<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">Today, April 30<sup>th</sup>, we will be meeting from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center to discuss
the work of Elizabeth Willis, particularly Meteoric Flowers, a collection of (mainly)
prose pomes that write through the work of British poet and naturalist Erasmus
Darwin (1732-1802). Of course, we will be discussing—among other things—the
unstable form of the prose poem, the nature of history, and allusions (and
palimpsestic writing) as poetic modalities. Interestingly, the very paratactic
nature of Willis’s poems links to comments made by our most recent guest, Lyn
Hejinian, describe parataxis as enacting a lateral aesthetics, one which
underprivileges subjectivity, allowing every place to serve as its own focus as
the poem continually reestablishes its grammar and structure.</p><p class="MsoNormal">On April 14<sup>th</sup>, Lyn Hejinian joined us for a
discussion of her work with a specific focus on Saga/Circus, her latest
collection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This was an intense,
productive conversation held at the Beinecke Library.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In that Hejinian is one of the most widely known and
acclaimed poets connected to Language writing, she began by contextualizing the
earliest development of her sense of poetics as being informed by the method
and intense investment in aesthetics and materiality of the Abstract
Expressionists, whose work she had been exposed to at a young age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The painters’ ideas that art was an
action that crossed from the individual gesture into public space grounded her
later thinking on the intersections of poetry and politics, with poetry being a
close attention to the material of language as it engaged and was engaged by
groups of people. The earlier mention I made of her thinking about parataxis
also served to display her profound debt to and interest in Gertrude Stein. A
fascinating talk Hejinian gave on the subject of Stein is available here: <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Hejinian/Heijinian-Lyn_9poets_KWH_10-12-00.mp3">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Hejinian/Heijinian-Lyn_9poets_KWH_10-12-00.mp3</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The development of her poetics was in sense ratified by the
poetry community of the San Francisco Bay area in the mid-1970s. There was in
that moment and place a prevailing sense within the community that poetry was
at stake and so Language writing served as a collective effort and communal
engagement—despite a plurality of practices—of the terms of what was possible
and available to the art particularly as a mode of aesthetico-critical
intervention into discourses of cultural power.</p><p class="MsoNormal">For Hejinian, Saga/Circus was a way of creating a space for
the marginalized voices of carnival workers or roustabouts inasmuch as the
workers were largely migrant workers who were often victims of violence (such
as lynching) because they were “outsiders” (or racialized others) brought from
outside the community and thus largely unprotected. Hejinian described the
tension as existing between players and payers (or attendees). The circus is a
contact zone for classes and races and for that reason it is often
violent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Moreover, the circuses
tropes were often militaristic —in its use of cannons going off, and so forth.
Saga/Circus then explores the presence of violence that so often comes with
entertainment. Saga/Circus presents the violence that comes with entertainment
indicating how hyperactivity and aporia are often obverse sides of the same
coin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Both sections that form the
collection are diasporic works in terms how each are representing narratives of
movement, and forms of political and economic Diaspora in which people are
forced to do this because of money). The project of the diptych of the parts of
the collection allowed her to work around the “problem” of beginnings and
endings, which have been sites of creative and epistemological difficulty for
her as a writer.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Hejinian put together Lola (the Circus potion of
Saga/Circus) because of “novel envy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>As a poet, she has often worked against the fullness of a novel’s
created world and she wished the take on that challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>She wanted to create an alternate
world, and the circus is itself an artificial world that facilitates illusion
as entertainment. Hejinian drew some inspiration from the work of outsider
artist Henry Darger (1892-1973) who created a vast narrative for his collage
work. In large part Hejinian wished to think through (or write into) the
question of what entertainment is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Her idea was to take entertainment seriously. She coupled this with the
19<sup>th</sup> century genre of the sea saga because of the emphasis placed on
generic conventions and the foregrounding of artifice. She sees the work, then,
as ironizing the historic conventions in that they are revisions of what might
be seen as poetic reversions to bygone literary forms. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We might consider this as late style revisions
of early style genres. Such banal details of extended narrative became
occasions for attention to mechanisms of meaning, for instance she was
interested in sound of names of characters in that their sounds could not only
locate persons but added amatory and sardonic/ironic textures of
narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Moreover, adding names
allowed her to keep the narrative proliferating, disrupting the linear,
sequential imaginative movement of the text.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The ironized tropes of the circus and the sea saga become
forms of allegory by which to live one’s postmodernity, which Hejinian defines
as life within late capitalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In
that late capitalism keeps itself abstract under the guise of openness,
diversity, and pluralisms, “Everything good about it is everything bad about
it.” Postmodern language writing’s irony becomes a site for understanding the
mechanisms of affect. Art presents sensible objects by which the mapping of a
possible lateralization of democracy or political interests provides
allegorical structure for thinking about political activism. Hejinian
distinguishes between exegetical allegory (reader experience) and authorial
allegory. Allegory calls attention to itself as a trope and this self-conscious
poetics of narrative or generic conventions serves as Political intervention
because the aesthetic threatens politics which are dependent on stable symbols—the
aesthetic constantly points to symbolism’s intrinsic instability. Allegory
especially insists on its made rather than found significance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The conflation of aesthetic investments
and political action were enacted throughout our conversation with Hejinian, as
the focus ranged from California’s political crisis to Jacques Ranciere’s
belief that the aesthetic reframes relationships to ordinary, sensible objects
revealing the processes of interpretation. The intensely abstract nature of the
conversation, however, was always grounded in the specificities of the poem on
one hand, and the political realities that, in Hejinian’s view, have only
continued to become direr since the 1970s.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>As is fully evident, this session was provocative on a wide
range of levels and entirely generative in terms if thinking of the
inextricability of history, politics, and poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Our many thanks to Lyn for her thoughtful, insightful
discussion of her work and of the politics of poetics/the poetics of politics.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Until soon,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Minister of Information</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here is a bit of Henry Darger;</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><img alt="http://homepage3.nifty.com/tamakis/%8D%D6%93%A1%8A%C2/DARGER2.GIF" src="http://homepage3.nifty.com/tamakis/%8D%D6%93%A1%8A%C2/DARGER2.GIF"> </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><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><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><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><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><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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