[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Kent Johnson Minutes

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

4/4/05

Dear Group Members,

First a reminder that we are scheduled to meet this Fri at 1.45.  I 
will say more about that at the end of the e-mail.  But first, let me 
recount our last session.

On Fri. March 25, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 
were joined by poet, editor, translator, and literary provocateur Kent 
Johnson to discuss his work.  Johnson.  Members may recall that we 
discussed a poem by Johnson last fall in conjunction with our 
conversation about poetry and Abu Ghraib. Although well known for his 
various translations principally from the Spanish of such poets as 
Jaime Saenz and others, Johnson is certainly most well known for his 
central role in what became the controversy of Araki Yasusada.  As I 
recounted in the prior installment of the minutes, in the mid 1990s, 
Yasusada was initially believed to be a rediscovered Japanese poet who 
wrote about the horrors of Hiroshima as one bearing direct witness to 
the events and their aftermath. It eventually came out that there was 
no actual Yasusada and that he was by all accounts a cleverly conceived 
heteronym. It is generally held that Johnson is the author of that 
heteronym, though he resolutely never claims to be so.  

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects to the discussion was that 
Johnson continually located Yasusada in ethical terms.  He stated that 
the person writing as Yasusada (who he insisted wished never to be 
identified so as to displace or negate the authorial centrality of 
Yasusada) wrote out of a overwhelming need to address—-via the poems in 
the collection Double Flowering—-Hiroshima and its continued impact on 
the world.  This of course raised the question of who gets to represent 
events of this magnitude and especially such ones imbued by such 
tragedy and whether or not art, poetry, and fiction might not be able 
to bear witness more compellingly than “actual” eyewitness accounts.  
If all acts of representation are subject to distortion, then the 
authority that presence lends acts of witnessing may be no more or no 
less suspect than wholly fictive representations.  The group discussed 
this while also considering the ways that such claims set up a slippery 
slope whereby eyewitness accounts can be discredited because they 
aren’t sufficiently “artful.”

However, Johnson’s situating of the Yasusada texts within the realm of 
ethics of representation was surprising as quite usually the work is 
read as being a kind of “trap hoax” in which the dubious politics of 
large parts of literary institutions (primarily the academy and 
publishers) were critiqued and satirized.  In large part, the Yasusda 
controversy is read as an indictment of those people who “fell for the 
hoax” because they wanted so much to have “discovered” an authentic 
poetry of witness. Readings of Yasusada as an avant garde cabal see it 
as an attack on those who fetishize authenticity and leap at any poetry 
that serves identity politics.  We discussed the ways that 
characterizing Yasusada in terms of a trap hoax might set up a 
situation where the heteronym is seen as a means of exploiting 
Hiroshima, which would be antithetical to the way Johnson had described 
the impulse and intent behind the work.  Johnson, who admitted his 
admiration for Pessoa, the master of numerous heteronyms, never closed 
the distance between himself and Yasusada, maintaining a distinction 
throughout the conversation. He also discussed his belief that fiction 
is the next frontier for poetry.  This would entail something more than 
simply adopting a persona, which never becomes anything more than a 
mask or act of ventriloquism.  An entire fictive context for poetic 
utterance would allow for new possibilities for the way that poetry 
undertakes representation and how it disinters the work from the 
biography of the writer.  This would not necessarily mean the 
destabilizing of authorship, but would allow a rethinking of how the 
author function might do more work if it were considered part of a 
poet’s artifice, context, and composition. All agreed that Johnson’s 
visit sparked an extremely useful and provocative discussion of what is 
at stake in representing events of such magnitude as Hiroshima and the 
Holocaust and what role poetry might have in thinking through possible 
ethical responses so that art remains reflective rather than 
directive.  Our thanks go out to Kent Johnson for his visit.  I should 
mention that the next collection of Yasusada poems will appear later 
this spring from Combo Books in Providence RI.

On this Friday, April 8th we will devote a session to the work of the 
French poet Pierre Alferi and will look specifically at the 
translations into English rendered by American poet Cole Swenson.  
Alferi is a particularly difficult poet who also happens to be the son 
of the late Jacques Derrida.  We will look primarily at OXO, which 
is “divided into seven sections. Each section is divided into seven 
poems. And each poem describes some aspect of modern Paris in seven 
short lines (plus an italicized coda which announces the noun or phrase 
that is described in the poem proper). What's more, each line is seven 
syllables long.” A brief review can be found at 
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005spring/alferi.shtml
Copies of the Alferi will be available sometime Tuesday afternoon at 
the Whitney Humanities Center.

This session on Swenson’s translations will help prepare us for a visit 
from the poet herself.  In addition to being a translator, Swensen is a 
poet who is on the faculty of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop.  
Swenson, a recent National Book Award Finalist, is one of the strongest 
and most erudite poets of her generation.  Her visit will be a special 
session and will occur on Friday April 15th.  A packet of her work will 
be available this Monday. A useful interview can be found here 
http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2003/Interviews/
interviews.htm

Also a there’s a helpful page provided by the Academy of American Poets:
http://www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=721

As the conversation with Cole Swensen will touch on translation and 
poetic praxis, feel free to invite interested parties.

“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets 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