[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Cole Swensen minutes
richard.deming at yale.edu
richard.deming at yale.edu
Thu Apr 21 12:16:17 EDT 2005
April 21, 2005
Dear Friends,
First a reminder that we are indeed meeting to discuss the work of
Robert Creeley tomorrow at our usual place. More on that at the end of
the minutes.
On Friday, April 15, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and
Poetics convened for a special session, a discussion with Cole Swensen,
one of the most important younger poets in the U.S. The discussion
centered, at least at first, around Swensens essay Garden War, which
had been circulated earlier. Swensen puts the two phenomena-war and
sculpted gardens-into conjunction with one another because (as she
notes in her essay) she noticed in the process of writing poems about
gardens the idea of war kept inserting itself. In her essay and in our
discussion, a kind of nondiscursive discourse was used. In that sense
the work of bringing war and gardens together was a thought experiment
rather than a specific, logical argument. Swensen explained that for
her very often the process of putting two concepts or tropes alongside
one another might be made to reveal a perspectival shift because of the
juxtaposition of two radically distinct things (not discontinuous with
Walter Benjamins notion of dialectical images). This might be one
advantage that poetry has over rhetoric in that it suggests
possibilities rather than explains a psoition or proposition
didactically.
In illustration of her sense of the connection between gardens, war,
and perhaps poetry, Swensen showed slides of the massive garden Vaux-le-
Vicomte, designed by Andre Le Notre (1638-1715) that is created (or we
might say composed) with a one point-perspective in place. That means
that the gardens full effect is designed to be seen from one specific
vantage point and in that way is conceived not unlike a painting. To
achieve this effect the architect made use of anamorphosis, or a kind
of controlled visual distortion used to compensate for the distortion
that occurs because of refraction, perspective, and so forth. A useful
primer for understanding anamorphosis (with a series of examples) can
be found at www.anamorphosis.com
Although at first any conection mbetween agrdens and war might seem
counterintuitive, at the same time, it became clear that there were
some links between war and gardens that did arise by way of our
conversation in that both possibily can be seen as being anti-natural
with both evincing a will to power, no matter how benign landscape
architecture might otherwise seem. Given the example of Le Notre, the
architect exercises his dominion over the material, natural world but
does so even at the level of sense perception. These gardens are not
bucolic or pastoral but are evidence of Reasons attempt to overwhelm
nature. Moreover, there are any number of arguments about the
aesthetics of warfare that might also echo through the kind of
incredibly elaborate and control gardening that we discussed. Although
we touched on the fact that poetry seems to touch on both war and the
garden, we didnt pursue the ways that poetry might be complicit in
these anti-natural tendencies. Swensen did suggest that poems offer a
kind of anamorphosis or counter-distortion that manipulates perception
(in a non-moral way) so that one can see the world more clearly and
directly by seeking at a nontraditional or unconventional, even
indirect way, of looking at a thing.
The conversation shifted to discussing the limitations of logical
arguments, which only allow one type of perspective based as it is on
certain formal and rhetorical conventions. Swensen said that poetry
was able to avoid having to make a definitive stance. It was pointed
out that there are prose poems in her body of work and that there is a
brief essay in her book park that could be read as prose. Perhaps her
essay Garden War is closer to prose poem, then, following a logic of
image and intuition, which might be one way out of the will to power
previously cited. In any event, Swensen discussed the ways that poetry
can pursue even to the point of exhaustion a single object or trope.
This leads to the fascinating question of what follows in the wake of
that exhaustiondoes the trope get discarded (as Wallace Stevens
suggests) or does then fresh, new unapprehneded relations between
things (a la Shelley) become possible?
We ended on a discussion of the current state of contemporary poetry,
or what Jean-Jacques Poucel calls the extreme contemporary. There
was a suggestion that there is unsettled sense of what be construed as
a aesthetic shift from the conservative values of what Charles
Bernstein calls official verse culture being more or less predominant
to a more dynamic, open-ended, disjunctive poetics being coin of the
realm. The group discussed the problems of various labels (such
as avant-garde or experimental); innovate seems the least
problematic, despite it being vague and somewhat self-congratulatory.
However, Swensen did say that her sense of the term suggest a poetics
that is principally motivated by a restlessness and that the poet
herself or himself feels an imperative to jettison not just tradition
or genealogy but to beyond even his or her own impulses. Thus, the
exhaustion Swensen mentioned earlier seems to operate not only
thematically or in terms of subject matter but at the very level of
form itself.
It was a fascinating and dynamic conversation and we greatly thank Cole
Swensen for joining our group. Our only regret is that we didn't ask
her to read more poems. Just as a note, she will be returning to Yale
next fall to read at the Beinecke as part of the Yale Collection of
American Literatures reading series, curated by Nancy Kuhl.
The group will be meeting tomorrow at 1.45 in the WHC for our last
session of the academic year. We will be discussing the work of Robert
Creeley. The reading packet is available at the WHC and there is no
shortage of work to be found online (see the previous e-mail for
specific links).
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
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