Аннотация:The paper explores Russian Formalism’s impact on literary theories and practices of the Language school in American poetry. Poets of this school were interested in the Formalists mainly due to their connections with the poetry of the Russian Futurism. Yet the theoretical thought of the Formal School was one of the main inspirations for “Language poets”, in advocating for a new language-centered material poetics. Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie and his own techniques in literary writing had a direct influence on LanPo’s sense of literary style and strategies (in the writings of Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and some others). The value of the Formalists was in their social orientation: the principles of MLK and OPOYAZ were reinvented in the new conditions of American alternative poetics of the 1970–1980s. The paper also accounts for the resonances of Russian Futurism in neo-avant-garde American poetry, as well as for correspondences between Language Poetry and Russian postmodernism (Conceptualism and Metarealism).