<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><p class="MsoNormal">Here's the whole semester's schedule at a glance:</p><div><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong></div><div><strong></strong>Friday, September 10 , 3 p.m.</div><div>Readings: <em>OXO</em> By Pierre Alferi</div><div class="main"><div class="snap_preview"><p><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong>, <strong>Pierre Alferi Visit</strong><br>Friday, September 17 , 3 p.m.<br>Readings: <em>OXO</em> By Pierre Alferi</p><p><strong>Related Event: Jean Valentine Poetry Reading</strong><br>Wednesday, September 29, 4:00 pm<br>Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street<br>Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series<br>Contact: <a href="mailto:nancy.kuhl@yale.edu">nancy.kuhl@yale.edu</a></p><p><strong>WGCP Meeting: a Discussion of the work of Angélica Freitas, led by translator Hilary Kaplan</strong><br>Friday, October 8, 3 p.m.<br>Readings: Angélica Freitas readings TBA; <a href="http://digitalartifactmagazine.com/issue2/Translating_Poems_from_Angelica_Freitas_Rilke_shake">essay by Hilary Kaplan</a></p><p><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong><br>Friday, October 22, 3 p.m.<br>Readings: C. D. Wright work TBA</p><p><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong>: <strong>C. D. Wright Visit</strong><br>Friday, November 5, 3 p.m.<br>Readings: TBA</p><p><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong><br>Friday, December 3, 3 p.m.<br>Readings: David Shapiro work TBA</p><p><strong>WGCP Meeting</strong>, <strong>David Shapiro Visit</strong><br>Friday, December 10, 3 p.m.<br>Readings: TBA</p></div></div></div></div><div>For easy reference, working group activities, the minutes of our sessions, and other resources are located here: <a href="http://wgcp.wordpress.com/">http://wgcp.wordpress.com/</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003F9F"><b>Review of </b></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003F9F"><b>Oxo</b></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003F9F"><b> by John Couth. </b></font></div><div><p><span class="pageName"><strong><font color="#990000">Pierre Alferi</font></strong>: <font color="#003300"><strong><em>Oxo</em></strong></font></span><span class="style1"><span class="style5"><br>(Translated by Cole Swensen; Burning Deck, Providence, R.I., 2005; paperback, 60pp, $10; isbn 1886224668)</span></span></p><p class="style3">Pierre Alferi has published four books of poetry in his native French: <strong><em>Oxo</em></strong> is the translation into English by Cole Swensen of his third book (<strong><em>Kub Or</em></strong>, 1994). Although it would have been interesting to have the French original on the page opposite the translated text, it's evident from the acknowledgement that poet and translator have worked in close collaboration. (Also one can make out the case for exclusion of the originals on aesthetic grounds because, for this book to work, its presentation must remain visually sparse and tightly conceived.) The language style that results is informal, American and spare.</p><p class="style3">The book's structure relies on the notion of the bouillon cube, with each poem two dimensionally reflecting a side – but this is no conventional regular hexahedron, rather one reliant on cube as in root, in this case a cube root of seven. Each poem is made up of seven lines of seven syllables, with each section containing seven poems. These comprise the 'cube' which Alferi offers to imaginative dissolution.</p><p class="style3">In Hebrew the number seven represents completeness and totality; in Oxo, the poet seeks to make complete, to give shape, pattern to disparate experiences of daily city life – the seven sections represent the completeness, the totality of the ordering system. The floating impressions of a succession of external and internal experiences require structure if sense is to follow, poet and reader work side by side as the generators of such order and understanding.</p><p class="style3">An idea of what's being attempted is signalled in 'preface', the seventh poem in the book:<br></p><p class="style3">here is seven times seven<br>times seven times seven a<br>far-fetched grunge idea for<br>you in hard cubes of almost<br>anything goes like on T.<br>V. in fact it's almost as<br>good as compacting the trash</p><blockquote class="style3"><blockquote><p><em>preface</em><br></p></blockquote></blockquote><p class="style3">It's 'a grunge idea . . . like on T.V.' and like TV the book combines all things together regardless of connection or harmony; the unifying principle is the medium, as here it's the bouillon 'compacting the trash'. The artefacts of the low and high cultures of the Paris cityscape are ordered within the book like a succession of adverts within a commercial break which jostle for our attention while sequentially contributing to a greater picture. The book's final poem, entitled 'coda', talks about the absorbency of 'tampon words', at once both redolent of personal and cultural reference, which need to be 'unfurled', dissolved