[Wgcp-whc] This Friday Zawacki visit, & important WGCP news

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Mon Dec 5 11:10:55 EST 2011


On Friday, Dec 2 the Poetics Group met for our first discussion focused on Andrew Zawacki’s most recent collection of poems, Petals of Zero, Petals of One, which is comprised of three long sequences: “Georgia,” “Arrow’s Shadows,” and “Storm, Lustral.” We will continue our discussion this Friday (December 9th) from 3-5 p.m. in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  All are welcome to attend, even first-timers.  Below I will paste a series of questions drawn from our prior session.  This should give people a good sense of what our conversation covered. These questions will then help shape the course of things this Friday as well—though we will not be limited to these questions.  They really serve as a prompt for what may happen.

 

This coming session will be the last of the semester and, sadly, the last of the academic year.  Since two of the three co-coordinators—Jean-Jacques Poucel and I, your humble narrator—will be abroad next semester, the WGCP will be on a one-semester pause this spring.  This will be the first time since the group began in January of 2003 that the group has had a break.  But don’t worry, we will be back stronger than ever in September.  So, let us be especially celebratory this Friday!

 And speaking of celebrations,  I will also post here a general invitation for a book party that will happen next week.

 In the meantime, I look forward to seeing people Friday for what will be a generative, intense, and thoughtful discussion.

 

Yours,

 

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator

 

+++++++

 

Friends,

 

Please stop by to help us celebrate our new books: Little Winter Theater by Nancy Kuhl & poem for the house by Katie Yates. More party details follow; please be in touch with questions. Hope to see you…

 

Nancy & Katie

 

 

BOOK PARTY: Little Winter Theater by Nancy Kuhl & poem for the house by Katie Yates

 

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

from 5:30 - 7:30 pm

at The Bourse – 839 Chapel Street 2nd floor (go through English Market to find stairs / elevator): http://www.boursenewhaven.com/our-location

 

More about the books:

Nancy Kuhl, Little Winter Theater, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY:  http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=202

Katie Yates, poem for the house, Stockport Flats, Ithaca, NY: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780984028511/poem-for-the-house.aspx

 



Questions for Zawacki

1) On Friday, the group listened to a recording of the poet reading the long, incantatory poem “Georgia.”  Although on the page, the poem is rigorously end-stopped, we noticed that in the reading, you (Zawacki) wove in caesuras and de facto line breaks that changed the nature of the lines.  What is your thinking in terms of how you read a poem and how it is looks on the page?  And is there some authority that a reading has in terms of reflecting the author’s intentionality?

 

2) Throughout Petals of Zero Petals of One (and particularly in “Arrow’s Shadow”) there is a great deal of language pulled from scientific discourse.  This discourse mixes with natural imagery, and what we might call a literary discourse.  Is the scientific discourse a way of generating a kind of dissonance (and is thus used because there is an opacity to it within the context of a poem). Or is the mixing of the scientific and the more lyric somehow a claim, a worldview—that the world itself is increasingly a mixture of these two modes? Extending this idea, we might ask if you are placing a binary system (1-0-1-0) against the combinatorial possibilities that “Arrow’s Shadow” points to (especially in its last pages)?

 

3) In “Arrow’s Shadow” you paraphrase Zukofsky’s poetics (“Lower limit speech, upper limit music”) as “lower limit language, upper limit language.” In that sequence, you do foreground language as language (borrowing upon certain Language poetry tactics, for instance). The poem itself is quite long.  Is there a way that you are attempting to extend that felt experience of language as language (through disorientation, estrangement of meaning, de stabilization, and so forth)?  Why prolong this mode? What experience is offered by extending this even after the conceptual point is established?  Is the experience of time itself (as revealed in the process of reading such a dense, demanding text) something that interests you in the movements of a poem?

 

4) Petals of Zero Petals of One is comprised of three long sequences and poets such as Olson and Zukofsky are invoked in the book.  Can you say something about the maximalist tendencies of this book?  And how did you go about composing the sequences?  Did you have an architecture in place when you began writing?  Did you keep writing in order to discover the shape? And what was cut out?  How did you shape the work once you had a sense of it?

 

5) Since you do work with a variety of discourse in your poetry as well as translating from various languages, what is your sense of what constitutes discourse?  And what is language that your poems reflect back upon language qua language?

 

6) How has your sense of poetry changed over the years? How do you place what you do in terms of a larger tradition (to speak generally) or in terms of more immediate generations of poets?

 
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