Over a quarter-century running roughly from 1971 (Robert Grenier's "I HATE SPEECH") to the "Writing from the New Coast" conference at SUNY Buffalo in 1993 and beyond, Language poetry has arguably been the most artistically successful, most controversial and least understood literary movement in the United States. Exegetical work from Marjorie Perloff and others continues to illuminate its achievement, but the recent scholarly turn has been toward social and cultural history, as evidenced by Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990
and Christopher Beach's Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution. Vickery, a research fellow at Sydney, Australia's Macquarie University, combines aesthetic and social analyses by focusing on specific poets and works and highlighting the work of women poets from outside the often male-dominated list of usual suspects. While Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, who get two apiece of the 18 short sections here, have both received a lot of critical attention, Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser, Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe are finally treated as equal citizens, making for an extraordinarily rich account of the small presses, the letters, the talks and the works that flew (and fly) among these superb writers. From praxis-based chapters like "Supporting a Scene: Tuumba Press" to text-based forays like "Models, Manifestoes, and Morphogenesis: The Role of Theory," Vickery never loses sight of the work or the personalities involved and renders them clearly and critically, making this a welcome enlargement of the temple. (Apr. 23)
Forecast:University libraries and course syllabi (English and women's studies especially) will be steady markets for this title. If shelved in the poetry section, it should certainly attract both the curious and the initiated, given the still- contentious pull of the "Language" tag and the strength of the work discussed.