in our psyches if we are to glimpse beneath surfaces. Interpretively, we must create the 'boiling water' in which to dissolve these poems that represent to us the variety and intensity of experiences we daily encounter but may fail to make mean. Alferi suggests that just as under scrutiny the poems will continue unfold new meanings, so too will experience. It's like greedily supping the bouillion:<br></p><p class="style3">ah it's so very ah how<br>absorbent these tampon words<br>made to be unfurled so<br>quick one more one last one quick</p><blockquote class="style3"><blockquote><blockquote><p><em>coda</em></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="style3">The book's first poem introduces the notion of a shuffled 'flip-book', which fits appositely with our experience of the rapid succession of scenes that ensue, that and the cinematic technique of the jump cut. Playing such a central part in contemporary life, it's little surprise that the media should occupy Alferi's attention – cinema, TV, the Walkman, advertising are reduced to their cubes of scrutiny.</p><p class="style3">But everything's worthy of attention. In 'regular', the poet focuses on the meaning-full, important sounding, quasi-scientific language of a health product ad, replete with its evident vacuous inability to deliver – the 'if' of the poem's beginning creating the logical uncertainty of what the 'low low price of regular' can never buy:<br></p><p class="style3">if it's true that it contains<br>quite naturally the enzyme <br>necessary for modern<br>life then this built-in leak-proof<br>agent protects enriches<br>the ozone layer at the<br>low low price of regular</p><blockquote class="style3"><blockquote><blockquote><p><em>regular</em><br></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p class="style3">Other of the poems in the 'shuffle' deal with street and commercial life, politics, music and the ways in which figures from high culture, such as Charles Ives and Flaubert, can inhabit a consciousness in the present:<br></p><p class="style3">. . . all I can tell you<br>is that life which paces you<br>in the distance as Paris<br>once did me will but too late<br>be completely fulfilling.</p><blockquote class="style3"><blockquote><blockquote><p><em>the france of henry james<br></em></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p class="style3"><em>Oxo</em> expresses Alfieri's determination not to be paced 'in the distance'.</p><p class="style3">The tone of the poems range from humorous, satirical, affectionate, resigned, committed; alienation is never an issue, with the poet at all times prepared to engage intelligently with the variety of experience/reality he encounters. The language throughout is spare and precise, as one might expect given the strictures of form, almost devoid of tropes, closer indeed to what Aristotle might have described as rhetoric. The cube device allows for nothing wasteful – dissolution of the bouillon is only possible through the reader's engagement.</p><div><br></div></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003992">Review of OXO by </font></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003992">Joyelle McSweeney </font></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: medium; "><a href="http://www.constantcritic.com/joyelle_mcsweeney/oxo/">http://www.constantcritic.com/joyelle_mcsweeney/oxo/</a></span></span></div><div><div></div><h3 id="post-52" class="title"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#003992"></font></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: medium; ">Pierre Alferi with photographs by Suzanne Doppelt, trans. by Cole Swensen, Burning Deck, 2004</span></h3><p class="author">Wednesday, October 20th, 2004</p>
<div class="entry"><p>Three cheers for Cole Swensen and her consistent effort to bring
contemporary French poetry to an English-reading audience. Her latest
labor, <i>OXO</i> (the French title is the more pungent <i>Kub Or)</i>,
is the second Pierre Alferi title Swensen has translated, and it
renovates the space- and shape-conscious dynamics of the earlier volume,
<i>Natural Gaits. Natural Gaits</i> explored the physics of the
vertical column of text; accordingly, concern with speed and sequence
self-consciously directed its apparent currents of thought. With <i>OXO,</i>
Alferi compacts and converts this frame to a more abstract and yet
culturally fraught shape: the square, at once the paragon of inhuman
perfection and the model of human rationality; at once the window
through which one peers at one’s urban neighbors, and the shape of the
tidy, well-kept box that is one’s own apartment, one’s own self-concept.</p><p>The overall form of <i>OXO</i> is deliberate and ingenious, and is
ably implemented by the book’s elegant design. An airy, thinlined,
textless square appears on the first page of the volume and six times
thereafter, at the beginning of each of seven sequences of poems; each
poem takes up only that much space on the page as is bounded by the
square. While the title, which in English is a brand-name bullion cube,
