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Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet and educator associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University where he teaches modernism and cultural studies.

Early life and education

Watten was born in Long Beach, California in 1948. After graduating from high school in Oakland, California, he studied at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. He majored in biochemistry, graduating with an AB in 1969. At Berkeley he met poets such as Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman and studied with Josephine Miles in the English department. He enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1971 he and Grenier began the poetry journal This, which he edited with Grenier for the first three years and then alone until 1982. He graduated with a master's in fine arts degree in 1972.

Career

In 1976 he and other poets founded the reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco that ran through 1980. From 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period.

In the 1980s Watten worked as an academic editor and then Associate Editor for the journal Representations at Berkeley. In 1989 he began graduate studies at Berkeley and received his PhD in English in 1995. He joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994.

At Wayne State University in 2019, some students reported Watten to university administration for misbehavior. Later these students published their collective testimonials in a blog, which included allegations of Watten being "hostile, verbally abusive, and manipulative with female students." Wayne State hired an independent investigator and removed him from teaching in November 2019. Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed grievances citing a lack of required due process and a restraint of free speech, and requested the restrictions be withdrawn. The details of the disciplinary action were published after a FOIA request, which was protested by Watten as "outrageous". Watten returned to teaching classes in 2023.

Major work

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Watten's early creative work is collected in Frame (1971–1990), which appeared in 1997 and brings together six previously published works of poetry from the previous two decades: Opera—Works (1975); Decay (1977); Plasma/Paralleles/"X" (1979); 1–10 (1980); Complete Thought (1982); and Conduit (1988)—along with two previously uncollected texts—City Fields and Frame. Two book–length poems—Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991)—were republished with a new preface as Progress/Under Erasure (2004). Bad History, a book-length prose poem, appeared in 1998.

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). He has published three volumes of literary and cultural criticism: Total Syntax (1985);The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003); and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016).

With Carrie Noland, he co-edited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009), as well as special issues for the journals Qui Parle (2001) and the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (2020). In 2013, an anthology of essays from Poetics Journal was published (A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998), followed in 2015 by an e-book that republished the entire journal's content (Poetics Journal Digital Archive).

Watten is also co-author, with Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Steve Benson, and Bob Perelman of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006–2010). This work, which consists of ten volumes, is described as an "experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco."

Watten's work has been translated in numerous foreign languages, with two chapbooks in French and Italian. Plasma/Parallèles/“X,” trans. Martin Richet (2007), comprises three long poems that originally appeared in a chapbook by Tuumba Press in 1979. A chapbook consisting only of Plasma, trans. by Gherardo Bortolotti, came out in 2010.

Awards and recognition

In 1995 he was the subject of a special issue of the poetry magazine Aerial. The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.

Bibliography

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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 press 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 1–10 (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)

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

• 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)

Personal life

Watten is married to the poet Carla Harryman and they have a son together.

References

1. ^ "2003 Holloway Series - Barrett Watten". English Department, University of California, Berkeley. 2003. Archived from the original on 29 October 2003.
2. ^ "Barrett Watten - Professor". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Wayne State University. Archived from the original on 15 March 2016.
3. Arnold, David (2007). "'Just Rehashed Surrealism'? The Writing of Barrett Watten". Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal. Liverpool University Press. p. 138. ISBN 978-1-84631-115-4.
4. ^ "Barrett Watten". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Wayne State University. Retrieved 21 September 2024.
5. Harley, Luke (7 February 2013). "Poetry as virtual community. A review of 'The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography'". Jacket2.
6. ^ Nguyen, Terry (21 June 2019). "'I Was Sick to My Stomach': A Scholar's Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope". Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 65, no. 34. pp. A26 – A27. Archived from the original on 2021-02-24. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
7. ^ Zahneis, Meghan (11 December 2019). "This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He's Being Banned From Teaching". Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on 2021-04-17. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
8. For additional details, commentary, and links see Barrett Watten's piece How The Grand Piano Is Being Written Archived June 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
9. in a publicity release at Watten's homepage (see "External links" above)
10. Le Quartanier éditeur & revue
11. Smith, Rod (1995). "Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory". Aerial. No. 8. ISBN 978-0-9619097-4-1. Archived from the original on 29 November 2020.
12. ^ "The René Wellek Prize Citation 2004". American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
13. "Poetics Journal Digital Archive". Wesleyan University Press. Retrieved 29 September 2024.
14. Simpson, Megan (Winter 1996). "An interview with Carla Harryman". Contemporary Literature. 4 (37). Retrieved 26 September 2024.

External links

• Faculty webpage
• Barrett Watten.net
• The Grand Piano

• American male poets
• Language poets
• Writers from Long Beach, California
• 1948 births
• Living people
• American literary critics
• Wayne State University faculty
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• University of Iowa alumni
• Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
• American magazine founders
• American male non-fiction writers