A date is supposed to pin a day down, yet Barrett Watten's "Today's Date" never tells us what day it is. It offers the raw material of one: trucks starting up, fog, cyclists, a marsh, a tower. Its central idea is that a day, like a poem, is assembled from "detachable items," and that the only honest response is to admit the assembly. Watten is generally counted among the Language poets, who treat words as material to be handled rather than as a clear window onto experience. This poem fits that approach, and it is easier to read once you watch it being built.
The opening shows the method. "Pick up on grand torque-suitably an / abstract reference" sounds like an instruction to oneself, a note about where to begin. Hyphens do the work of dashes and make the grammar hinge and stall. In "Can-needs must-be / inclusive," the idiom "needs must" gets wedged between "Can" and "be," so the sentence is interrupted before it finishes. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The rhythm comes from clipped fragments and from line breaks that fall at awkward moments: "so hard to / get across," "the / deserted sports palace," "air plane" split into two words. "Get across" quietly describes the poem's own problem, since the "latent charms" of an experience are hard to communicate.
The middle of the poem turns to landscape, and it is a landscape in the middle of fading. Trucks move "all around the edges of the town," monuments are "encased in fog," and the marsh is "slipping back in over the faltering road." Human structures look temporary, with nature reclaiming them. A "deserted sports palace" is a grand building with nobody in it, while a line of bicyclists streams past, ignoring it. The poem never names the place, so the scene stays general, like a composite of mornings.
Labor is also in the picture. The "day-laborers" make "contributions" toward a "colonial / bamboo tower." The word "colonial" suggests, though the poem does not explain, that monuments are built by people who rarely appear in the monument's story. Then the poem's thinking about history gets stranger. Each generation of "monumentality" has its own relation to "air plane, street lights, noise in wind," but the generations "crowd each other out, until / no sequence-nothing wiggles in the void." Time stops being a line and becomes a pile. What remains is "flat space," where "you" wander in streets with "no apparent movement."
The pronoun "you" matters here. It is both the reader and a general self, someone caught in a "cause / and linked condition." Watch imagery follows ("Delicate / balance to adjust, mainsprings"), with passive, agentless verbs: "cycled out, / carried down, moved around, sent ahead." Things get passed along and nobody seems to be passing them. Then the poem speeds up into its most rhythmic line: "You snap back, you place it, you name it, / you use it, you eat." The verbs run from noticing to naming to using to consuming, as if making meaning were a kind of appetite. For a moment the fragments click into a pattern, and the heat of "morning's sluggish heat" closes the loop with the "haze" at the start.
The ending is the poem's most careful move. "I could say now I'm here, I have arrived" is the first and only "I," and it is conditional. The speaker refuses the satisfying claim of arrival and settles for something plainer: "The work / is itself, you have an honest thing to make." The sentence is almost a tautology, which is the point. The work is not a symbol of something else, and its value lies in being made.
That is why the poem matters. Many poems present a finished experience for the reader to admire, but this one hands over the parts and the job of assembly. It makes difficulty a form of honesty. Read this way, "Today's Date" may also be a pun, since a date can be an appointment as well as a day. The poem sets up a meeting with the reader, and the reader has to do the work to keep it.