Language Writing and the Medium of Language
One of the things Language Writing did that was, I think, very important for the development of the language arts and poetry was to perform the essentially modernist task of investigating the medium of poetry. Out side of a very few cases (Gertrude Stein in particular) there had never been a concerted effort in English on the part of a group of writers to investigate the medium of language as such. A task that had been done repeatedly in the visual arts (minimalism, cubism, abstract expressionism, futurist sculpture and painting, etc.). Starting with ideas rooted in Marx and Saussure the language writers engaged in a decade plus exploration of language as medium and content, or rather what the possibilities were for the content of writing to be language itself.
This investigation, broadly speaking, went along two separate paths: an investigation at the level of the phrase, and an investigation at or below the level of the word. Many of the core language practitioners (from both coasts) worked in both modes. However, for a variety of reasons, the phrasal level of language writing seems to have been historically preferenced and has had the greatest influence on post-language writing here in North America. Over the next three or four posts I will be exploring what I mean by these modes of writing.
