<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">I wanted to begin with a reminder that our end of the year
pizza soiree is tomorrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We’ll
provide the ‘za but it is BYOB.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Of
course, all are welcome as we celebrate two new books (a new collection of
poems by Nancy Kuhl and a new translation by jean-Jacques Poucel) and say bon
voyage to 2009/10. We'll be meeting from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. All are welcome! It's okay if you didn't rsvp and yet still want to come!</p><p class="MsoNormal">The last time we met was Friday May 7<sup>th</sup>, when
Elizabeth Willis joined the group to discuss her most recent collection,
Meteoric Flowers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>However, at the
end of the session we were able to coax her into reading a few poems from her
forthcoming collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Address</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal">We began our conversation by asking Willis about the ways
that femininity and gender enter into Willis’ work.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Given that there is a focus on aesthetic pleasure and
lyricism in the work and that there are recurrent tropes (such as flowers)
throughout the work, the poems draw upon a form of femininity that risks the
sentimental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Willis discussed the
ways that she is keenly aware of the risk of the lyric poem being
“pretty.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Her use of the lyric was
at some level an attempt to unseat sentimentality by making the texture of the
poems and in particular the form of the prose poem into a means of writing back
at fixed ideas or conventions of gender. Inasmuch as the poems are reflective
of her own identity as a woman who grew up informed by second-wave
feminism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>She seeks to move away
from poems as being merely instruments for social change and the revising of
aesthetic possibilities offer change without polemics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the case of Meteoric Flowers, her
identity as a woman poet writing through Erasmus Darwin allows for a way of
unsettling the pursuit and conquest narrative of the lyric address because of
the destabilizing of traditional conventions of gendered address. Moreover, E.
Darwin saw flowers as polymorphously perverse and so by that inversion of
gendered tropes Willis disrupts set fictions of gender. Also, this subversion
of form and voice further enacts the complexities of the pastoral mode and
gender ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Ultimately,
though, it is sound and musicality that directs her most immediate
compositional choices. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">At the very practical level, we had asked her about the
tension between the titles and the poems, the titles having been drawn from E.
Darwin’s text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Willis indicated
that very often she would write the poems first and that way the poems weren’t
captions but were ways of writing back towards Darwin’s text. Sometimes, this
produced a seamless connection and other times it made a complex tension
between title and text that raises the questions of what that relationship
might be. In that E. Darwin’s book is a poetic attempt at classification
(taking somewhat seriously the Adamic injunction of the poet to be the namer),
the tension between title and text interrupts the easy relationship between
classified and classification.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Throughout our conversation, Willis would return to her
thinking about the productive capacity of interruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The very paratactic nature of the
sentences within the prose poems of Meteoric Flowers enact this disrupts of the
ideas of a forward, progressive motion in order to foreground the ways that sentences
are made to cohere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Another way of
approaching this would be to investigate at what point certain grammatical
constructions can look like “sentences” and yet not quite cohere enough to be
sentences or to convey meaning—though this fracture itself becomes their
meaning, of course.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One of the reasons that Willis turned to the prose
poem—beyond the formal inversion of E. Darwin’s use of verse to guide his
taxonomy—is that verse can be a saturated space in the ways that the traditions
and conventions of the lyric poem can be overdetermined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This led to a very generative
discussion about the sentence of the prose poem acting as a long line rather
than a discrete sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What
shapes its structure are beats, rhythm, cadence and other musical concerns rather
than grammar or information. In this way, the prose resists narrative dictates
of closure or sequence as well as allowing for the exploitation of what we
might call lyric intelligence. What then occurs is that the cohesion of the
poem, and the prose poems within the entire collection based on voice rather
than an absorptive narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Without that consistent narrative, the “I” becomes what Willis called a
form of “soft matter,” shifting from poem to poem, rather than creating a
stable, autobiographical subject. We might then think of voice in terms of
style, with style being a consistent vocabulary of specific textual concerns
and compositional strategies shaped by a recurring set of references.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The idea that voice is a kind of style
and style is a kind of voice, bring the ideas of representation and identity
quite close together while still allowing for a destabilized, amorphous
subjectivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As is evident, this was a an intense and far ranging
discussion that delved deep not only in terms of the formal moves of Meteoric
Flowers but went to the ways that poetics can bring us to discussing gender,
aesthetics, ethics, and the very stuff of how we know ourselves in the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Certainly, this piques one’s
appetite for Willis’ forthcoming <i>Address</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Stay tuned, true believers! And of course, we are deeply appreciative to the luminescent Elizabeth Willis for her joining us and providing the grounds for such smart, dynamic, free ranging conversation.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Until tomorrow,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</p>
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