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PROGRESS

by Barrett Watten

The focus on Barrett Watten's oeuvre in the most recent issue of Aerial has fomented a reexamination of several of his pivotal poetical texts, such as the remarkable mid-eighties achievement of Progress:

"Here shows an author himself         With the head tilted back         Pictured unseeing,                            unaware, Locking in a prolonged seizure . . . ." "An angry farmer carrying a book                 And a stick,                         to learn what                 An imperialist in Taiwan is, Why not remember the lesson . . . " 

"Progress is a writing politics."
- Andrew Ross

Of Watten's Plasma/Paralleles/"X":

"These works argue for finer thought, by being so, poetic processes set in motion that manufacture fresh distillates, achieved particulars." - Geoffrey Young Of Watten's Critical Writing: "Total Syntax is a primary text for any understanding of the determining politics of the world in which we live, literally -- because poetics as politics is the determining imagination . . . .He has done what I had begun to think impossible . . . made articulate and accessible the decisive activity of our present writing."
- Robert Creeley