In this essay, I will offer an analytic account of the phenomenon sometimes known as Language poetry, a school of poets that, although conceived as a response to two roughly contemporaneous if incommensurable developments—the American government's involvement in the Vietnam War and the American university's enthusiastic reception of continental literary theory—is still active and visible well after the end of both.¹ By calling my argument analytic, I want first of all to distinguish it from critique.² Language poetry has survived both the historical situation it originally addressed and the intellectual framework that underwrites its practice; it promises to outlive as well the institutional ethos (that of the "voice centered" poetry writing workshop) whose dominance initially justified Language writers' sense of themselves as an embattled movement from the very moment of inception. The stylistic practices associated with Language poetry are increasingly central to American poetry in the present. In such a changed literary scene, critique seems not only too late (Language poetry having already triumphed over its detractors) but beside the point. The ever-widening appeal of a Language-informed poetics and the energy with which it has charged the scene of contemporary poetry suggests that the mere critique of Language poetry as historically belated or theoretically benighted must be missing something important about the work.

Nor, however, should analysis be thought synonymous with defense. For while the account I will give of Language poetry does provide what I take to be a compelling rationale for it, it nonetheless should not count as an explication or endorsement of the Language poets' own sense of their enterprise. Because I believe that Language poets have tended to resist or even to misdescribe some of the most serious and interesting implications of their own practice, I am under no illusions that the account I am about to offer will be appealing to them (or even that they will agree that it is their practice that I describe). Language poets have made dramatic claims for their 'experimental' and 'oppositional' poems as contributions to social justice and the reader's freedom. At the same time, Language poetry has understood itself to be itself a social enterprise—a 'provisional institution' that grounds 'an alternative system of valuation.'³ In reality, of course, the actual social arrangements that make up the ensemble of practices called Language poetry are hardly distinguishable, in their affections, affiliations, infighting, gossip, and institutional dynamics, from those that characterize past literary movements—or social life altogether. I will suggest that this disparity between theory and practice—between imagined and actual forms of collectivity—arises from a pair of contradictory commitments: to a radical concept of freedom on the one hand and to a repressive hypothesis of cultural determinism on the other. The theoretical assumptions that ground Language poetsanalyses of subject formation and of institutional power make their desire for freedom incoherent, leaving Language poetry at a familiar theoretical impasse that it has noted but to which it has not adequately responded.