[Wgcp-whc] reading today, Willis books available, Hejinian week next week

[Richard Deming]

Dear Poeticians,

It must be that April is indeed poetry month. Some news and some  
reminders:

1) On April 30th we will discuss Meteoric Flowers, a collection of  
poems written by Elizabeth Willis, one of the most significant poets  
of her generation.  Willis will join us for a discussion of her work  
on May 7th.  Copies of the book are now available at our mailbox in  
the main office of the Whitney Humanities Center.  These books are  
available to people who are interested, but only take one if you feel  
you can make at least one--if not both--of the sessions devoted to  
this work.  I'll post more information about Willis in a subsequent  
email.

2) Today at 4 PM is a student reading at the Beinecke Library.  Among  
the readers will be such WGCP luminaries as Sarah Stone, Edgar Garcia,  
Justin Sider, and Caitlin Mitchell.

3) a reminder that next week, Tuesday the 13th Lyn Hejinian will be  
reading at the Beinecke Library at 4 PM. I'll paste the info below.  
She'll then be meeting the next day, Weds the 14th, with the Poetics  
Group for a special session.  This will also be at the Beinecke and  
will be held from 3-5.  As ever, our sessions are open to any  
interested parties, so do feel free to spread the news.

Here are the series of questions drawn from our discussion of her work  
held on March 26th.  These have been sent to Hejinian.  As is our  
usual practice, the questions are more like prompts for dialogue and  
conversation, not a blueprint for the session.

Questions for Hejinian from Yale Seminar in Poetics





We are interested in the ways that you see your development as a poet  
and in terms of your poetics.  One way of approaching this question  
would be to ask: what was your relationship to the language  
“movement” (that is, how did you think of it as a movement and your  
connection or investment in it as such) in the 1970s and 1980s. How  
did you see your relationship to it and to your peers?  And what is  
your relationship to it now, years later?  How would you characterize  
the ways that you have developed your thinking and writing since then?



The Saga of Saga/Circus comes at an interesting time in terms of your  
connection to the “experiment  in collective autobiography” that is  
Grand Piano. In what ways have these engagements with narrative shaped  
your vision/revision of the possibilities of prose as a space of  
blurring discourses?  We might ask what your understanding of Saga is— 
is it a form of epic?  Is it a genre unto itself?



There is a way of reading Circus as a roman a clef.  Was this  
something that you had explicitly in mind?



Given the trope of the circus (and as some members noticed the crime  
novel) in the first part of your latest collection, are you thinking  
in terms of Fellini’s circuses?  The circus of the Weimar Republic/ 
Todd Browning’s early films?  Or is Bakhtin’s carnivalesque something  
that you have in mind?



Could you say what the process of translation has done for you in  
terms of your poetics?  And has it impacted your poetic practice? What  
complications do you face in thinking about the problematic text that  
is a translation?



What was the thinking that led to the bringing together of the two  
parts of Saga/Circus?  How do you see their interrelations? Is it  
their proximity or their distance that interests you?



Now that you teach, how has teaching shaped or changed your thinking?  
In what ways has the impact of avant-garde poetry reformed  
institutions?  Or what  questions does the presence of a critical  
poetic practice occurring within the institution open up for you?



Onward,

Richard Deming, WGCP Co-coordinator











Lyn Hejinian, Poetry Reading
Tuesday, April 13, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl at yale.edu



Poet, essayist, and translator, Lyn Hejinian is the author or co- 
author of numerous books of poetry, including The Fatalist (2003), The  
Beginner (2000), Happily (2000), Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999),  
The Cold of Poetry (1994), The Cell (1992), My Life (1980), Writing Is  
an Aid to Memory (1978), and A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking  
(1976). She is the author of a collection of essays, The Language of  
Inquiry (2000). She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the  
California Arts Council, the Poetry Fund, the Academy of American  
Poets, and the National Endowment of the Arts.

For more information about and examples of Lyn Hejinian’s work, visit  
the following sites:

Lyn Hejinian at the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC): http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/

Lyn Hejinian at the Academy of American Poets : http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/396

Lyn Hejinian on PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php
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