directs us to think of the book as a conceptual cube, with seven
sequences of seven poems of seven lines each, it is the square we move
through so deliberately to get through the text. Moreover, the book is
without page numbers and the inscrutable squares do not present us with
an ideology or hierarchy for reading the poems that follow; they merely
mutely, and acutely, <i>present</i> them. The strangeness of this irreducible structure is the dominant experience of reading <i>OXO,</i> rather than the expansive volume a mathematical cube connotes.</p><p>As for the poems themselves, they are boxlike, consisting of seven
occasionally enjambed lines with an italicized undertitle below. The
relationship of the title to the poem it underscores is deliciously
inconsistent. Sometimes, the undertitle will provide the metaphorical
key to the poem one has just read, as in this poem which appears in the
first sequence:
</p><p>because they crawl flat on their<br>
bellies held only by the<br>
brittle voice of another<br>
down here on earth it’s heads names<br>
ads hear-say in place of steps<br>
it weighs or it jams too much<br>
to groove with the jellyfish</p><p> <img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="60"><img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="40"><i>roofers</i></p><p>Here a series of phrases establish a sideways, horizontal motion
which stresses the difference between above and below, bottoming out in
the final image of those depth-traversers, “the jellyfish.” The
undertitle, “<i>roofers,”</i> appears as the “answer” to the riddle of
the brief poem whose lines could be re-read as riffing off their
crawling figures; at the same time, the image of the roofers sprawled
like benthic life opens up a vista across rooftops of an urban seafloor,
which by implication reworks the sky as sea.</p><p>Other poems in <i>OXO</i> posit a less apposite relationship between the poem and its title:
</p><p>there’s still the liquid pleasure<br>
of the demonstration of<br>
the insult gratuitous<br>
as stomping on cherries as<br>
pissing on a tree you find<br>
enough to cry over in<br>
the gas good the sausage bad</p><p> <img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="60"><img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="40"><i>chirac resign</i></p><p>Here the undertitle seems like a detail pulled out of the
“demonstration” scene recorded (and the word “demonstration” seems to
pun at the poem’s overall interest in demonstrating a writing as well as
a seeing process). At the same time, the status of the undertitle as a
command is like a second movement for the poem, a second speech act
which veers off in another direction. The undertitle is more pointed,
more concise than the verse, which gets diffused in bourgeois matters of
stomping fruit or eating a disappointing lunch. In this case the
undertitle has linguistic activity apart from just explaining the poem
or renaming it. It throws a dart in another direction.</p><p>If there is one shortcoming in the poems of <i>OXO,</i> it is that
they more than occasionally charm. The petite, humorous poems have the
cleverness of bonbons. A rotation through the poems of Parisian types
(the gallery owner, the cafe owner, the street vendor) and sites (the
cafe, the cinema, the ground floor shops) plus a piquant concern with
literature give the poems a definite Decadent flair. Yet Alferi’s tongue
is firmly in-cheek on the subject of national/literary lineage:
</p><p>ah how these lines of whalebone<br>
unfold are read and refold<br>
with the faint sound of firing<br>
a salute when it’s just wind<br>
without rain the reverence<br>
for this foolish foolscap and<br>
its morose literature</p><p> <img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="60"><img src="http://www.constantcritic.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="40"><i>mallarme’s umbrella</i></p><p>Indeed, it is through their lack of ponderousness that the poems of <i>OXO</i> escape the heavy savor of Decadence.</p><p>Finally, while total experience of <i>OXO</i> casts the reader as a
habitual flaneur/voyeur, a concern with cinema and its ability to create
an illusion of motion from a series of static units runs through the
volume and proposes, by implication, an alternate version of the book in
which the individual poems form a continuous thematic or narrative
motion. For the most part, <i>OXO</i> resists this engineered arc.
However, and tellingly, in the central section of the book, cryptic
photographs by Susan Doppelt are annotated by a series of undertitles
which may be read together and thus add up to the kind of seven-line
poem found elsewhere. This central section, then, represents a recycling
and remaking of the energies employed through the rest of the book,
here compressed and pressed into tantalizing service of the visuals.
Alferi’s ability to render his intellectual and aesthetic speculations
in productively mutating forms leaves the reader hopeful for a future
installment, and indebted to Cole Swensen for the intelligence,
flexibility, dedication, and skill she brings to these translations.</p></div></div><div><br></div></body></html>