Barrett Watten

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Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten reading at the Prague Microfest in May 2011
Born	October 3, 1948 Long Beach, California
Occupation	Professor
Spouse	Carla Harryman
Academic background
Education	University of California, Berkeley University of Iowa
Academic work
Institutions	Wayne State University

Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he teaches modernism and cultural studies.

Watten was born in Long Beach, California in 1948, the son of a US Navy research physicist.^[1] As a child, he moved frequently, including time in Japan and Taiwan. He graduated high school in Oakland, California in 1965, and briefly attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] He graduated with a AB in biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley in 1969.^[2] While at Berkeley, he met fellow poet Robert Grenier,^[3] and participated in student protests against the Vietnam War.^[1] He then attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1972 with a MFA.^[2] He finished a Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1995.^[1]

In 1976, he and other poets founded the reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco that ran through 1980.^{[4][note 1]} From 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period.^[4]

In 1971, Watten and Robert Grenier began the poetry journal This,^[6] which he edited with Grenier for the first three years and then alone until 1982.^[7][8] In 1989, he began graduate studies at Berkeley, receiving a PhD in English in 1995.^[2] In 1995, the poetry magazine Aerial published a special issue about Watten.^[9] Between 1981 and 1998, Watten served as an editor for Poetics Journal along with Lyn Hejinian.^[10] In 2013, an anthology of essays from the journal was published, followed by an e-book of the entire journal's content in 2015.^[10]

Watten joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994.^[3] In 2019, some students reported Watten to the university administration for misbehavior and later published their collective testimonials in a blog, including allegations of Watten being "hostile, verbally abusive, and manipulative with female students".^[11] The university hired an independent investigator and removed him from teaching in November 2019.^[11][12] Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed grievances citing a lack of required due process and a restraint of free speech, and requested the restrictions be withdrawn.^[12] The details of the disciplinary action were published after a FOIA request, which was protested by Watten as "outrageous".^[12] Watten returned to teaching classes in 2023.^[7]

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Watten's poetry is associated with a loosely-affiliated group of avant-garde poets referred to as the West Coast Language Poets.^[1] This group includes Robert Grenier, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, and Leslie Scalapino.^[1] The group shared an opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as "skepticism about the appropriation of truth by meaning".^[1]

Since the early 1970s and up until today, the latter group of poets have been able to distinguish themselves from the preceding literary generations and movements, in particular the New American Poets, through an emphasis on self-reflexive experiences with language rather than the physical body.^[1] Watten's early creative work is collected in Frame (1971–1990), which appeared in 1997.^{[note 2]} Two book–length poems—Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991)—were republished with a new preface as Progress/Under Erasure (2004). Bad History, a book-length prose poem, appeared in 1998.

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). He has published three volumes of literary and cultural criticism: Total Syntax (1985);The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003); and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016).^[13][14][15] Watten is also co-author, with Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Steve Benson, and Bob Perelman of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006–2010).^{[16][note 3]}

He also co-edited A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) with Lyn Hejinian and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) with Carrie Noland.

The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.^[17][18]

Watten is married to poet (and collaborator) Carla Harryman.^[19]

• Faculty webpage
• Barrett Watten.net