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American poet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
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Barrett Watten | |
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Barrett Watten reading at the Prague Microfest in May 2011 | |
| Born | October 3, 1948 |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Spouse | Carla Harryman |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley University of Iowa |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Wayne State University |
Watten was born in Long Beach, California in 1948, the son of a US Navy research physicist.[1] As a child, he moved frequently, including time in Japan and Taiwan. He graduated high school in Oakland, California in 1965, and briefly attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] He graduated with a AB in biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley in 1969.[2] While at Berkeley, he met fellow poet Robert Grenier,[3] and participated in student protests against the Vietnam War.[1] He then attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1972 with a MFA.[2] He finished a Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1995.[1]
In 1976, he and other poets founded the reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco that ran through 1980.[4] From 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period.[4]
In 1971, Watten and Robert Grenier began the poetry journal This,[5] which he edited with Grenier for the first three years and then alone until 1982.[6][7] In 1989, he began graduate studies at Berkeley, receiving a PhD in English in 1995.[2] In 1995, the poetry magazine Aerial published a special issue about Watten.[8] Between 1981 and 1998, Watten served as an editor for Poetics Journal along with Lyn Hejinian.[9] In 2013, an anthology of essays from the journal was published, followed by an e-book of the entire journal's content in 2015.[9]
Watten joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994.[3] In 2019, some students reported Watten to the university administration for misbehavior and later published their collective testimonials in a blog, including allegations of Watten being "hostile, verbally abusive, and manipulative with female students".[10] The university hired an independent investigator and removed him from teaching in November 2019.[10][11] 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.[11] The details of the disciplinary action were published after a FOIA request, which was protested by Watten as "outrageous".[11] Watten returned to teaching classes in 2023.[6]
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Watten's poetry is associated with a loosely-affiliated group of avant-garde poets referred to as the West Coast Language Poets.[1] This group includes Robert Grenier, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, and Leslie Scalapino.[1] The group shared an opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as "skepticism about the appropriation of truth by meaning".[1] They also distinguished themselves from the preceding New American Poets through an emphasis on self-reflexive experiences with language rather than the physical body.[1] 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).[12][13][14] 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).[15] 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."[16]
Watten's work has been translated into 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.[17] A chapbook consisting only of Plasma, trans. by Gherardo Bortolotti, came out in 2010.
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The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.[18][19]
As of 1996, Watten is married to the poet Carla Harryman and they have a son together.[20]
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