[Wgcp-whc] minutes--Jorie Graham visit, & next session 3/25

[Richard Deming]

My Dear Fellow Poeticians.


My apologies for a somewhat delayed report on Jorie Graham’s visit to  
the seminar on February 18th.  It was, as we expected, an intense and  
generative discussion of Graham’s poems and poetics, as well as  
larger topics as well.

Graham began by focusing on how she arrived at the particular form of  
the poems in her most recent collection, Sea Change. She noted that  
William Carlos Williams has insisted that a “new music” yields “a new  
mind.”  Therefore, with each new book she employs a new form. This  
new form is usually gestured to near the end of a prior collection of  
hers—it points to a future problem that she takes up.  Graham has  
indicated in interviews that the form of Se Change was a conflating  
of Whitman’s sprawling vaticism with Williams’ attention to concrete  
particulars (each poet offering a formal representation of a kind of  
democratic impulse), but in conversation she explained that such a  
characterization came to her after the fact as a way of articulating  
even to herself what she was doing, a least in terms of how it  
related to a poetic genealogy.

Graham explained that poetic form isn’t just a compositional  
question, but has a larger context.  The initial catalyst of the form  
was a rivulet of water that she noticed and had thought about the  
form of that water’s movement and its visual and textual implications  
for form. She explained that she had become profoundly impacted by  
the information about global climate change that becomes more and  
more evident every day. Poets can provide the imaginative language  
version of science by vivifying data with metaphors, lyricism, and so  
forth. These aesthetics elements can make the information become  
experiential—thus loss and crisis are felt and lived through, rather  
than simply an inundation of facts and statistics.  For Graham, there  
is a deeply empathic element to art and she wanted to write poems of  
praise and deep attention that would enable people to identify with  
the natural world that is so threatened. Indeed, she argued that the  
use of imagination is a political act inasmuch as it shapes people’s  
ideals and investments and at some level pushes against rhetoric and  
dogma in that poetry (and the arts in general) call for profound  
attention to the world in its particulars and a correlative  
sensitivity to how these particularities work upon us.

The attention that creates the possibilities for empathy and  
identification flows towards her belief tthat to imagine the deep  
future, one needs to imagine a deep past.  Moreover, she wanted to  
write poems that could be read by people generations and generations  
hence and that these future readers would see what we have now have.  
As long as the poems are, she concived of them as exploded haiku, and  
intended them to be held in the mind all at once; thereby stretching  
the duration of attention so that becomes more and more nuanced (as  
opposed to sudden insight that the haiku masters sought to facilitate)

  Graham wanted to encode this spectrum of past, present, and future  
into the form of her poems.  As she envisions it, the left hand side  
is the past.  It is that which we are always moving away from.  As  
she composed, she made sure that left side is always the same number  
of characters, and so there is a mathematical quality to them; also,  
these lines can work together in their own right as a poem. The  
center column would serve as the core or throat of the poem; and the  
right hand side is the future, thus broken and chaotic.  For her the  
right hand margin is always the most vulnerable in any poem since its  
works according to its own logic—it is the most revealing of choice.   
The left hand margin is always a beginning and is less vulnerable,  
less exposing.  At the same time, that left hand margin in Sea Change  
marks the possibility of a new beginning from which the lines can  
spill out from. Moreover, the moving back and forth between the long  
and short lines create an effect of the presence of absence in their  
variations (each length pointing to the variation from the other),  
while the short lines are generally accented so as to more or less  
spring forward and create a rapidity, which makes the reader also  
aware of time and pace.

Graham began the discussion by saying for her aesthetic form is not  
only a question of writing poems, but speaks to how we imagine our  
ways of being in the world. Given that the discussion ranged from  
William’s imagist poems to the increase in yearly rainfall to the  
state of American education, it is clear that Graham sees that  
imagination (both in absence and presence) touches on all aspects of  
life. We can see then that for her poetry and poetics bring to the  
fore profound ethical issues. The conversation was as far-reaching as  
we had anticipated after having read the ambitious Sea Change. So, we  
thank her for a terrific conversation that brought back to mind the  
sense of stakes that thinking about poetry and poetics can hold.


Our next session will not be until March 25th, when we will hold our  
conversation at the Beinecke Library.  That day we will be joined by  
the scholar Kaplan Harris who will discuss his research, insights,  
methods, and so forth in his work as one of the editors of the  
forthcoming volume of the selected letters of Robert Creeley.  I’ll  
say more about that next week.  In the meantime, spring break is here— 
so enjoy!

In the meantime, let me recommend to you a valuable link. Detailed  
information about Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the  
Science of the Soul is now available online: http:// 
psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/; the “Checklists and Object  
Descriptions” page (http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/2011/02/28/ 
checklists/) links to PDF documents providing information about all  
exhibited materials. This a truly riveting and important exhibition,  
that our own Nancy Kuhl executive produced.

And also some good news: Susan Howe, past guest and ongoing friend to  
the WGCP, was awarded the Bollingen Prize, one of the most  
prestigious awards given to poets in the United States.  
Congratulations to Susan for this much deserved accolade. The  
official announcement is here:

http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/howe-bollingen/


Onward!
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator
  
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