From rdeming at me.com Sun Nov 1 22:03:17 2009 From: rdeming at me.com (Richard Deming) Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 22:03:17 -0500 Subject: [Wgcp-whc] Gizzi Friday Message-ID: Dear All, We meet next Friday at 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities center to discuss the work of Peter Gizzi. I'm sending along a brief poetics statement by Gizzi that appears in the extremely generative and useful anthology Lyric Postmodernisms edited by the late Reginald Shepherd and published by one of the great independent presses, Counterpath Press. http://www.counterpathpress.org/aupgs/shepherd/shepherd.html Counterpath is a great source for the kind of work that this group's discussion so often center around. Lyric Postmodernisms collects poems and poetics statements by poets whose work engages the possibilities (and impossibilities) of lyric in the age of high irony. It is worth a look. Cheers, Richard Deming, Co-coordinator and Group Footnoter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091101/6140e795/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: gizzi page 1.tiff Type: image/tiff Size: 367232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091101/6140e795/attachment-0002.tiff -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: gizzi page 2.tiff Type: image/tiff Size: 64774 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091101/6140e795/attachment-0003.tiff From richard.deming at yale.edu Thu Nov 5 09:47:14 2009 From: richard.deming at yale.edu (Richard Deming) Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:47:14 -0500 Subject: [Wgcp-whc] Peter Gizzi, tonight and tomorrow Message-ID: Dear All-- just a reminder that Peter Gizzi reads tonight: Peter Gizzi Thursday, November 5 at 7:00, LC 317 Peter Gizzi?s books include The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92. His many honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and, with Kevin Killian, of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Currently he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Presented by the Contemporary Poetry Colloquium and the Graduates Poets? Reading Series. Tomorrow, he meets with the WGCP from 3-5 in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. All are welcome! Also a last footnote: Jennifer Gross sends along the Van Gogh image below: she wanted to follow up her point at our last session about Gizzi's poem "Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures," and how the cadence and imagery in it reminded her of this very specific Van Gogh, the very last painting he made in his life. Specifically, Jennifer was also thinking in terms of the bifurcation of the painting (along the horizon) and the way Gizzi's poem reverses the lines of the first half in the second half of the poem, so that the poem, as well as the painting, have a sutured effect. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091105/5ca714a0/attachment-0002.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Vincent van Gogh.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 280571 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091105/5ca714a0/attachment-0001.pdf -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091105/5ca714a0/attachment-0003.html From nancy.kuhl at yale.edu Fri Nov 6 07:55:03 2009 From: nancy.kuhl at yale.edu (Kuhl, Nancy) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 07:55:03 -0500 Subject: [Wgcp-whc] Meeting today: 3PM Message-ID: <4E7CFD32F59839419D8C9AFF094BBF964C36BFB99E@XVS3-CLUSTER.yu.yale.edu> All- Just a reminder-for our meeting with Peter Gizzi today, we return to our usual meeting time, 3pm. WGCP Meeting with Peter Gizzi: 3 pm, Friday, November 6th, Whitney Humanities Center Rm 116. The group will discuss The Outernational and additional readings (http://wgcp.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/gizzi-outernational), focusing on the questions outlined here: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/2009-October/000229.html. Cheers, NK Nancy Kuhl Curator of Poetry, Yale Collection of American Literature The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University 121 Wall Street, P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240 Phone: 203.432.2966 African American Studies at Beinecke Library: http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/ Poetry at Beinecke Library: http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/ Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities: http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091106/f6d5769e/attachment.html From richard.deming at yale.edu Fri Nov 13 13:10:05 2009 From: richard.deming at yale.edu (Richard Deming) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:10:05 -0500 Subject: [Wgcp-whc] Next session: 12/4 Waldrop's Transcendental Studies Message-ID: <7D46944B-89E3-4223-9AE6-1F980AB1CF29@yale.edu> Dear All, First a quick note that Marjorie Perloff of Stanford University will deliver the keynote address, ?The Audacity of Hope: Futurist Aura and National Difference in the Early Manifestos,? at 5 p.m. on November 13 (today) in the Beinecke Library as part of the Futurism Conference . I will soon post the minutes from last Friday?s discussion with our visitor, the poet Peter Gizzi. In the meantime, I wanted to circulate word of our next