[Wgcp-whc] Jorie Graham visit 2/18--& events this week

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue Feb 8 20:08:08 EST 2011


Dear Comrades,


Last Friday we met to discuss Jorie Graham's most recent collection of  
poems, Sea Change. As a reminder Graham will be joining us for our  
next session on Feb 18 from 3-5 PM in 116 of the Whitney Humanities  
Center.  Below, I will paste the questions culled and extrapolated of  
that generative and engaging discussion. These should give a good  
sense of that shape of that discussion. We will touch on these  
questions when the poet is with us.  I wanted to also add something  
else that will be helpful in advance of our next conversation.  At  
Friday's session we talked at length about how Graham's poems might  
sound read aloud given that she juxtaposes long lines and clipped,  
short lines, all held together by extremely long sentences.  I found  
sound files online of her reading poems from Sea Change.

"Embodies"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20169

"Just Before"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20164


"Nearing Dawn"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20165


Also I'm not sure I've actually provided the official bio:


photo: Jeannette Montgomery Barron	
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a  
journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated  
in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris  
before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she  
studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University  
of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently  
Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of  
the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996  
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30  
years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption —  
intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow  
emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the  
poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke  
or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone  
who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of  
the time simply by writing poems."

Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great  
Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur  
Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy  
and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is  
currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard  
University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American  
Poets from 1997 to 2003.

========================

Anyway, before I provide those questions, I also wanted to draw to  
people's attention to events happening at the end of this week that  
should be of special interest to people on this list.  But before  
that, just a reminder:
The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other

Friday at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the

Whitney Humanities

Center at Yale University to discuss

problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international  
alternative and /or avant-

										garde traditions of lyric poetry. All are welcome

										to attend.

.

Thus,
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator



+++++++++


The Graduate Poets’ Reading Series presents: Christian Hawkey

7:00 pm, Thursday, February 10th
Linsly-Chittenden, Room 317
63 High St., New Haven, CT

Christian Hawkey is the author of Petitions for an Alien Relative (a  
chapbook by hand held editions, 2010), Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse,  
2010), Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007), Hour, Hour, a chapbook which  
includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press,  
2006), and The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), winner of the 2006  
Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2006 he was given a Creative Capital  
Innovative Literature Award and he has also received awards from the  
Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Pratt  
Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Books will be sold at the reading, Cash or Check Only.  For more  
information, please email Justin Sider (justin.sider at yale.edu) or  
Sarah Stone (sarah.stone at yale.edu)







++++++++

New Writing in German / Neue Literatur at Yale

You are invited to a one-day set of workshops and readings by 6 of the  
best up-and-coming German, Austrian, and Swiss novelists.

Please join the Yale Department of German on Friday, February 11th  
from 1-7pm in Room 309, Wiliam H. Harkness Hall,
as they welcome:
Dorothee Elmiger
Andrea Grill
Julia Schoch
Antje Rávic Strubel
Peter Weber
Andrea Winkler
who will discuss their recent work and the state of the novel written  
in German today.

1:00pm-5:15pm 	Workshops in German
5:30-7:00pm		Readings/ Roundtable in English
7:00				Reception/ Dinner

See attached pdf for details.


++++++

Questions for Jorie Graham

When the members of the group discussed Sea Change at our last  
session, we discussed the distinctive form of the poems. We wondered  
about how you arrived at the form—the juxtaposition (or fusion of the  
long and short lines).  Could you say something about the process or  
evolution by which you arrived at that form? We were also interested  
in the process of writing these poems.  Would you work on one poem at  
a time?  Would you draft a whole poem in one sitting? Which poems cam  
first and at what point did you have a sense of the whole shape of the  
book?



You have said that you see that form as a wedding together of a  
Whitmanic expansive, vatic line and Williams’s short line that  
promotes a kind of particularity in terms of one’s attention to words  
themselves (the line as measure, in that sense). This acknowledgement  
of these two predecessors within the very form of your work raises  
some engaging questions about how you conceive your relationship to  
tradition, especially since both those poets expressed the need to  
perpetually re-envision the present’s relationship to what has come  
before. How do you think of tradition?  What role does it have in  
thinking about your work? And how do you construct a genealogy that  
contextualizes your work (or frames the values that you have in terms  
of poetry)?



Expanding this issue, indeed, we noted the frequent use of the  
ampersand in Sea Change.  For many of us, this invokes the Black  
Mountain Poets—and perhaps especially Olson, who also combined  
Whitmanic scope and Williams’s particularity—and also history, place  
and the ocean—all elements that exist within your book. Is he (or  
Black Mountain poetics) a conscious influence on this form—or does he  
fall within the tradition of genealogy you seem to inhabit? This is  
less a question about Olson per se, so much as a question about what  
might be the experimental side of the American grain and how you think  
of your relationship to it.



Speaking of Olson, the lines raise questions about reading the poems  
aloud because there can be a kind of breathlessness to the length of  
the long lines, as well as the length of the sentences that are  
developed over the course of your poems.



The form of the poems is consistent throughout Sea Change, and yet  
thematically the poems are often quite different. How do you think of  
the connection of form to acts of perception?  In other words, is one  
element of the consistency of form in Sea Change the suggestion that  
no matter the situation or condition, certain kinds of movement are  
fundamental to how we process experience?  We might call this a  
question about the metaphysics of poetic form.



One feels justified in asking about “the metaphysics of form” in part  
because your work has consistently been characterized as  
“philosophical” (for what it’s worth, googling “Jorie Graham” and  
“philosophical” produces 26,300 hits).  This term underscores the  
meditative element of your poems.  At the same time, could you say  
something about the ways that you see a poet’s role and a  
philosopher’s as being in conversation, since there is a way that your  
poems do tend to think about universal—or at least collective—human  
truths? How do these roles differ in your mind?  Moreover, given that  
so much of your book complicates faith in Art (especially, say in the  
poem “Violinist at the Window”), how do you conceive of the function  
of the poet or of poetry? Consider this a question dealing with the  
continuing challenge of Adorno’s statement “To write poetry after  
Auschwitz is barbaric.”

How would you characterize the way your own interests and values have  
developed and changed over the course of your writing life?  What were  
the sorts of things that you looked for in poems—your and others—when  
you were writing your first books and what has changed and what has  
remained constant from the beginning?

  ++++++


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