[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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