session, which will be Friday, December 4, from 3-5 in our usual room (Whitney Humanities Center, rm. 116). The session will be devoted to discussion about Transcendental Studies, the latest collection of poems by Keith Waldrop and a current finalist for a National Book Award. Professor Waldrop will join out discussion in January. For this upcoming session, we will be joined by renowned French translator and American literature scholar Olivier Brossard. Brossard has translated Waldrop into French and he will help guide and direct our conversation and discuss his prolonged engagement with Waldrop?s poetry and poetics. Here is Brossard?s bio (with a link to his faulty page) Olivier Brossard is associate professor (American literature and poetry) at the University of Paris Est (Marne-La-Vall?e). He wrote his PhD dissertation on ?Lyricism in Frank O?Hara?s poetry? (University of Paris 7, 2006) which he is currently rewriting in English for a book to come out with Dalkey Archive Press. He most recently wrote articles on the poetry of Frank O?Hara and Peter Gizzi. In 2000, with the help of Vincent Broqua and friends, he started the Double Change collective (an online magazine at www.doublechange.com and a reading series in Paris www.doublechange.org). With Eric Athenot, he edited Walt Whitman hom(m)age 2005-1855, a bilingual anthology of British and American poets published by Joca Seria and Turtle Point Press. With Elisabeth Hayes and Suzi Winson of the FACE foundation, and with Vincent Broqua, he co-organized the French and American festival POEM (2009) and co-edited POEM : Poets On (an) Exchange Mission, a bilingual anthology (Fishdrum/Doublechange). He?s currently working on an anthology of New York School poets with Macgregor Card and on a French Frank O?Hara Selected Poems. Recent translations include Keith Waldrop?s The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon (forthcoming from Jos? Corti), David Antin?s What It Means to Be Avant-Garde (with Abigail Lang and Vincent Broqua, Presses du R?el) and Frank O?Hara?s Lunch Poems (with Ron Padgett). http://imager.univ-paris12.fr/1214206125147/0/fiche___article/ ++++ In the hopes of contetxtualizing Waldrop and his work, I?ve gathered some useful links. I pulled this extensive bio from www.poets.org Keith Waldrop was born in Kansas and served in the United States military. In 1954, he met his wife, the poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop while stationed in Kitzingen, Germany. He studied at Aix- Marseille and Michigan Universities, earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1964. His first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Calvary (University of Michigan, 1968), was nominated for a National Book Award. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009), a collection of collages; Transcendental Studies (UC Press, 2009), a trilogy of collage poems; and a translation of Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Wesleyan, 2009). His other work includes The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon: With Sample Poems (Omnidawn, 2004). His other collections of poetry include The House Seen from Nowhere (2003), Haunt (2000), Well Well Reality (1998, with Rosmarie Waldrop), and the trilogy The Locality Principle (1995), The Silhouette of the Bridge, which won the Americas Award for Poetry (1997), and Semiramis, If I Remember (2001). He has translated several contemporary French poets, such as Anne- Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Dominique Fourcade, Jean Grosjean, and Paol Keineg. In 2006, he completed a translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (Wesleyen University Press). According to Waldrop, collage is a major mode of composition for him. He explains the process as: "a way to explore, not necessarily the thing I am tearing up, but the thing I am contriving to build out of torn pieces. To the extent that there is a purpose to what I do, its end is the 'enjoyment of a composition'?a concern, as A. N. Whitehead notes, common to aesthetics and logic." About his work, the poet Michael Palmer has said, "As we would expect from Keith Waldrop, it is suffused with a particular humanity and an appreciation for the absurd, even the grotesque, in daily life. The rhythmic apposition of prose and poetry brings to mind the freedom, alertness and quality of distillation in Basho's classic travel sketches. With his quietly precise sense of modulation and his unerring gaze, Waldrop remains one of the vital and requisite, semi- secret presences in American letters." Waldrop has received an award from the Fund for Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Berlin Artists Program of the DAAD. In 2000, he received a Medal from the French government with rank of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters, for lifetime contribution to French literature. