SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's ‘Albany,’ Susan Howe's ‘Buffalo’.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 3 (spring 1999): 405-34.

In the following essay, Perloff explores the styles and themes of several of the Language Poets, focusing on their development of “difference”—or an individual lyrical identity—in their works.

The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body—in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.

—Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description”¹

One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the cardinal principle—of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England, usually labeled “linguistically innovative poetries”)² has been the dismissal of “voice” as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface to...