[Wgcp-whc] Fwd: WGCP-R. Back minutes (10/05) and C. Bök readings (10/26)

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Mon Oct 15 23:33:25 EDT 2007 

Comrades,

I am forwarding the minutes from our most recent activities. Thanks to
Jean-Jacques for stepping in as guest-scribe.  Jean-Jacques also provides the
texts and contexts for our next session.

Best,
Richard Deming

----- Forwarded message from jean-jacques.poucel at yale.edu -----
    Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:19:17 -0400
    From: Jean-Jacques Poucel <jean-jacques.poucel at yale.edu>
Reply-To: Jean-Jacques Poucel <jean-jacques.poucel at yale.edu>
 Subject: WGCP-R. Back minutes (10/05) and C. Bök readings (10/26)
      To: Richard Deming <richard.deming at yale.edu>

Dear All,

Four brief announcements:

	1. Charles Bernstein reads at the Beinecke Library on Tuesday Oct 16
(Today) at 4pm (see you there, I hope);
	2. there are three attachment in this email; please print and read
them in preparation for our meeting on Oct 26;
	3. Christian Bök will visit the working group on Friday, November 2,
the day after his reading at the Beinecke Library.
	4. Copies of Eunoia are now available at the WHC; more will arrive
shortly.

Minutes from our last meeting :

On 5 October the working group met with author Rachel Tzvia Back
whose current reading tour had her traveling from Wellesley College
to New York City.  Our conversation was partly oriented by selected
readings from Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe
(Alabama, 2002) and, more substantially, by our reading of her fourth
volume of poems, On Ruins and Return: The Buffalo Poems (1999-2005)
(Shearsman, 2007).

Our discussion opened with ruminations on the decisive role Back
attributes to seeing an American buffalo in a Galilean landscape; the
surprising out-of-place character of the  bison remains central
throughout the book and there is intentional drift in the way it is
staged as an enigmatic signifier. Back described having had this
vision after pulling off the road to recover from heat and pregnancy
related nausea. At first, not yet knowing the gender of the child she
was carrying, Back referred to the vision in her poems by using the
impersonal-neutral pronoun, it. The buffalo becomes masculine in the
central section of the book, in part, says Back, because those poems
negotiate writing through an array of patriarchal violence, if also
determined by the birth of Daniel, Back's third child. In the
culminating sections, as the image takes on the freight of personal
grief related to Back's sister's illness, the buffalo is again
changed and rendered as female. That movement is emblematic of the
way the vision retraces a kind of personal, or intimate
transformation over the 5 years of the book's composition.

As our conversation developed it became clear that the "unsettling"
of landscape that Back writes about in relation to Howe has
influenced, to some degree, elements of Back's poetics, and that both
are made more complex by the historical situation of her voice as a
English language Israeli woman poet.  When pressed, Back acknowledged
that her use of the buffalo, as myth and symbol, engages a set of
implicit and explicit risks and that this appropriation problematizes
historical responsibility with respect to genocide, and the
systematic erasure of histories.

One poem makes some of these complexities clear by setting side by
side at the heart of the poem (at least) two parallel ruins, that of
Mi'ar (the Arab village near Back's residence) and the high plains
(former habitat of the buffalo). The poem is entitled
"(dispossessed)" and appears as follows on the page:

										Drought of years
										duration

										Longer than any

										In memory than any
										Memory

			Beneath															On a slope
  			Blackhills Judith													of Olive
			Ridge Highwood													trees wild Mint

			Mountains														Myrrh Anise red
			Sioux and Arapahoes												Anemone the people
			on short-grass plains												of Mi'ar

			in search of search for											in search of search for
			forage last Herds													Markings
			the stories solitary												of former homes

			White Buffalo													razed after the War
			who will lead them												and the Well
			to water															where it once stood


										I am writing this
										unrooted


										In the moment
										before
										[...]

If it was suggested that one can possibly compare modern-day Israel
to early America, it was also made absolutely clear that the use of
stories from both was a central concern for crafting the poems in
Back's book.

The ensuing discussion helped demarcate (and concatenate) a series of
boundaries and contradictions, and especially the question of the
personal as, and in contrast to, the political. That distinction—as
far it is experienced in the composition and reading of the poems—in
inflected around public events, many related to the second Intifada
(after Sept. 2000), as well as private, or more intimate, dramas,
and, the intersection of the two.

Such tension seemed acute in the terms by which Back herself accepts
and resists certain standard, locating labels. That is, she self
identifies as "English Language Israeli Poet" and not "American-
Israeli poet"--her rejection of the latter being inflected by a drive
toward local rootedness. Similarly--if quite different in timbre--
Back rejects the notion that she is an  "avant-garde poet," claiming
that her affinities with Howe are distinct from her appreciation of
DuPlessis. The categories of "witness poetry" and a "poetry of
domesticity" also found little shelter in our conversation —so
limited/limiting is the application of labels—though in discussing
the penultimate section of the book, there was a lively talk of
retreating into the intimacy of family life once the constancy of
violence related to the occupation overwhelms. This return to the
intimate sphere of family and love demarcates a fragile and longed
for safety zone. Our exchanges then explored what such safety would
means in terms of poems.

Paraphrasing Lorine Niedecker, Back said she had the impression that
"the lyric lies in ambush for me. I try to avoid it, but don't really
manage." This failure was largely seen as felicitous since the
lyrical qualities of the poems (from the crafting of sound to the
occasional moralizing) is so successful. As our conversation wended
back to the fact that history too lies waiting to ambush the lyric,
or any writing emanating from so fraught a historical event, Back
described an as of yet to come (ideal) poetic voice that could
sustain, ignore, undermine or counteract the surrounding pressures of
zealot certainty and give voice to the edges that are everywhere
silenced in a landscape where a no-person's-land is virtually
impossible, so intense  the debate, so high its stakes.

Perhaps that voice is already speaking.


Sincerely,
Jean-Jacques


ps-- In our next discussion we will interrogate the writings of
Christian Bök, beginning with his prize winning Eunoia, a word that
Bök defines as "beautiful thinking."

Here are the proposed Christian Bök readings for Oct 26 :

1. Eunoia. Copies of the book are now available for pick-up at the
WHC; the text is also available in a variety of other formats,
including streaming files (see list of links below).

2. Proposal for "Xenotext" sent by Bök for the purpose of our
discussion (attached below as word document "Xenotext")

3. Online interview in Postmodern Culture: http://
www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2voyce.html

4. Bök's essay: "Notes toward a Potential Robopotics" (PDF attached
below)

5. Dworking on conceptual writing:  http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html

6. and, a few short essays by Bök taken from the web, about poetry
online (attached below as Word document "WGCP_Bök_Sess.doc" -- for
easy printing)

7. Last but not least (perhaps first, since performance is so crucial
here) listen to Bök reading / enunciating a wide selection of
compositions, including Eunoia, and selections from his Cyborg Opera:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bok.html


EUNOIA
A videofile of  Bök reading the first chapter of Eunoia.
http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/media/gpp2002/bok-higgins.wmv

Eunoia... the whole text is available on-line here:
http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/eunoia/voile.html

(just click on the page after you're through reading it, the next one
will appear) and here too is Eunoia: http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html

Interview w/Bök regarding "Xenotext" (In Postmodern Culture):
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2voyce.html

Essay (introduction) on conceptual writing by Craig Dworkin:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html

Essay by Bök: On Nicholodeon by Darren Wershler-Henry:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bok/nickel.html

WikiBök: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k




  
  




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