[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 week’s 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 group’s 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 Zukofsky’s 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 Cavalcanti’s 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 Lang’s 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 Oppen’s “Of Being 
Numerous,” the long title poem that comes from the poet’s 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 
Eliot’s 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 one’s reading, making time a 
present condition in one’s 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 Yale’s 
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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