Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches modernism and cultural studies.

Early life and education Watten was born in Long Beach, California, in 1948, the son of a US Navy physician. As a child, he moved frequently, including time in Japan and Taiwan. He graduated high school in Oakland, California, in 1965, and briefly attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While at Berkeley, Watten met fellow poet Robert Grenier, and participated in student protests against the Vietnam War. From 2006 to 2010 ten members of the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period. which he edited with Grenier for the first three years and then alone until 1982. In 1989, he began graduate studies at Berkeley, receiving a PhD in English in 1995. In 2013, an anthology of essays from the journal was published, followed by an e-book of the entire journal's content in 2015.

Watten joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994. The university hired an independent investigator and removed him from teaching in November 2019. Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed grievances citing a lack of required due process and a restraint of free speech, and requested the restrictions be withdrawn. Two book–length poems—Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991)—were republished with a new preface as Progress/Under Erasure (2004). Bad History, a book-length prose poem, appeared in 1998.

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). He has published three volumes of literary and cultural criticism: Total Syntax (1985);The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003); and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016). Watten is also co-author, with Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Steve Benson, and Bob Perelman of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006–2010).

Watten co-edited A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) with Lyn Hejinian and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) with Carrie Noland.

Awards and recognition The American Comparative Literature Association awarded Watten the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.

Personal life Watten is married to poet Carla Harryman.