<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div><img height="387" width="517" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:E43CE97C-000F-4913-A0EE-3B1D08F3FC6E@gateway.2wire.net"></div><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Post-session conviviality: from left to right--Omar Berrada,
Peter Cole, Brian Johnson, Donald Brown, and C.D. Wright</p><p class="MsoNormal">----- </p><p class="MsoNormal">Dear All,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">I wanted to send an email that conveys the provocative,
generative discussion of our most recent session of the WGCP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>On November 5, the Working Group in
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics were joined by the poet (and recent National
Book Award finalist) C. D. Wright to discuss her book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Rising, Hovering, Falling</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In following some of the issues raised during the group’s
initial engagement of the book during a prior session, we began by asking about
the dilemma of writing about politics and political realities in poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Often, one camp will insist that
political poetry needs to be clear and populist in order to have any efficacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Another camp will counter and argue
instead that what results is not poetry but rhetoric. Wright indicated that
much of the poems of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Rising, Hovering,
Falling</i> (as well as many of her other collections) were fueled by moral
outrage in terms of some of the political and social turns America had
taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The conversation continued
to hover around the difficulty of writing about and from moral outrage without
becoming moralizing and didactic. The outrage does not define her work, but it
does give shape to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In terms of
the split that can seem to occur in terms of the arguments for how poetry can
be political—perhaps most famously and contentiously debated by Denise Levertov
and Robert Duncan (see <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/28/dunc-bert-lev-essay.html)">http://jacketmagazine.com/28/dunc-bert-lev-essay.html)</a>
--Wright indicated that as she sees it there is “no way out of the concerns of
one’s time.” She suggested that in conventional models of understanding politics
and narrativity tend to travel together (political discourse often being the
construction of competing narrative’s) but pointed to lyric poets—such as
Michael Palmer—who are able to use the lyric to address the political.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">For Wright, the virtue of narrative is its mutability and
flexibility, while politics and dogma can too easily make narrative intractable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Her work then strips narrative down to
find its point of maximum flexibility, generosity, and openness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This commitment to narrative is, she
points out, part of her Southern birthright. She does not establish the shape
of a book ahead of time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Instead
she writes as a means of finding the form.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Her experiments with minimal narrative are a way of blending
the fragmented, overlapping experiences of urban spaces with a sense of
location and that she is building a book as a habitable space. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To this end, Wright conceives of form as
a way of sculpting with words and language. The repetitions and the recurring
condition of “incompletion” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Rising,
Hovering, Falling</i> (for instance in the collection’s title poem, Wright
broke the poem in half publishing this long poem in consecutive issues of the
Chicago Review, making it literally a serial poem as she drew upon the
Victorian convention of serial publication) bear out that the poems are means
of discovering how to see things as clearly as possible, but also to keep
possibility an open question rather than a specific claim of how things are.
What informs her poetics is the belief that poetry remains a utopian
undertaking.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">From this position, the poems are at some level attempts to
“expel the scorpions” of contemporary discourse. This is a cathartic action as
much as it is a means of making part of the record the process of resistance to
illegitimate power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Poetry is a
kind of safe space to do this because although it makes injustice and the
witnessing of injustice part of the record of the contemporary moment, a poem
is “like a leaf in the Grand Canyon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>That does not mean there is no value, but that the poem itself is not
decisive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Wright is trying do, she
stated (using a chiasmus), is maintain the conditions of “the experience of
language, and the language of experience.” <span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Writing is not simply about one’s own sense of how things are
but it is a way of objectivizing a moral vision, which again helps transfer
moral vision into the public sphere of shared experience and makes the language
of experience a matter of public record. In an interview with Wright conducted
by Kent Johnson that I sent in advance of her visit, Wright mentioned that in
visiting prison inmates to write the book One Big Self, Wright felt that it is
the guest’s job to honor the host. We see that this idea of ethics of poetry
being enacted by Wright is this process of thinking of self and other, collectivity
and individuality as interrelated and interdependent situations and states of
being. The back and forth, chiasmic sensibility informs—consciously and
unconsciously—the poetics of this singular writer who reminded us, both in her
poems and in her conversation—that poetry is an art that has stakes that must
be acknowledged. We thank her for this intense, thoughtful, and involving
conversation.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As I mentioned earlier, our next guest will be David Shapiro.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our first session devoted to his work
will be 12/3 from 3-5.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>He will
then join us on 12/10.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here is the official Bio:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">David Shapiro (b. 1947) is an American poet, literary
critic, and art historian. Shapiro has written some twenty volumes of poetry,
literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and
his first book was published at the age of eighteen. Born in Newark, New
Jersey, Shapiro grew up in Newark, New Jersey and attended Weequahic High
School, and attended Columbia University, from which he holds a B.A. (magna cum
laude) and a Ph.D. (with distinction), as well at the University of Cambridge,
from which he holds degrees with first honors. Shapiro has taught at Columbia,
Bard College, Cooper Union, Princeton University, and William Paterson
University. Shapiro wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery, the first book
on Jim Dine's paintings, the first book on Piet Mondrian's flower studies, and
the first book on Jasper Johns' drawings. He has translated Rafael Alberti's
poems on Pablo Picasso, and the writings of the Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
Shapiro has won National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment
for the Arts fellowships, been nominated for a National Book Award, and been
the recipient of numerous grants for his work. Shapiro lives in Riverdale, The
Bronx, New York City, with his wife and son.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here is a review of Shapiro’s Selected Poems: Maxwell Heller
<a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/02/books/david-shapiro-poems">http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/02/books/david-shapiro-poems</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And here is a a great interview at Pataphysics Magazine:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.yanniflorence.net/pataphysicsmagazine/shapiro_interview.html">http://www.yanniflorence.net/pataphysicsmagazine/shapiro_interview.html</a></p><p class="MsoNormal">In the meantime, be sure to get your copy of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Selected Poems</i> from our mailbox in the
Whitney Humanities Center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Hurry,
though—copies go fast.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And have a great Thanksgiving.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Thus,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Group Co-coordinator</p>
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