuel. “Formas y estructuras poéticas en Barrett Watten” (Poetic forms and structures in Barrett Watten). Los mejores poetas americanos contemporáneos: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten. Ed. Brito. Madrid: Ediciones literarias mandala, 2011.
• Aji, Hélène. “Barrett Watten: Poetry and Historiography.” Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu. Exeter, U.K.: Shearsman Books, 2007.
• Arnold, David. “‘Just Rehashed Surrealism?”: The Writing of Barrett Watten.” Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007.
• Blazer, Alex. “Barrett Watten: From the Other Side of the Machine.” I Am Otherwise: The Romance Between Poetry and Theory After the Death of the Subject. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.
• Hugill, Piers. “Watten & Hejinian (‘What, no, begin again?): or Poetry as Language’s ‘State of Emergency.’” Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu. Exeter, U.K.: Shearsman Books, 2007.
• Metres, Philip. “Barrett Watten’s Bad History.” Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2007

Reviews

• Heuving, Jeanne. Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. American Literature 91, no. 4 (December 2019): 905–7. PDF here.
• Williams, Tyrone. “Examples Of: On Barrett Watten’s Questions.” Review of Questions of Poetics. Jacket2 (18 January 2019). Link here.
• Harley, Luke. “Searchlight Intelligence.: Barrett Watten’s Critical Poetics.” Review of Questions of Poetics. Journal of Poetics Research no. 9 (31 August 2018).
• Grant Matthew Jenkins. Review of Questions of Poetics. ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1 (2017). Link here.
• Segal, Eyal. Review of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998. Poetics Today 38, no. 4 (2017).
• Barry Schwabsky. “Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Hyperallergic (6 November 2016). Link here.
• Almon, B. Review of Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement. Choice 47, no. 10 (June 2010).

Literary biography

• 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.

Edited volume

• Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory. Special issue ed., with introduction, by Rod Smith. Aerial 8 (1995).

Other qualifications directly relevant to courses taught

Dissertation defenses (last six years)

• Felicia Preece, “Making Geography Come Alive”: Hemingway and Representing Space in Mid-Century America (PhD, 2023, director)
• Marcus Merritt, The Center of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materialism, and the Poetic Subject in 20th-Century American Poetry (PhD 2018, director)'
• Brad Flis, Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, and the Mexican Revolution in U.S. Modernism (PhD, 2018, director)

M.A. essay (last six years)

• Livingston Garland, “Archive Antidote: Digitality and the Archive in Jackson Mac Low’s The Light Poems” (MA, 2021, director)

Courses taught (last six years)

Graduate

• English 7004, Theoretical Issues in Cultural Studies, “Questions of Unreason in Modern Cultures,” Fall 2018

Upper division

• English 4991/5992, Honors/Senior Seminar, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Life,” Fall 2023
• English 5450, Modern American Literature, “Modernism, Modernity, and the Question of Value,” Winter 2019
• English 5860, Topics in Creative Writing, “Creative Foundations: Contemporary Forms and Critical Practice,” Fall 2018

Lower division

• English 3100, Introduction to Literary Studies, Winter 2019
• English 3090, Introduction to Cultural Studies, Fall 2023, Winter 2023
• English 2415, Geopolitics and Literature: “Genres of Global Noir: Poetry, Fiction, Cinema, Media,” Winter 2024
• English 2350, American Literature: “Modernism and Writing,” Winter 2024

Courses taught by Barrett Watten

Winter Term 2025 (future)

• ENG3090 - Introduction to Cultural Studies
• ENG4991 - Honors Seminar
• ENG5992 - Senior Seminar

Winter Term 2024

• ENG2350 - American Literature: Writing about Texts
• ENG2415 - Geopolitics and Literature: Writing about Texts

Fall Term 2023

• ENG3090 - Introduction to Cultural Studies
• ENG4991 - Honors Seminar
• ENG5992 - Senior Seminar

Winter Term 2023

• ENG3090 - Introduction to Cultural Studies