A sampling of our Language poets’ poems (week 8)

Here are some fascinating options for starting into our week 8 syllabus:

Lyn Hejinian writes a prose-poem autobiography, following her life year by year—but her sentences are not in chronological order, nor are they of consistent types of sentences.

Bob Perelman writes an elegy for a poet-editor friend who is dying of AIDS, and for each line he writes he cuts off after five words, leaving every line as an open or unfinished sentence.

Harryette Mullen writes a sequence of poems—many of them homophonic lists—in which she imagines the poet sleeping with a dictionary.

Ron Silliman takes a ride for many on the Bay Area “BART” train, on Labor Day, and writes a many-paged prose poem consisting of a single sentence that attempts to describes everything he see, hears, and thinks.

The Language poets! These poets and more. Go HERE to see it all.