<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear All,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">First, I wanted to offer a reminder that we will <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">not</b> be meeting today at 3 PM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Today’s
session is canceled</b> but we will announce a rain date very soon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the meantime, I waned to send along
an account of our most recent session.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On Friday, January 29<sup>th</sup>, recent National Book
Award recipient Keith Waldrop joined the WGCP to discuss his most recent book,
Transcendental Studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Although
this book is his most recent, its constituent parts were actually written some
time ago and published separately. One might say that their being linked
together is itself a way of thinking about how relationship among poems and
textual materials is part of the book’s overarching structure.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Collage techniques played a large role in generating the poems.
Being overwhelmed by certain administrative duties attached to his teaching,
Waldrop devised a method for maximizing his writing time. Given that Raymond
Queneau had been an early and importance influence on his work, Waldrop was not
averse to making texts that were at some level procedurally driven (or at least
generated). Waldrop would pull down prose books and draw language and sentences
from each book. He avoided books of poems because the verse forms, he found,
were shaped too insistently and could not easily be translated into a new
context without bearing their old structure. Collage for Waldrop is a means of
circumventing the actual generation of materials.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>His obsessive tendencies are at the level of revision, where
the poet is shaping and reshaping linguistic materials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, he explained that he is an
inveterate reviser, who keeps working on poems right up until they are
published. However, collage is only successful as collage if the material is
completely disinterred from its previous context and is wholly assimilated in
the new context of his poems. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>At
one point, Waldrop referred to himself as a machine for producing poems, not in
the sense that he has no agency but in the sense that he seeks to constitute
language in forms rather than to produce specific—and therefore reductive—meanings.
The meaning is tied to the sound, the sound to the meaning. Given the intensity
and comprehensiveness of his revising, Waldrop doesn’t feel that the work
necessarily maintains a debt to its sources.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>They become fully reconstituted though his efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The work lies then in the act of
composition itself. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Given his investment in revising, believing in some sense
that that is where the art actually lies, Waldrop explained that he looks for
certain things as he revises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Aesthetic pleasure or at least satisfaction is part of the goal. Largely,
his compositional decisions are made by attending to the sound of the poems. Meaning
is a latter concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>He does not
write with a determined meaning in mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>However, meaning is not wholly ignored in that meaning often determines
a word’s sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For instance, the
word record is a useful example. If we mean the verb (as in to record), then
the word is pronounced one way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>If
we mean the object, (as in a record on a turntable), then the word is
pronounced differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Line breaks
and so forth contribute to the tonality and shape meaning as well because they
help determine emphasis. He generally finds that he can’t begin to write with a
specific meaning in mind, however, because it is largely the sound and
aesthetics experience that guides his composition.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Waldrop is a renowned translator, and he explained that when
he translates his focus is on units larger than just each discrete word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The unit of translation is not the
word, but a line perhaps or stanza or sentence. We might say then that both
translation and collage or reincorporation of materials into a larger cohesive
body of work. Waldrop was asked if collage is a form of translation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>He responded by explaining that the
difference between translation and collage is that with collage, the work only
matters if the materials mean something different in their new context; with
translation, the work only matters if the materials mean something similar in
their new context.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Waldrop explained that in translation, there is a spectrum
to be negotiated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>At one end lies
the question of “what should the poem be (as determined by the original?” On
the other side is the question, “what can the translator do or actually be able
to accomplish?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The translation
falls between these two poles.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The session was a fascinating glimpse into the context of
Waldrop’s work and his process. As a group, the group thanks Keith for his
visit and his insightful discussion of poetry, collage, and translation.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Now, as I say, I will be in touch soon about the
rescheduling of our session on Zaum and other invented languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Make mine a large cup of decaf Esperanto.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Hasta pronto,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming</p>
<!--EndFragment-->
</body></html>