Barrett Watten

Quite wonderful.

"Avant-Garde Poetics of the Zone" uploaded and sent to EAM.

As it keeps getting worse over here, I continue to work on organizing a session on transpositions of the avant-garde, definitively out of the country, in Stockholm September 2-4. See: bit.ly/45dSPvK

Call for papers for EAM Stockholm: "Avant-Garde Poetics of the Zone." Hoping for a wide array of topics to make the sessions a kind of "interzone" in their own right. Deadline: January 30. bit.ly/45dSPvK

It appears that none of the MLA "Just in Time" sessions appear in the print catalogue. Thus, if you are going to MLA or checking out what is being presented, use the online listings. Here is the link for Sunday January; we are on at 8:30: mla.confex.com/mla/2026/mee...

MLA program is out with our Just-in-Time session "Twentieth-First-Century Jackson Mac Low" NOT LISTED! Here is a link and a screen capture of the online program; please pass the word. Time and place are Sunday, January 11, 8:30–9:45 AM, MTCC 714A, Toronto. mla.confex.com/mla/2026/mee...

My poem "Media Literacy" and photos from No Kings, April 2025, up at Chant de la Sirene Journal. www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/barrett-watt...

Steve Benson reading for Anti-Tyranny. Check out the Chant de la Sirene Journal itssue itself in the link: www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/issue-5-onty....

Zone: correlations (1973 2021) event page: 20% off from Chax Press through December. www.facebook.com/events/16639...

Balzac in Paris.

Simone Fattal recommends Zone.

Pubication announcement / Paris reading 11/25.

Here is the sale price line for ordering Zone: correlations from Chax: bit.ly/3LUJVMI

Publication day for Zone: correlations; first appearance in a bookstore (Third Mind Books, Ann Arbor).

Change the narrative so that it outlasts the news cycle.

Arrived and very beautiful! Very literary as well. Can't wait to spend time with it.

ACCEPTED! MLA TORONTO, JANUARY 8–11, 2026

“Twentieth-First-Century Jackson Mac Low”
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University

This special session tracks the work of poet, composer, playwright, and performer Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004).

With Clarinda Mac Low, Tyrus Miller, Michael O'Driscoll, BW.

You do need to see that video. I won't post it here, but I could have. It's easy to find.

It's not just that the NYT chose to ignore the massive protests -- 300,000 in their city alone! -- but that the piece they *did* run on the front page about Democrats is almost cartoonishly bad in how much it whines that they're just not doing what A.G. Sulzberger LXVII wants them to do.

Yes, I was there. No Kings march in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Crowd size 5K-8K and very good-spirited, if a bit polite. My "Siempre Antifascista" t-shirt, made In China, was the only such I saw.

My morning's work was to update what I've been doing in "Language Writing and Beyond," uploading some narrative framing that verges on polemic to introduce the take-home exam I gave to students last week. Enjoy, and why not, what responses might you have? bit.ly/3WLwH74

Please add: @thisdirect.bsky.social Thanks!

Page 12.5. Academic Contexts II. bit.ly/46maTEI

Page 12.4: Academic Contexts II. Continuing my effort to answer the "blog"; the difficulty continues. bit.ly/3JI1zSQ

Page 12.3: Academic Contexts I. Off my desk and into virtual space: my effort to take down the anonymous blog, answering the seven faculty who posted on it. This is difficult material, as are and were the times. bit.ly/4pmVgEL

I am uploading my syllabus, minus boilerplate plus some notes about my course and teaching in general. Fourteen weeks is not enough, obviously! I am looking ahead and back but also to the ongoing middle of Language writing and its offshoots, controversies, and reception after 2000. bit.ly/4n2TpCJ

Document 108: Global Poetics CFP. Proposal for a multi-session seminar at ACLA, Montréal, February 26–March 1, 2026 with link to portal; deadline October 2. Organized by Barrett Watten and Lauri Scheyer. Circulate widely! bit.ly/4mzKg4K

Due to popular demand: a page of "Language Notes" on my fall teaching, and links to pdfs of the eight parts of Eleana Kim's excellent history of Language writing up to 1994. Thanks to Nada Tzirre Gordon for keeping it alive up to this very moment. bit.ly/4oEm56N

Seminar is up: "Radical Particularity and Global Poetics: Critical Regions of Cultural Transmission"; click here: bit.ly/47p0okX