<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Dear Friends of
Poetics, </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Before I get to
the minutes of our last session I want to remind you all that we will be
meeting this Friday (October 23) for a discussion of Peter Gizzi’s
Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007).
One important note: <b>our session will begin at 3.30, not our usual time
of 3.00.</b> The room will be, as
ever, room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. Also, of course, the WGCP is always open and welcoming to
all interested persons, so be sure to spread the word.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Gizzi is one of
the most important poets of his generation and he will be reading on campus
Thursday Nov 5 and then meeting with the WGCP the next day, Nov. 6. In my last
email, I sent a series of links to Gizzi’s work and to interviews and recordings. These are archived here at our blog
(did you know we have a blog?
Thanks Nancy!): </span></font><a href="http://wgcp.wordpress.com/"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">http://wgcp.wordpress.com/</span></font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">I would also
recommend this review of Gizzi’s recent book:</span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2007/reviews/P_Gizzi.html">http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2007/reviews/P_Gizzi.html</a> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> ++++++++++++++++++</span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Now, the
minutes:</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">The Working Group
in Contemporary Poetics met on Friday, September 23, and we were joined by
poet/artist/art critic Marjorie Welish to discuss her work. The discussion was very generative,
provocative, and usefully challenging in the issues discussed, which touched
not only upon Welish’s work but also upon the nature of poetry and inscription
as a whole.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Welish described
her interest in various forms of inscription or the acts of reading that happen
within various contexts and in light of various codes. Welish opposes the traditional
notion of lyric in terms of it being considered a vehicle for personal
subjectivity. Working against the
model of the poetic “I” as some expression of authenticity or inviolable
sincerity, she considers the possibility of the lyric as a mode not limited to
"personal expression" but also ruminative and possibly critical as
well, in the ways that it can be turned on its own sites of reading. Such a
conecpetion of poetry would make the processes of interpretation as much a part
of the poem’s experience as anything else. Thus (to provide only one example) she
incorporates into her work an allusion to Poussin’s </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Arcadian Shepherds</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> in which a shepherd knells down at the side of a
tomb and both points, reads, and (seemingly) speaks aloud the text on the tomb,
“et in Arcadia Ego.” In the
painting, the shepherd is reading and interpreting the text, which places the
viewer in a similar position, while the viewer also is interpreting the shepherd’s
actions. In reading Welish’s poem,
the reader reads those acts (by way of allusion and reference) and
reads/interprets what Welish has done by placing that scene (activated not by
description or image but by way of allusion, itself arguably a form of
inscription) within her poem. The
reader in a sense more directly takes the place of the shepherd that way. Throughout
our discussion it became clear that Welish thinks in terms of a poetics of the
page that is also a poetics of surfaces.
In reading the work, one looks not only at the transparent meaning, but
at the context of the words as well, determining multiple kinds of
discourses—from epitaphs to art criticism to graffiti—that work with and
against each other and play with and against the immutable memorializing that
inscription is sometimes presented as. </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">A guiding question
for Welish has been, “what would a postmodern inscription look like?” This mode
would presumably not resolve differences between types of discourse (or codes)
but make the differences a relevant, operating fact. This form of inscription would continually the model in
which inscription posed (as) some “eternal” truth and allowed for play and
dissonant interpretations to remain in effect. In that written culture took up from orality that part of
the sociolect that ascribes values those values meant to be put into practice
become part of the signs themselves.
In the play of differences of a postmodern inscription Welish seeks to
create poetic conditions that bring the incommensurabilities of some of those
values and practices into the light.
These incommensurabilities between signs, codes, values reveal the interpretative
processes that are all too often transparent or left unacknowledged. </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Welish gave some
context to her thinking by describing an encounter as an undergraduate at
Columbia with various translations of the same text. She felt a kind of crisis in discovering that texts would
have competing translations, noting where agreement in the various forms of the
translation occurred and where there seemed to be irreconcilable
differences. This paradox—how the
text can be same, yet different—provided a specific example of how acts of
reading can be so disparate although the readers are looking at the same set of
words. We noted in our discussion
how the question “Are all contingencies in effect?” which appears in a poem
included as part of </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">The Isle of
Signatories</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> becomes a kind of credo for Welish’s poetics. This is in part due to the fact that
that line was proposed as part of a text to be used as part of an inscription
for a hand railing at Ohio University.
The proposed inscription, though commissioned, was not used, but the
words are “still in effect” as a contingency within Welish’s book. </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">These questions
of inscription and memorializing were fueled by Welish’s thinking about the New
York Public Library. The question
arose for her about whether “a library is a repository of books or a repository
of knowledge.” These lead then to the questions of conceiving of knowledge not
as a truth but as a series of contingency-based practices. Her work continues to find ways that
poetry can reposition knowledge as an active, critical engagement rather than a
grand, reifying narrative.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">This (too) brief
report should, hopefully, convey some sense of the intensity and intellectual
reach of the discussion we had during that session. A useful follow up to Welish’s visit might be </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">To Destroy Painting</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> by Louis Marin. Many issues that the group touched upon
in our two sessions devoted to Welish’s work reverberate there as well.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3619249">http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3619249</a></span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> +++++++++++++++++++++++</span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Gizzi, known for
his erudition and deep knowledge of American and continental poetry will be as
exciting and intense a visitor, so we look forward to seeing everyone there.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">One last note—frequent
visitor and friend of the WGCP Cole Swensen has just published Flare, which is a book made in collaboration
with the Painter Tom Nozkowski.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Original
prints from </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Flare</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> are
currently on view in the exhibition </span></font><a href="http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/exhibitions/ex_onview.html"><em><span style="color:blue"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Continuous Present</span></font></span></em></a><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> (brilliantly curated by
Jennifer Gross) at the Yale University Art Gallery.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><strong><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0); "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Flare can be
ordered from Yale University Press:</span></font></span></strong><strong><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></strong><a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300162400"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300162400</span></font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">.</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">See the Beinecke’s
note on the book here:</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/flare/">http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/flare/</a></span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Thus,</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<font class="Apple-style-span" face="Cambria" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</span></font><!--EndFragment-->
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