L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

With the letters of the word spaced by equal signs, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is primarily the title of an American avantgarde poetry founded by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews and published between 1978 and 1981. The poems and essays appearing in the journal come from authors that started writing in the late 1960s, raising major questions about the conditions of writing and the emergence of master discourses. The equal signs underline the status of the letters and their combination into the formation of words. Formally, it breaks the integrity of the word and encourages the reader to become aware of the artificiality of the sign. In continuity with this questioning of the sign, and in keeping with the idea that there is an arbitrariness to the functioning of language, the texts also undermine the conventions of grammar and syntactic organisation, the composition of paragraphs and the delusions of transparent discourse. In the political context of FEMINISM and the rise of minorities, the Language poets debunk ideologies that become enforced in the very structures of language, and attempt to evidence their surreptitious domination over the discourses prevalent in the mainstream sociocultural sphere.

The poets refuse the notion of a school of Language Poetry, and function as a loose network of similarly preoccupied authors with differing poetic practices. The main poets associated with the term include Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Nick Piombino and Tina Darragh, who produce texts based on disjunctive modes of writing and a focus on the materiality of the sign. Their poetics is, however, strongly linked to their modernist predecessors or nearcontemporaries, but with a preference for less central figures than Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot; the mentors of the Language poets are rather William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and the OBJECTIVISTS, as well as, among a younger generation, Jackson MacLow. The resulting poetry is deliberately challenging since it aims at emphasising the role of the reader in the very production of a text's meaning(s).