TOM CLARK
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ity, and their work has a tendency to talk about itself, sometimes in a
language reminiscent of technical manuals, as in Watten's poem
"Position":
The apex settles on
Tones in surrounding heads .
A test case, or
exile . No wires account for
failure of specific response .
A triangle gives ,
circles branch out. Forced
Exposure to limit distorts .
Watten's critical prose, also amply represented here, deploys
the same kind of institutional-gray vocabulary to only slightly dif–
ferent ends . In his prose Watten seems to owe a debt to the distanc–
ing and disjunction methods of the Russian Formalists, especially
Viktor Shklovsky. His interest in Shklovsky reflects the leftist stance
that's common among language school writers. One critic, Fred
Pollack, has suggested that "language-school leftism is either stupid
or disingenuous, the icing on a cake only bourgeois intellectuals can
afford ." Indeed, solidarity among the language school cadres is ex–
pressed not in bomb-throwing or plotting the overthrow of the state
but in tactics like letter-writing campaigns , such as the one Watten
orchestrated when I criticized his work in
Poetry Flash
recently.
To give some background: My first foray into criticism of the
language school was in a January 1985 San Francisco
Chronicle
review of Watten's
Total Syntax,
wherein I took issue with, among
other things, his terminology (Watten seems unable to get to the end
of a sentence without tripping over an "obscured referent" or "gram–
matical completion" along the way), and suggested such writing was
"the kind of mumbo jumbo you'd hear from a guy who stumbled
into a linguistics lecture one day, and walked out an
instant expert the next." The
Chronicle
received a storm of angry let–
ters from Watten's allies, including one from his erstwhile Ph.D. ad–
viser, who called me a "reactionary frump." That same letter-writer,
a well-known University of California linguistics professor named
George Lakoff, also produced an article later the same year for the
local poetry periodical
Poetry Flash.
Titled "On Whose Authority?",
the article's central point was that "language" writers had seized back
