[Wgcp-whc] WG--Poetics, minutes for 10-1
richard.deming at yale.edu
richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue Oct 5 14:28:55 EDT 2004
10/5/04
I will offer a brief summary of our special session and then a longer
report on last weeks regular meeting. At the end, I will give a sense
of this next regular meeting. Note that there is a special meeting
planned for Thursday Oct. 14. This will be a visit to the Beinecke
library to look at materials relevant to the groups interests and
concerns.
Special Meeting:
On Weds the 22nd the group met at 4 PM to have a discussion with poet,
translator, and Zukofsky scholar Abigail Lang (UNIVERSITÉ PARIS III-
SORBONNE NOUVELLE). Professor Lang, in town after attending the
Zukofsky conference, gave a fascinating reading of A-9 and its
relationship to the conventions used by Cavalcanti and his canzione
sequence donna mi priegha. Prof. Lang revealed the incredibly
baroque, even mathematically precise (if at times arcane)
infrastructure of Zukofskys poem, showing the various repetitions
internally, between lines, and amongst the various stanzas, most of
which were exactly patterned in accord with the tonal and rhythmic
sequences in Cavalcantis work. The group as a whole was amazed to
see that such an abstract structure existed below the surface, since we
had spent so much time on the poem already. Professor Lang thus was
able a whole new dimension to the poem, even for those quite familiar
with it already. One could not ask for a more thorough even
encyclopedic presentation from Professor Lang who had followed up every
conceivable formal and lexical allusion or reference. The group deeply
appreciated her Herculean efforts. The session concluded with a
viewing of Professor Langs artistic collaboration. She provided the
poetic text for a fascinating computer graphic/ film animation piece
entitled Sluice (a suite scored for multiple voices) that brought
together statistics, economics, and lyric poetry in rich and compelling
ways.
Regular Meeting:
On Friday Oct 1, the group met to discuss George Oppens Of Being
Numerous, the long title poem that comes from the poets 1969 Pulitzer
winning volume. Topics of discussion ranged on the difficulties of
setting the locating the speaker (a term which might only be nominal in
this case of this text) especially in terms of a possible addressee.
As a place to begin, we noted the frequently indeterminate nature of
the pronouns throughout the text. For instance, in a prose section
appearing at the end of the first section, a you is suddenly
addressed but since it appears in a section marked off by quotations
marks, it becomes difficult to say whether the you is the addressee,
the speaker, and beyond that one might ask about how a reader might be
sympathetically invested in that you. However, given that the poem
posits itself of Being Numerous, a title that suggests that it is
both an exploration into the condition of being numerous and also
arises out of (and thus belongs to) that situation, the shifting
pronouns seem part of that exploration.
We also discussed the appearance of quotations that appear in various
parts of the thirty-four sections of the poem. In most cases, it
becomes difficult to say what the source material is, except for the
last instance a prose passage occurring at the conclusion of the text,
which is in a sense signed by Whitman, in that his name and a specific
date appears with the cited material. This montage of outside voices
woven into the text of the poem, some members of the group, suggested,
worked in a very different way than they might in Williams or Pound.
Additionally, given the fractal and fracturing of its meditations, not
to mention elements of its style and subject matter reminded some of
Eliots work. One suggestion was made that the fragmentary nature of
the short sometimes abrupt lines brought to the fore a sense of space
and time in the experience of reading the poem. The lexical marks on
the page sparse and austere means that a great deal of white space
surrounds the words, as it does in a Paul Celan poem. Paradoxically
though, the short lines and irregular rhythms, not to mention the
irregularities of the syntax, slowed down ones reading, making time a
present condition in ones consciousness while reading. The
repetitions of lines that recur throughout the sections also mark time
on one hand while possibly offering a principle of cohesion. We agreed
one thing that needed more attention was an investigation into how the
repeated words and phrases might work differently or similarly in
different sections. The repetitions, austerity, and numbered sections
also had the effect of making evident the cutting or editing together
of the various parts. This then has the double sense of suturing in
which the sections (or even the various parts of each sentence) are
brought together and by which consciousness (of self against a larger
collective) is determined.
There was also a discussion of the poem as being invested, possibly, in
a phenomenological meditation on subjects and their relationship to the
world and things in the world. The very opening of the poem There are
things/We live among and to see them/Is to know ourselves. This was
part of a larger conversation about how the abstractions of the poem
seemed grounded in particularities resulting in a tension that bears
further thinking about. The general agreement that the elegance and
specificity of the poem made its reflection and meditation compelling
and for some great.
Next Regular Meeting (October 15):
For the next regular meeting, we will shift to a more thematic
discussion. We will read a piece Selections from Jean-Michel
Espitallier and Dominique Fourcade. Espitallier will be visiting Yales
French department for a talk the next week on Oct. 19. Fourcade, like
Espitallier, wrote a poem this summer about Abu Grabe images and we
will look at these two texts along with a poem by Kent Johnson dealing
with the same subject. In additions we will look at short essays by
Susan Sontag as a background for discussing poetry and the ways that it
might deal with current political events and how it might (or might
not) be able to represent the horrors of war. I will e-mail everyone
when the copies are ready to be picked up.
The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met every other
Friday at 1:45 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric
poetry. All are welcome to attend.
---R. Deming, group secretary
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