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches at Brown University, and has served as co-editor of Burning Deck Press, with his wife Rosmarie Waldrop since 1968. ++ In terms of situating Waldrop?s Transcendental Studies, here is an excerpt from a brief exchange between Craig Morgan Teichner and Waldrop: CMT: This is an unusual book?really three books in one, which you call a trilogy. Can you explain how you wrote them? KW: It came about for a very specific reason. The problem was that I had to become the director of a program at Brown?it was graduate writing program. Back then it was part of the English department, but required somebody to be the director and there was no assistant director and only a part time secretary, so there was a lot of stuff going through. It was not a difficult job, but it was endless. I kept thinking after hours about what I should do tomorrow and what I didn?t do yesterday, and I found after some months that I was not writing any poetry, and I didn?t like that, so I decided midnight would be the hour when Brown would disappear for me and I?d work on my poems no matter what. I decided to do some collage work with my poems, and the mechanical part of it, just getting words from somewhere, I thought would be something I could do without thinking, so I got a batch of books and put them on the table?the plan was very simple, I put three books in front of me, all prose, a novel, then something psychological, then whatever I happened to have around. I would take phrases from these three books and make some stanzas, four, five six lines. Once I had that I?d make more stanzas of the same number of lines, and when that gave out, after a page or two, I?d say alright I have this poem now and I would take it to the typewriter and type it up and in doing so I would rearrange the stanzas alphabetically. I wasn?t worried about keeping the words exactly what they were? sometimes I changed words. I wasn?t trying to prove anything about collage, I was trying to write poems. Then I would put a title on it and put it aside. Then after a matter of weeks, I had something book length, when it wasn?t working anymore, I stopped. At that point I rearranged all the poems by title and that was the second part of the book. The first and third parts are mainly collage, a little less. I had different ways of working with it. (the rest of the exchange is here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_p_waldrop_interv.html ++ Also useful is the end of an interview with Waldrop conducted by Peter Gizzi (a former student of Waldrop?s): Keith Waldrop: I think this is part of a more general question: Where does it come from, where do we get, the energy to "create"? And all I can say is that it seems to me to come from the desire of the thing to be created. To ask why someone writes is usually a red herring. One may write because of emotion or because of moral need or because a bill is coming due or to explain an idea or because of some whim, and those "causes" may well leave their traces in the poem. But the poem is in the words of the poem-in their relations, internal and external. In one sense, the words of the poem belong to the poem. In another sense, they belong to the language the poem is written in and to the world that language is part of. There is no mystical substance behind the words. There is no key, since there is no lock. And there is no psychological state behind it, because when the poem is done, the poet is dead. (the rest of the interview is here: http://www.sigliopress.com/library/kw_petergizzi.htm +++ Here, Waldrop is interviewed by Charles Bernstein http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldrop-K/Close-Listening/Waldrop-Keith_Close-Listening_conversation_11-05-09.mp3 At this link, Waldrop reads a selection of his work: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldrop-K/Close-Listening/Waldrop-Keith_Close-Listening_reading_11-05-09.mp3 Onward, Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091113/b80f0685/attachment-0001.html From richard.deming at yale.edu Sat Nov 14 17:50:27 2009 From: richard.deming at yale.edu (Richard Deming) Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:50:27 -0500 Subject: [Wgcp-whc] minutes--Gizzi visit 11/6 Message-ID: <535A67F2-176E-445A-A546-B42275947C18@yale.edu> Dear Poeticians, The Working Group in Contemporary Poetics met on Friday November 6 to discuss the poetry of Peter Gizzi, who was able to join our conversation that day. In response to the opening question about what is ?Americanness? in terms of his interest in an American vernacular and poetric tradition, Gizzi described that the American landscape and the nation?s rhetoric or forms of address and speech patterns are tied together. Part of this, he explained, comes from his understanding of his parent?s and grandparent?s immigrant and working class background. Thus, the question of place and identity are not settled questions. His work and the work he is drawn to investigate aesthetic values which are braided with moral and political values. In terms of rhetoric, language is largely performative and therefore brings certain conditions into being. Poetic language is not strictly fictional, nor is it reportage. It composes, presents, and represents the world as he encounters it. The poetic text in a sense ratifies this encounter and fasions it into a communicable reality that readers can then take part in. Since Gizzi brought in the term ?performative? I would insert a passage from J. L. Austin, the great philosopher of speech acts an performativity. This is his comment on performative utterances: I want to discuss a kind of utterance which looks like a statement and grammatically, I suppose, would be classed as a statement, which is not nonsensical, and yet is not true or false. These are not going to be utterances which contain curious verbs like 'could' or 'might', or curious words like 'good', which many philosophers regard nowadays simply as danger signals. They will be perfectly straightforward utterances, with ordinary verbs in the first person singular present indicative active, and yet we shall see at once that they couldn't possibly be true or false. Furthermore, if a person makes an utterance of this sort we should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something. This may sound a little odd, but the examples I shall give will in fact not be odd at all, and may even seem decidedly dull. Here are three or four. Suppose, for example, that in the course of a marriage ceremony I say, as people will, 'I do'?(sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). Or again, suppose that I tread on your toe and say 'I apologize'. Or again, suppose that I have the bottle of champagne in my hand and say 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth'. Or suppose I say 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'. In all these cases it would be absurd to regard the thing that I say as a report of the performance of the action which is undoubtedly done?the action of betting, or christening, or apologizing. We should say rather that, in saying what I do, I actually perform that action. When I say 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth1 I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening; and when ? say 'I do' (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it. Now these kinds of utterance are the ones that we call performative utterances. +++ Gizzi described his poetry as a performing of his bibliography, the various texts?cultural, social, political, as well as lexical?that form the horizon of his consciousness. The poems bring this bibliography into being by the way they make those books ripple outward through the poems. Gizzi described himself as a ?product of books that took [him] out of his mother?s home.? These books included work by Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, the Beats, and others. Books and the arts in general are, he said, a kind of sonar for discovering the self. For these reasons, Gizzi has memorized a great many poems in that it rescues the past and transforms it into the present. Keeping such work in the mind keeps it alive. Memorization is more than memorialization, it offers tools to deal with and navigate problems or crises in the present. He conceives of the poet as an ethnographer, perhaps he is the ?ethnographer of his own nervous system,? and again this system is comprised of his found and received bibliographic and cultural texts. Poetry then offers explorations of both vivid and thick description. Gizzi?s use of ?thick description? comes from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who argued that one must go beyond the (largely empirical) description of some activity (for instances the winking of an eye) and try to determine the larger cultural context that enables certain shaped behavior to signify some specific meaning. Poetry than combines an attention to concrete particulars but also, especially at the level of form, ?tries out? the social and historical context that makes meanings possible. For this reason, his work thinks along the lines of familiar rhetorical figures, but disrupts them to test their horizon of real and potential meaning. Thus, in a poem like ?Protest Poem? the lines insist on what the poem is not. ?This is not a declartion of love or song of war/ not a tractate, autonym, or apologia? nor is it ?a bandage or hospital tent/not relief or the rest after.? The poem counters familiar political responses so as to keep the wound open rather than cauterizing the emotional and spiritual wounds of political turmoil and allowing them to heal. The delay of ?healing? becomes the means of protesting. For Gizzi, poetry can be both plaintive and critical (which seems like an interesting way of thinking about the poetics of his generation). In ?Protest Poem? and throughout our conversation with the poet, his sense of a poetic lineage kept returning. For Gizzi (and this is central not only for his sense of texts but for history as a whole), tradition is not behind, in the past?it is prospective. It is self- determined by the poet who then works in such a way as to generate the conditions by which his or her genealogy can be made to cohere as a tradition, a tradition that then gives poets authority and legitimacy. Clearly, this was an intense discussion that again and again revealed Gizzi?s belief that a commitment to discovering and fashioning tradition is a way of being responsible to the future. At every moement, Gizzi made clear that poetry is an art in which the stakes are always as high as they can possibly be. This was our highest turnout ever (about 30 people) and that is a testament to Gizzi?s investment in an art form that matters to anyone connected to our group. Many thanks to Peter Gizzi for joining us for such a generative, provocative discussion. Just a reminder: we meet again on Dec. 5 to discuss the work of one of Gizzi?s teachers in graduate school, Keith Waldrop. Until then, Richard Deming, Co-coordinator -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20091114/c66477e2/attachment.html