SOURCE: Watten, Barrett. “Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” In In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, pp. 599-612. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

In the following essay, Watten focuses on Surrealism in postwar American art and how the Language Poets incorporated it into their methodology.

Method in American art after the war incorporated numbers of Surrealist concepts. Traces of automatism and objective chance fuse in the renegotiated value for “the self.” That recognition and the self are equivalent terms is coded into a wide range of art work. Logically, “the method that is no method,” which so many artists have claimed, is consistent with the dominant ideology, aesthetic and otherwise, of the time. The method of no objects, the method of many objects, and the method of the reconstituted object all have their postwar forms, as critiques. The dialectical frame is absent...