language poetry - its attention to the word - seems to be a natural movement in an age becoming digital. and now post-digitality is affecting analogue forms of art (painting s by vija celmins (see 21:art the sbs doco) or ross bleckner (see the excellent 'modern art in the common culture' by thomas crow). but their work reminds me as much of the supposedly highlanguage poets susan howe (cited by leves) and lyn hejinian as that of a younger generation (sounds like i know a whole generation ... i know bits. their work could be read as already postlanguage (i mean post language poetry not a poetry that is post language) - but what am i implying? im not implying so much as withholding an unexamined assumption that the postlanguage poem would be a return to a more humanist poetic (and perhaps celmins and bleckner are just postmodern - yet i think theres some analogy to be drawn). howe/hejinian may shudder at such a description - they may not - but there is a stronger sense of the personal political in their work (howe's use of historical material is a personalising one) than their male counterparts (bernstein, perelman, andrews). this could be said of poetry as a whole - though im sure thered be also sorts of complications and exceptions - there always are - but im not sure that this generalisation is true of the surrealists. the male surrealists seem more sentimental than the female.. mckenzie isnt sentimental - nor particularly surrealist - though perhaps theres something of aragon in the un/forced digital erotics of 'Using it'/'excorcising'/'More'(pp 63-69).