SOURCE: Emanuel, Lynn. “Language Poets, New Formalists, and the Techniquization of Poetry.¹” In Poetry after Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell, pp. 199-221. Ashland, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Emanuel explores the similarities and differences between the methods of Language Poets and those of the New Formalists, concluding that the two groups have much in common.

There has never been a society—until our own—in which all representations are available equally to any observer at any time. That we are rapidly approaching such a condition (or have reached it) is the result of complex social transformations: rising literacy, increasing urbanization, and the accelerating incitement to control all things, especially the forbidden, by making them subjects of discourse.²

That this is an age, among poets, of technique, method, formalisms (both traditional and experimental), is not only the subject of my essay, but its context. So sharp...