Language Poets - Lynn Emanuel (essay date 1998)
Lynn Emanuel (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: Emanuel, Lynn. “Language Poets, New Formalists, and the Techniquization of Poetry.1” In Poetry after Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell, pp. 199-221. Ashland, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1998.
[In the following essay, Emanuel explores the similarities and differences between the methods of Language Poets and those of the New Formalists, concluding that the two groups have much in common.]
There has never been a society—until our own—in which all representations are available equally to any observer at any time. That we are rapidly approaching such a condition (or have reached it) is the result of complex social transformations: rising literacy, increasing urbanization, and the accelerating incitement to control all things, especially the forbidden, by making them subjects of discourse.2
That this is an age, among poets, of technique,...
[The entire page is 7346 words long]
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