[Wgcp-whc] 1/29--Keith Waldrop visit, minutes

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Fri Feb 12 11:04:05 EST 2010


Dear All,



First, I wanted to offer a reminder that we will not be meeting today  
at 3 PM.  Today’s session is canceled but we will announce a rain date  
very soon.  In the meantime, I waned to send along an account of our  
most recent session.



On Friday, January 29th, recent National Book Award recipient Keith  
Waldrop joined the WGCP to discuss his most recent book,  
Transcendental Studies.  Although this book is his most recent, its  
constituent parts were actually written some time ago and published  
separately. One might say that their being linked together is itself a  
way of thinking about how relationship among poems and textual  
materials is part of the book’s overarching structure.



Collage techniques played a large role in generating the poems. Being  
overwhelmed by certain administrative duties attached to his teaching,  
Waldrop devised a method for maximizing his writing time. Given that  
Raymond Queneau had been an early and importance influence on his  
work, Waldrop was not averse to making texts that were at some level  
procedurally driven (or at least generated). Waldrop would pull down  
prose books and draw language and sentences from each book. He avoided  
books of poems because the verse forms, he found, were shaped too  
insistently and could not easily be translated into a new context  
without bearing their old structure. Collage for Waldrop is a means of  
circumventing the actual generation of materials.  His obsessive  
tendencies are at the level of revision, where the poet is shaping and  
reshaping linguistic materials.  Indeed, he explained that he is an  
inveterate reviser, who keeps working on poems right up until they are  
published. However, collage is only successful as collage if the  
material is completely disinterred from its previous context and is  
wholly assimilated in the new context of his poems.  At one point,  
Waldrop referred to himself as a machine for producing poems, not in  
the sense that he has no agency but in the sense that he seeks to  
constitute language in forms rather than to produce specific—and  
therefore reductive—meanings. The meaning is tied to the sound, the  
sound to the meaning. Given the intensity and comprehensiveness of his  
revising, Waldrop doesn’t feel that the work necessarily maintains a  
debt to its sources.  They become fully reconstituted though his  
efforts.  The work lies then in the act of composition itself.



Given his investment in revising, believing in some sense that that is  
where the art actually lies, Waldrop explained that he looks for  
certain things as he revises.  Aesthetic pleasure or at least  
satisfaction is part of the goal. Largely, his compositional decisions  
are made by attending to the sound of the poems. Meaning is a latter  
concern.  He does not write with a determined meaning in mind.   
However, meaning is not wholly ignored in that meaning often  
determines a word’s sound.  For instance, the word record is a useful  
example. If we mean the verb (as in to record), then the word is  
pronounced one way.  If we mean the object, (as in a record on a  
turntable), then the word is pronounced differently.  Line breaks and  
so forth contribute to the tonality and shape meaning as well because  
they help determine emphasis. He generally finds that he can’t begin  
to write with a specific meaning in mind, however, because it is  
largely the sound and aesthetics experience that guides his composition.



Waldrop is a renowned translator, and he explained that when he  
translates his focus is on units larger than just each discrete word.   
The unit of translation is not the word, but a line perhaps or stanza  
or sentence. We might say then that both translation and collage or  
reincorporation of materials into a larger cohesive body of work.  
Waldrop was asked if collage is a form of translation.  He responded  
by explaining that the difference between translation and collage is  
that with collage, the work only matters if the materials mean  
something different in their new context; with translation, the work  
only matters if the materials mean something similar in their new  
context.



Waldrop explained that in translation, there is a spectrum to be  
negotiated.  At one end lies the question of “what should the poem be  
(as determined by the original?” On the other side is the question,  
“what can the translator do or actually be able to accomplish?”  The  
translation falls between these two poles.



The session was a fascinating glimpse into the context of Waldrop’s  
work and his process. As a group, the group thanks Keith for his visit  
and his insightful discussion of poetry, collage, and translation.



Now, as I say, I will be in touch soon about the rescheduling of our  
session on Zaum and other invented languages.  Make mine a large cup  
of decaf Esperanto.





Hasta pronto,

Richard Deming
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