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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Frame (1971-1990)

Barrett Watten

Out of Print

A Sun & Moon title.

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For two decades, Barrett Watten has occupied a singular, foreground position in American Writing. He has expanded the very definition of poetry and opened the genre to history, philosophy, and politics.

In Frame, Watten crosses shifting cultural terrains by means of deliberate engagements in language. His thought, embodied with visionary clarity, passes forcefully between differing modes of experience. His innovative techniques recall the poetics of André Breton's points sublimes.

Frame brings together six previously published works from two decades—Opera—Works, Decay, 1-10, Plasma/Paralleles/"X," Complete Thought and Conduit—along with two previously uncollected texts—City Fields and Frame. Each of these works constructs a horizon of language at the boundary between politics and art.

As Ron Day has summarized, "I would be hard pressed to think of an art writing which is more engaged with the relation of poetic method and contemporary political and cultural materials than Barrett Watten's."