Zone: Correlations (1973 2021)

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, on Zone

Barrett Watten is a professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Total Syntax and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, winner of the 2004 René Wellek Prize. He coedited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement with Carrie Noland, and A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-1998 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive with Lyn Hejinian. A founding member of the Language school movement of poetry, his creative works include Frame: 1971-1990, Progress/Under Erasure, Bad History, and, in progress, Zone.

Contents 1 Period Style 11 2 War of Position 33 3 Question of Interpretation 65 4 Blue States (After Fearing) 69 5 Zone (Correlation) 83 6 The Annotated “ Plan B” 109 7 Media Literacy 141 8 Notzeit (After Hannah Hö ch) 147 9 The Meridian as Archive 177 10 Unthought 185 11 Orphé e in Translation 221 12 Some / Ruins 239 Notes / Sources / Publications 257