Barrett Watten is a professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Total Syntax and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, winner of the 2004 René Wellek Prize. He coedited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement with Carrie Noland, and A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-1998 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive with Lyn Hejinian. A founding member of the Language school movement of poetry, his creative works include Frame: 1971-1990, Progress/Under Erasure, Bad History, and, in progress, Zone.