[Wgcp-whc] Gizzi session, this Fri at 3.30 and minutes of Welish visit

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed Oct 21 11:37:58 EDT 2009


Dear Friends of Poetics,

Before I get to the minutes of our last session I want to remind you  
all that we will be meeting this Friday (October 23) for a discussion  
of Peter Gizzi’s Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007).  One important note:  
our session will begin at 3.30, not our usual time of 3.00.  The room  
will be, as ever, room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  Also, of  
course, the WGCP is always open and welcoming to all interested  
persons, so be sure to spread the word.



Gizzi is one of the most important poets of his generation and he will  
be reading on campus Thursday Nov 5 and then meeting with the WGCP the  
next day, Nov. 6. In my last email, I sent a series of links to  
Gizzi’s work and to interviews and recordings.  These are archived  
here at our blog (did you know we have a blog?  Thanks Nancy!): http://wgcp.wordpress.com/

I would also recommend this review of Gizzi’s recent book:

http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2007/reviews/P_Gizzi.html

  ++++++++++++++++++

Now, the minutes:



The Working Group in Contemporary Poetics met on Friday, September 23,  
and we were joined by poet/artist/art critic Marjorie Welish to  
discuss her work.  The discussion was very generative, provocative,  
and usefully challenging in the issues discussed, which touched not  
only upon Welish’s work but also upon the nature of poetry and  
inscription as a whole.



Welish described her interest in various forms of inscription or the  
acts of reading that happen within various contexts and in light of  
various codes. Welish opposes the traditional notion of lyric in terms  
of it being considered a vehicle for personal subjectivity.  Working  
against the model of the poetic “I” as some expression of authenticity  
or inviolable sincerity, she considers the possibility of the lyric as  
a mode not limited to "personal expression" but also ruminative and  
possibly critical as well, in the ways that it can be turned on its  
own sites of reading. Such a conecpetion of poetry would make the  
processes of interpretation as much a part of the poem’s experience as  
anything else. Thus (to provide only one example) she incorporates  
into her work an allusion to Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds in which a  
shepherd knells down at the side of a tomb and both points, reads, and  
(seemingly) speaks aloud the text on the tomb, “et in Arcadia Ego.”   
In the painting, the shepherd is reading and interpreting the text,  
which places the viewer in a similar position, while the viewer also  
is interpreting the shepherd’s actions.  In reading Welish’s poem, the  
reader reads those acts (by way of allusion and reference) and reads/ 
interprets what Welish has done by placing that scene (activated not  
by description or image but by way of allusion, itself arguably a form  
of inscription) within her poem.  The reader in a sense more directly  
takes the place of the shepherd that way. Throughout our discussion it  
became clear that Welish thinks in terms of a poetics of the page that  
is also a poetics of surfaces.  In reading the work, one looks not  
only at the transparent meaning, but at the context of the words as  
well, determining multiple kinds of discourses—from epitaphs to art  
criticism to graffiti—that work with and against each other and play  
with and against the immutable memorializing that inscription is  
sometimes presented as.



A guiding question for Welish has been, “what would a postmodern  
inscription look like?” This mode would presumably not resolve  
differences between types of discourse (or codes) but make the  
differences a relevant, operating fact.  This form of inscription  
would continually the model in which inscription posed (as) some  
“eternal” truth and allowed for play and dissonant interpretations to  
remain in effect.  In that written culture took up from orality that  
part of the sociolect that ascribes values those values meant to be  
put into practice become part of the signs themselves.  In the play of  
differences of a postmodern inscription Welish seeks to create poetic  
conditions that bring the incommensurabilities of some of those values  
and practices into the light.  These incommensurabilities between  
signs, codes, values reveal the interpretative processes that are all  
too often transparent or left unacknowledged.



Welish gave some context to her thinking by describing an encounter as  
an undergraduate at Columbia with various translations of the same  
text.  She felt a kind of crisis in discovering that texts would have  
competing translations, noting where agreement in the various forms of  
the translation occurred and where there seemed to be irreconcilable  
differences.  This paradox—how the text can be same, yet different— 
provided a specific example of how acts of reading can be so disparate  
although the readers are looking at the same set of words.  We noted  
in our discussion how the question “Are all contingencies in effect?”  
which appears in a poem included as part of The Isle of Signatories  
becomes a kind of credo for Welish’s poetics.  This is in part due to  
the fact that that line was proposed as part of a text to be used as  
part of an inscription for a hand railing at Ohio University.  The  
proposed inscription, though commissioned, was not used, but the words  
are “still in effect” as a contingency within Welish’s book.



These questions of inscription and memorializing were fueled by  
Welish’s thinking about the New York Public Library.  The question  
arose for her about whether “a library is a repository of books or a  
repository of knowledge.” These lead then to the questions of  
conceiving of knowledge not as a truth but as a series of contingency- 
based practices.  Her work continues to find ways that poetry can  
reposition knowledge as an active, critical engagement rather than a  
grand, reifying narrative.



This (too) brief report should, hopefully, convey some sense of the  
intensity and intellectual reach of the discussion we had during that  
session.  A useful follow up to Welish’s visit might be To Destroy  
Painting by Louis Marin.  Many issues that the group touched upon in  
our two sessions devoted to Welish’s work reverberate there as well.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3619249



  +++++++++++++++++++++++

Gizzi, known for his erudition and deep knowledge of American and  
continental poetry will be as exciting and intense a visitor, so we  
look forward to seeing everyone there.



One last note—frequent visitor and friend of the WGCP Cole Swensen  
has  just published Flare, which is a book made in collaboration with  
the Painter Tom Nozkowski.

Original prints from Flare are currently on view in the exhibition  
Continuous Present (brilliantly curated by Jennifer Gross) at the Yale  
University Art Gallery.
Flare can be ordered from Yale University Press: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300162400 
.


See the Beinecke’s note on the book here:

http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/flare/



Thus,

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator
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