<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "> </div> </div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><img src="http://www.croquonslavie.fr/NR/rdonlyres/73E843AA-B918-4623-B8BD-949A6A2F7310/594/kub_or_190_190.jpg" id="il_fi" height="190" width="190"></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear All—</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On Friday, September 17, the poet, novelist, and filmmaker Pierre Alferi joined us for a discussion of his work, particularly his collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">OXO </i>(French title: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Kub Or</i>), translated by Cole Swensen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I will give an overview of that discussion, but first I want to alert everyone to our next session, which will occur Fri Oct 8 from 3-5 PM in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On that day we will be discussing the work of the Brazilian poet Angelica Freitas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Specifically we will be reading a selection of poems from her book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Rilke Shake</i>. Our discussion that day will be shaped by the input of Hilary Kaplan, a WGCP member-at-large and Freitas’ American translator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I am attaching to this email the original versions in Portuguese and Hilary’s translations. These will be the texts on which we’ll we focus our discussion on 10/8.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Hilary has a terrific essay on translating Freitas here: <a href="http://digitalartifactmagazine.com/issue2/Translating_Poems_from_Angelica_Freitas_Rilke_shake">http://digitalartifactmagazine.com/issue2/Translating_Poems_from_Angelica_Freitas_Rilke_shake</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And I’ll clip the first two paragraphs to provide a biography for this poet:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><em><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Rilke shake</span></em><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman""> (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), a collection of 45 short poems, is the first book by the young Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas. The title, a pun on milkshake (which in Brazil’s vernacular means just what it does in English), indicates the book’s contents: poetry approached as a shake of languages, words, canonical tradition and a measure of delight, whirred in postmodernity's ironic blender. The often first-person poems grapple with shaking off the influence of not only Rilke but also Shakespeare (the pun is not lost), Stein, Keats, Moore, Bishop, Bashō, Blake, Brodsky and Pound. In “não consigo ler os cantos” (“i can’t manage to read the cantos”) the speaker, established as female at the beginning of the book, asks the revolutionary and rhetorical question, “vamos nos livrar de ezra pound?/…/vamos nos livrar de mariane moore?” (“shall we free ourselves from ezra pound?/.../shall we free ourselves from marianne moore?”). Since she can't shake free of these titans, she shakes them together with everything else real and imagined from her life—family, languages learned or overheard, travels, dreams, homeland, and so on—to see if anything tasty results.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Born 8 April 1973 in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Freitas studied journalism at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, then worked as a reporter in São Paulo. She now lives in Pelotas and Holland, where she is translating poetry and working on a second book. She has published poems in the Brazilian journal Inimigo Rumor, and in Diário de Poesía (Argentina) and aguasfurtadas (Portugal). A translation of “love (collage)” appeared in Issue 6 (Spring 2007), dedicated to Brazilian poetry, of the American poetry journal Aufgabe; translations into English of “What is a tschüsstschüss?” (“o que é um baibai?”) and “Love, a collage” can be found in the German online art magazine Hilda. Freitas’ work is also included in the anthology <em><span style="font-family: Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Cuatro poetas recientes de Brasil</span></em> (Buenos Aires: Black & Vermelho, 2006). She co-edits the Brazilian poetry journal <em><span style="font-family: Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Modo de Usar & Co</span></em> (in print and online at revistamododeusar.blogspot.com) and keeps her own blog, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin">tome uma xícara de chá</span></em> (loop.blogspot.com).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0.1pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0in; "><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">The work of this poet seems to be in some ways sympathetic with Alferi’s work (and may set up our discussion later this semester of and with second-generation New York School poet David Shapiro).<o:p></o:p></span></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">++</p><p class="MsoNormal">Our discussion with Alferi began with a question to him about how he navigates his sense of the various media and literary forms in which he is invested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Alferi responded, and in large part this speaks to his process as an artist is that he sees himself as a land surveyor rather than a geometrist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The surveyor enters into a mapless space with no prior image of the territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Alferi believes that through writing he feels his way into the space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Feeling his way, there is a trajectory for his thinking, but one without a map or without general knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>There are techniques of orientation such as triangulating position by way of fixed stars, but there don’t predetermine what is actually to be discovered.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In some ways, constraints are like these fixed stars as they are the pretext for generating his own responses so he can sort through his experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Alferi then shifted metaphors and suggested that form serves as a kind of sieve by which he can sift everyday experience for the moments of revelation, intuition and surprise that are part of daily life (and which too often go otherwise unnoticed).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Beginning a work is the opportunity to invent (or find) the most effective sieve to make these discoveries possible.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">When asked if there were any models that he had in mind in terms of his approach to working with language and with images he confessed that he often desired to emulate scientists insofar as there is a precision to their experimenting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In other words, his goal is not to arbitrarily play with language but to do things that produce new possibilities for insight and representation. In that way, we come to know the capabilities of consciousness that much better.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Alferi mentioned that when his work his characterized as “playful” it often seems that people feel the work lacks seriousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In reality, he hopes that the use of language through poetic operations yields a broadened sense of what it means that we are primarily linguistic beings. It also indicates how form and language are organic, living things, susceptible to change, evolution, and adaptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Poetry reveals the flexibility of language.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">He discussed, for instance, the constraints of OXO—the seven lines of seven syllables across seven sections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>With a seven-syllable line, there can be no caesura that establishes symmetry within the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Any pause will group the elements of the line in odd patterns, resulting in a fundamental instability that appears line by line. The fact that Swensen’s translation breaks the lines in different places and places the caesuras in places different than in the French indicates how that instability is maintained across languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The cubic trope that develops also lends itself to compactness within the lines and across the poem that visually signals his work’s decisive split from a more classical line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The difference is evident to the eye as well as the ear.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Alferi referred to this as a formless form, which sparked further discussion of what constitutes form. Alferi argued that poetry is not simply form but is the negotiation—and even the struggle--of an animating force with the plastic nature of linguistic form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We might see this as some animus (perhaps we might call this consciousness) working with and against the limitations of language. This also goes beyond simply one’s ideas of the literary and engages with metaphysical concerns with what constitutes being itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is another way, that the stakes of Alferi’s “playing" with language are revealed as being quite ambitious and profound. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In his films, which often incorporate linguistic tropes, Alferi feels he can represent the evanescence and ephemerality of language because time is such an essential part of cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>His use of soundtracks allows him to create rhythmic pulses that enable one to scan (as one scans a poem’s prosody) the visual images. The combining of cinema and poetry into a shared poetics represents the fact that the ordering of perception is constantly occurring no matter how conscious or unconscious that process might be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Alferi’s work brings that process into view, makes it somewhat opaque is that we can be aware of the fact that the sieves we create to understand our experiences occur not just in the arts but in everyday life as well.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As is evident, the discussion of what constitutes form and the impact of aesthetic experience on one’s sense of the world was extremely generative and provocative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>All agreed that this was a thoughtful and at times profound conversation and set the bar high for the rest of the semester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our collective thanks to Pierre Alferi for his engaging thoughts and his willingness to join our group to discuss the issues arising from our reading of his work</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></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"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></b></p> <!--EndFragment--> </div></div></blockquote></div></body></html>