"There are many reasons why the Language poets, and their fellow travelers, like Palmer, shift the..."

“There are many reasons why the Language poets, and their fellow travelers, like Palmer, shift the terms of their analogies to linguistics from a Spicerian investigation of language as magic to a newer investigation of scale-shifting and juxtaposition as tests of literacy. One has to do with a sense that capital itself had both extended its reach and intensified its encroachments into psychic existence, that capital itself had grown both ‘bigger’ and better able to reach into the crawl spaces of individual citizen-consumers’ psyches.”

- from “Language” in Spicer and After (excerpted from The Matter of Capital, by Christopher Nealon) Nealon has made a consistent argument about the invasive nature of capital in American culture. And, most interesting to me, has traced it from a Pound/Auden collision of approaches through Ashbery and up to the Language poets. His argument is that poetry has been colliding with the vastly powerful American capitalism throughout the 20th Century. And I am especially interested in this place where poets push back in a Spicerian way (“Language is magical! Stay off my kind of language!”) or a Langpo way (“You, capitalism, disrupt my complacent use my language!”). It is to Nealon’s credit that these arguments feel naturally fit to the tradition preceding them.