[Wgcp-whc] Rankine visit on Nov 11

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Sat Oct 29 21:02:37 EDT 2011


Dear Friends,

 

On Oct. 21, the WGCP met for the first of two sessions devoted to the work of Claudia Rankine.  Our conversation focused on her most recnt collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.  The conversation was wide-ranging and provocative. Instead of minutes, below I will paste a series of questions drawn from the session.  These should give people a sense of the warp and woof of what was talked about that day.  These questions will be sent to Rankine, who will be joining us on Friday, Nov. 11 from 3-5 PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  The questions will serve as series of prompts to give some shape and structure to our discussion that day.

 

Rankine will also be reading the night before, but more on that later.

In the meantime, I will post below an announcement from Josh Stanley about an upcoming reading that should be of particular interest to members of this list.

 

I also wanted to let people know, that the last two sessions of the semester will be on Dec 2nd and Dec. 9th.  These will be devoted to the work of poet and translator Andrew Zawacki.  I will send more information about these dates, but I wanted to make sure that people put them on their calendar.

 

From amidst the snow,

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator

  

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From Josh Stanley: 

Simon Jarvis will be reading his poetry on Wednesday November 2nd in LC 317 at 7pm.

Simon Jarvis has published three works of verse in the past 6 years: The Unconditional (Barque Press, 2005); F [subscript] 0 (Equipage, 2007); and Dionysus Crucified: Choral Lyric for Two Soloists and Messenger (Grasp Press, 2011). Recent poems can be read and heard here: http://theclaudiusapp.com/1-jarvis.html . Jarvis has also published two major critical works: his Adorno: A Critical Introduction, published by Polity in 1998; and Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, published by CUP in 2007. Jarvis' work in gutty verse and prose is concerned with the thinking that verse in fact is: a thinking which is capable both of unedited-for-consumption gulps and body rhythms and of distinctive speculation.     

               Briefly, I want to insist on the difference between “reading his poetry” and “giving a poetry reading”. Jarvis reads in a way that is unlike anything I have ever heard from an American poet because embedded in his practice (and recent criticism) is a belief that poetry is alive in the moment of performance – what is on the page without even a silent reading is a graveyard of cutup language. What I mean is that this is not a chance to hear Simon Jarvis give us an interpretation of his poems in the act of reading or supply a fresh or first encounter with his work. Instead, I think this is a rare opportunity to hear a master verse-performer reading prosodically intense work.

                Furthermore, as a reminder: Jarvis will be giving a lecture in the English Dept on Tuesday November 1st in LC 317 at 4pm on *rhyme*.

 

 

 

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Questions for Claudia Rankine 

In the brief interview with you that is available at the Academy of American Poets website, poets.org, you indicate that you primarily think of yourself as a poet and yet less and less you think of writing in terms of genre.  What does it mean, then, to call Don’t Let Me Be Lonely an “American lyric”?  In other words, how would you define lyric, especially since in many ways Don’t Let Me Be Lonely challenges some of more traditional expectations brought forward when “lyric” is invoked.

 

As you move from a traditional genre (or perhaps better described as “genre more traditionally determined?), are there forms of writing or writers from whom you are drawing?  Were there models that you were able to pull from in writing that book or the writing that you are doing now?  This attached to the fact that the back of the book we see Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is to be described as “Lyric Essay.”  What does that entail?

 

Since your writing and what we might see as its poetics have changed over the years, could you describe your own evolving sense of poetry, of what it can and can’t do, of what its value and the limitations it wrestle with and against?

 

Given that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely pulls into its movements historical events, cultural critique, media studies, and so forth, what is the role or responsibility within American culture as you see it?  These seems like a grand question, but the specifics of witnessing and acknowledging both broad world events as well as personal crisis are present among the book’s concerns.

 

One very spirited exchange in our discussion of the book deals with the political content.  Clearly the events of 9/11 inform the book, yet how do you conceive of the relationship of the political claims present in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely?  Is it meant to be explicitly political?  Or is the political the condition and context for the general and pervasive sense of (and focus upon) depression that pervades the book?

 

Can you describe the process of writing the book?  When did you begin it?  This question ties into the relationship that the work has to 9/11.
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