Progress/Under Erasure

Progress/Under Erasure re-presents in a new edition two innovative long poems by one of the best-known poets and critics associated with “Language” writing. Upon its original publication in 1985, Progress was greeted with enthusiasm and public debate. Its linguistically charged, emotionally relentless, and culturally reflexive nonnarrative form was pitched against the media saturation and political banality of the Reagan era. If Progress is a nonnarrative directed toward the end of history, Under Erasure (published in a limited edition in 1991) was written during its purported realization at the end of the Cold War in 1989, and event it records.

Barrett Watten is the author of Frame: 1971-1990 (Sun & Moon Press, 1997 [available through Green Integer]), Bad History, and Zone (in progress). He has participated in two multiauthored experimental works—Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and The Grand Piano (ongoiong). His collections of critical essays on modern and contemporary poetics appeared as Total Syntax and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, which was awarded the 2004 René Wellek Prize. He teaches modernist studies and poetics at Wayne State University.

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