Barrett Watten's poetry presents a dull surface. There is not much for the eye, the ear, the nose. Even a description of Barnaby Jones, contrasted with Dragnet, is done as dead-on earnest sociological analysis. There is obviously a brilliant mind behind all of this, but I don't quite get it as poetry.

Take a series of Silliman sentences from "Paradise." There is a poetic subject there: a guy who rides around the S.F. bay area on the bus, lifts weights, observes things, makes comments on the process of writing, etc... Observations are tightly focussed, visualized, witty. Watten, using a similar series of paratactic sentences, comes up with something like this:

"A car abandoned on a quiet street. Falling asleep continuously before they begin. The shooting widened to expire in the act. Index of fusion of large numbers of. Emerging workers occupy the gate. Repetition of yes and no."

There is none of that Pound/Williams concrete detail here. Nor does a poetic subject appear. There are syntactic breaks, but they don't lead to very interesting results. I read "Frame," a book of over 300 pages, several years ago. Picking it up again, nothing rings a bell; it is as if nothing registered with me. I've read enough of this kind of writing to understand what he is trying to do, but I have yet to be convinced.

Now, I'm sure that Watten avoids all of the things I'm looking for on purpose. I don't think he's trying to write like Silliman and simply failing. He doesn't want a poetic subject, for example: an "I" to which can be ascribed certain characteristics. And to be perfectly honest there are some quotable lines here and there. I just need more language in my language poetry.