Zone: correlations (1973 2021) by Barrett Watten

Description

ISBN 978-1-946104-60-1  264 pages  Poetry/Hybrid Writing  Trade Paperback Edition / First Edition

Zone: correlations connects twelve poetic experiments that extract and recombine language from its limitless archives, generating new meanings for public and private life in our distressed present.

ZONE: correlations (1973 2021)

To prove to myself that I’m not quite dead, I reread Barrett Watten’s “Plan B.” In all innocence he can call that piece of thinking a manifesto. A manifesto as stirring as the Manifeste du Surréalisme had been when it appeared in 1924. These texts are territories: you can walk in them, you can drive, or fly over. “Plan B,” among other things, already challenges artificial intelligence. It beats it, because I doubt that artificial intelligence will concern itself with man’s destiny.       — Etel Adnan

Usually, when a book of poetry has a date range on the cover spanning almost fifty years, I assume I am looking at a “selected” or “collected” poems. Let the reader not be fooled: Zone is something new. The correlations in this remarkable book take parataxis on mind-spinning trips across time, place, genre, medium, language, and author, producing strikingly emotional results. There are affecting pieces where personal and collective losses appear, touch, and wink away; there are larger canvases on which whole literary and social histories are re-understood and put in new motion; there are notes which carry their own emotional power. Throughout, there is the characteristic Watten tone, the reader’s building sense that the cool, polished surfaces of these lines are somehow, and barely, managing to contain a kind of analytic fury.        — David Kellogg

Where Bruce Andrew’s work bares the device (of social oppression) at the lexical and phrasal levels, Barrett Watten’s bares the device (of something more recalcitrant and thus even more devastating) at the structural/semantic level. Andrews shows how fucked up the language with which groups speak; Watten shows how tragic and fucked up our very structures of thought are.       — Lyn Hejinian

BARRETT WATTEN: Professor of English at Wayne State University; poet, critic, and editor of “newer” American poetries from the 1970s to the present; author of Frame (1971–1990); Bad History; Progress/Under Erasure; Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты; co-author of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography; author of acclaimed critical works such as Total Syntax; The Constructivist Moment (Rene Wellek Prize); and Questions of Poetics; subject of the edited volume Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory (Aerial 8).