[Wgcp-whc] Minutes--Lerner visit & Claudia Rankine forthcoming

Richard Deming Richard.Deming at yale.edu
Thu Oct 6 20:10:34 EDT 2011





Dear Poeticians,

 

This email brings two points of business.  First, I wanted to remind that we will next meet on Friday, October 21 from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  That will be the first of two sessions devoted to the work of Claudia Rankine. At the second session, on November 11th, Rankine will join our conversation.  This is the second visitor being brought to campus in conjunction with the Grad Poets Reading Series.  Rankine will read the night before (Nov 10th) in LC 317 at 7PM.  We will focusing our discussion on Rankine’s book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, as well as some new material that the poet will be sending us.  The books should arrive next week, and I’ll let people know when (and where!) to pick them up.

 

The second point of business is to provide some sense of last week’s discussion. On Friday, September 30th, the poet/novelist Ben Lerner joined us for a very wide-ranging and generative discussion of poetics and with special emphasis on his most recent book of poems, Mean Free Path.

 

Lerner described his desire in that book of poems to thematize throughout the work the problematized voice. Lerner came to see the voice of Robert Creeley’s poems (and the actual recordings of Creeley’s voice) as presenting a model for how to dramatize the effort of speech, particularly in a love poem and its attempts to escape facile sentimentality or the exhausted possibilities of an inherited Romantic vocabulary. In his close attention to Creeley’s stuttering line (both on the page and in recordings of the poet reading), Lerner came to see that hesitancy as expression itself rather than as a resistance to expressivity.

 

Lerner had turned to Creeley’s line as a way of moving out of the prose sentences of his previous book, Angle of Yaw.  What Lerner was looking for in Creeley’s work was a way of reconceiving of the form of the line.  Lerner’s interest in imposed form and constraint is that it offers a way of dramatizing or enacting the social struggle between a subjective series of choices operating within larger linguistic structures.   Creeley’s stutter became the plot, so to speak.

 

For Lerner, form, amongst its other possibilities, is the enactment or ironization of content rather than a medium to be made invisible or an objectivity that is made to disappear. Individuality appears, then, in the conflict and encounter between the writer and language itself.  In working through serial forms and constraints, failure (of communication, of meaning) is admitted into the poem’s structure.  Mean Free Path then walks between closure and the abjuring of closure.  The resulting undecidability neither lets the work be a totalizing system nor does it exist completely free of systems of meaning, perception, understanding.  This measure of the poems’ fractality lies in its play between open and closed systems. The wide ranging forms of language—science, slang, Romanticism, music, literary history—brings an openness and flexibility (a sense of the random and arbitrary) into a poetry shaped by an a priori compositional process.  This sets up the paradoxical condition of “emerging closure,” which Lerner described as a legible history of small decisions.

 

Wary of the Romanticizing tendency for poetry to valorize its own reactive failure as a sign of its own depth, Lerner sought instead a language could graph an experience of resistance to abstraction and allegory.  This meant creating a poetic register that neither embraced closure nor completely rejected it for the sake of disjunction qua disjunction.  Ultimately, the desire was to find a form within which even lines with a kind of transparency would have that spark of disjunction in order to make evident that the process of integration is ongoing. 

 

The reason for this drive to find a form that is neither resolved as linear or disjunctive goes back to the poet’s sense of that struggle between writer (and presumably the reader as well) and language being where subjectivity appears. So instead of linearity being imperceptible, linearity is something that we can come acknowledge as being an experience in and of itself.  This is just as much an experience of the self as wrestling with disjunction.  Thus, the experience of the self comes forth in a conscious experience of the integration of disparate parts and elements in a given poem. The task of the contemporary poet is to avoid the exhausted vocabulary of The Romantic poets as well as the programmatic derangement of the Language poets.  Then, with an anxiety towards these influences and a wariness of self-aggrandizement, the poet must grapple with language itself and the negotiations of articulating the experience of experience.  It becomes necessary therefore not to simply imitate the poets of prior generations (no matter how far back) and find instead the mix of skepticism and faith in being able to articulate experience in such a way that the function of poetry keeps moving forward without getting mired in the mere repetition of strategies and traditions for their own sake.  This generative anxiety signals a sense of responsibility for articulating experience but acknowledging its difficulties, complexities, and costs. This dramatization of a fundamental social struggle and its criticality at its best clears out dependency upon habit and allows for the possibilities of flexibility, generousness, and openness.  For want of a better word, Lerner described this as the possibility of grace.  Attention to the ways that elegance, beauty and overall aesthetic pleasure provides the ways of thinking about the experience of a self finding its way to see interference as a music. In that lies the moral (without moralizing) dimension of Lerner’s poetics, an open and unresolved utopic reach for openness, a love with all its edges.

 

As is clear, this was a fascinating and complex discussion of form that located intersections of the social and the aesthetic, ethics and poetics. The entire company of poetics folks joins me in thanking Ben Lerner for joining is for this compelling discussion of his work.

 

So, look soon for an email about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.  Until then,

 I remain,

Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator.
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