This chapter introduces the controversial movement known as Language poetry, one of the most significant, influential avant-garde poetry movement of the later twentieth century. It traces Language poetry’s origins and examines its theoretical, aesthetic, and political commitments. The chapter explores the fierce debates surrounding Language poetry’s rise and its institutionalization and canonization, and its outsized influence. It discusses some of the major features of Language poetics, including its radical experimentation with form and its postmodernist attitudes about the nature of language and the self. The chapter looks closely at work by a number of leading practitioners of Language poetry, including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Susan Howe.

This chapter traces multiple genealogies for the contemporary “lyric essay,” from the American memoir boom of the 1990s to the experimental writings of language poets, practitioners of postcolonial and Black diasporic thought such as Édouard Glissant and M. NourbeSe Philip, and writers who combine lyric and essayistic writing such as Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Khapil.