[Wgcp-whc] Next session: 12/4 Waldrop's Transcendental Studies

Fri Nov 13 13:10:05 EST 2009

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-Vallée). 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 José Corti), David  
Antin’s What It Means to Be Avant-Garde (with Abigail Lang and Vincent  
Broqua, Presses du Réel) 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 