Born in Long Beach, California, Watten graduated from highschool in Oakland, California, and attended MIT and then UC Berkeley, where he took an AB in Biochemistry in 1969. It was there he met poets Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman and studied with Josephine Miles, who recommended him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he received an MFA in English (Program of Creative Writing) in 1972. While at Iowa, Watten self-published and printed his first collection Radio Day in Soma City (1971) in a letterpress volume, unpaginated (25pp. approx.) in an edition of 75 copies, and began co-editing This with Grenier.

Watten later returned to the Bay Area and began to form relations with some experimental writers who would become known as the Language School. This 'school' was not a group precisely, but a tendency in the work of many of its so-called practitioners (see article on Language poets). Thus, Barrett Watten is one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, editing This and Poetics Journal (with Lyn Hejinian) two of the crucial vehicles and networks for the dissemination of Language Poetry.

Watten edited This, one of the central little magazines of the Language movement, and co-edited Poetics Journal, one of its theoretical venues. In 1986, he returned to UC Berkeley, earning his PhD in English in 1996. His published work includes Bad History (1998) and Frame (1971—1990) which appeared in 1997. Frame brings together six previously published works of poetry from two decades: Opera...Works ; Decay ; 1—10 ; Plasma/Paralleles/"X" ; Complete Thought and Conduit – along with two previously uncollected texts – City Fields and Frame. Two of his books – Progress (1985) and Under Erasure (1991) – were republished with a new preface, as Progress | Under Erasure (2004).

Watten is co-author, with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991) . He has published two volumes of literary and cultural criticism, Total Syntax (1985) and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003) which was awarded the René Wellek Prize in 2004. Watten earned his Phd at the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. His dissertation was entitled: Horizon Shift: Progress and Negativity in American Modernism.

In late 2006 saw the publication of the first volume of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006). This work is described as "an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. The project will consist of 10 volumes in all". In 2007, Martin Richet translated into French Plasma / Parallèles / «X», a volume that joins together three long poems which originally appeared in a chapbook by Tuumba Press in 1979.