<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear fellow Poeticians,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On Friday, Sept. 19<sup>th</sup>, we met for the first time
of the new academic year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This
first session was devoted to the work of Marjorie Welish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Welish is, in many ways, a relatively
unique figure in that she is quite equally accomplished as a painter, a poet,
and an art critic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, in most
ways, it is difficult to see any one of these as her primary identity or
occupation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Accordingly, her work
and thinking move across these different fields in ways that are surprising,
thereby throwing into questions some of the expectations and assumptions that
tend to inform, or at least traditionally do, one�s understanding of a given
field or mode of artistic endeavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>For example, we noted that in the long poem �Isle of Signatories,� the
poet works through the implications of the painter Nicolas Poussin and his
meditation on a phrase from Virgil, �et in Arcadia ego.�<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The phrase speaks to the idea that in
any situation, no matter how much like paradise it seems, death exists. There
is a canonical argument about Poussin�s work because there are two paintings
that take on the phrase, each showing shepherds at a tomb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Version 1:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.aiwaz.net/uploads/gallery/et-in-arcadia-ego-4952-mid.jpg">http://www.aiwaz.net/uploads/gallery/et-in-arcadia-ego-4952-mid.jpg</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Version 2:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/lsi/arcadia/poussin.jpg">http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/lsi/arcadia/poussin.jpg</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">However, the expressions of the shepherds in the two
paintings are quite different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Erwin Panofsky argued that the differences in the works suggest a
changing attitude about death (in the former death is a confrontation, in the latter
death is a metaphysical matter to be contemplated). Louis Marin argued that the
different expressions spoke more about the changing attitudes toward representation.
This is, as I mentioned, a canonical debate that reveals important distinctions
in art history (for instance, both arguments offer different views of what to
look at when looking at a painting�what are we meant to read? The expression in
its historical/conceptual moment or in its art historical moment?). <a style="mso-endnote-id:edn" href="#_edn1" name="_ednref" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[i]</span></span></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In Welish�s work, the argument cited here is a reference
that informs the poem, while also giving the poem in the possibility of
enacting a concern about how, if at all, language and poetry serves to
memorialize both experience and lyric subjectivity. Does poetry and language
then displace present experience or attention in its desires to envision a
futurity in which its subjectivity is to be reclaimed or, to use Welish�s term,
to be a form of salvage?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The poems
don�t offer an argument; rather they enact the paradoxical implications of the
ideas and positions Marin and Panofsky offer, especially in the relationship of
death to representation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But as we
see, Welish combines the concerns of poetry, art, and art history into her work
in ways that are inextricable from each other.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>These also raise the questions of how we read the
poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Are they comments on
criticism, on poetics, or on philosophical ideas?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Can we separate these at all? Does death underwrite all acts
of writing, which by their nature lodged language in a stream outside of
experience or the very being of the being who wrote the texts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Do these texts then displace the
subject?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And do changing ideas of
technology make these matters even more complex (if there is no longer a
physical object)? Think, for instance, of the relationship of the signature to
the signatory (specific act of representation that has an origin) and the
signatory to the e-signature. In many ways, Welish is considering both the
positive and negative implications of how the work of art or creation serves to
stand for or displace the artist or writer.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">This brief recounting of just the opening of her latest collection
gives an idea of the ambition and complexity of Welish�s work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In any event, the following questions
that were developed out of last week�s session will serve as a report on the
drift of the group�s conversation about Welish�s work and its
implications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These questions will
serve as prompts or a general outline for the discussion when Welish visits our
group on Friday, Oct 9 (3-5 pm in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center)</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--In Isle of <span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The Signatories, there are a number of references and
allusions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Some are more overt, as
in the dedication to Keith Waldrop or the quoting of Mallarme, some are more
embedded�as in the �thinking through� of Poussin and �et in Arcadia ego� of the
title poem, while others are quite below the surface, as in the allusion to
Rilke�s first Sonnet to Orpheus in sec 30 of �From Dedicated to� (you write :
�A tree has arisen. Translucence / A tree has arisen in air� and Rilke begins �Da
steig ein Baum,� and where Rilke writes �Ohr� you write the close sound of
�air� (one could say that translating homphonically, you are translating by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">ear</i>, which seems both ironic and apt
here). What role do you see reference and quotation playing in your work?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What responsibility do you see the
reader as having?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--Last year, a number of our visitors�Michael Palmer and Ron
Silliman in particular�articulated their sense of how social formations and
communities impact or shape their writing.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Given that you circulate among different disciplines and
different groups what is your sense of how communities shape your thinking
about poetics. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This question of
community leads to another question: What is the social function of art and or
poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How might they
differ?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or do they?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--Are you writing, as you see it, in, against, toward, or
away from (a) tradition?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How do
you conceive of that tradition?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>What constitutes it? In part this would lead us to consider your ideas
about what tradition does in terms of setting up grammars and languages for
understanding poetry and painting.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--Are there figures that you see yourself addressing in
terms of a genealogy of writers or artists.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>In some ways, this would be a question of what it is that
you see your own work as doing in terms of salvage.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--In discussing Isles of the Signatories, we noted the
concerns for materiality and the object that recurs through the various
poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is the object something you
see as needing redemption or reclamation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Is the loss of the object something that needs elegizing or are your
poems more insistent on seeing that process of an object�s material degradation
as unavoidable (yet that still demands attention)? In other words, what are the
stakes of the object (and perhaps subjectivity)?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--One notes the iterations and repetitions in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Isle of the Signatories</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Could you give a sense of what function
repetition serves in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For
instance, one might see the New York School of painters as arguing that there
is no repetition, and iterations demand closer attention to difference rather
than similarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is there such a
thing as repetition?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">--If one might say that your work thinks through the potentiality
of codes and operations, can you say something about what you look to pass on
to your students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How does someone
go about teaching this to students (either students who wish to be makers of
poetry and those who are readers in general). In other, broader ways, this
might be a way of asking how you answer the question �what is poetry� to your
students.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Does art have a pedagogical element?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">How would you see your work�s relation to the Futurists
(since you do periodically discuss their work)?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Can you say more about your thinking about salvage?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Do you see this as connected somehow to
Rauschenberg�s use of salvaged materials for his assemblages and combines. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">+++++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">These questions offer a range of the areas touched upon last
Friday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Again, Marjorie Welish
will join us on Oct 9, so please join us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Also spread the word�we always welcome visitors and observers.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">If you did not receive copies of her work, please contact me
directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Last Friday, we also
distributed copies of some essays from her book of art writing, Signifying Art
(Oxford UP).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Some people requested
that I send along the table of contents for this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I�ll paste that below. There is one
more interview (very recent) that I�ll be distributing later this week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I�ll be in touch about that.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Onward,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><br clear="all">
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%">
<div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn"><p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a style="mso-endnote-id:edn" href="#_ednref" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:
footnote">[i]</span></span></a> For further
discussion, one might look at T. J.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Clark�s recent meditation on Poussin, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">The Sight of Death</i>, for yet another reading.</p>
</div>
</div>
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