<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal">My Dear Fellow Poeticians.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">My apologies for a somewhat delayed report on Jorie Graham’s visit to the seminar on February 18<sup>th</sup>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It was, as we expected, an intense and generative discussion of Graham’s poems and poetics, as well as larger topics as well.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Graham began by focusing on how she arrived at the particular form of the poems in her most recent collection<i>, Sea Change</i><span style="font-style:normal">. She noted that William Carlos Williams has insisted that a “new music” yields “a new mind.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Therefore, with each new book she employs a new form. This new form is usually gestured to near the end of a prior collection of hers—it points to a future problem that she takes up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Graham has indicated in interviews that the form of Se Change was a conflating of Whitman’s sprawling vaticism with Williams’ attention to concrete particulars (each poet offering a formal representation of a kind of democratic impulse), but in conversation she explained that such a characterization came to her after the fact as a way of articulating even to herself what she was doing, a least in terms of how it related to a poetic genealogy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Graham explained that poetic form isn’t just a compositional question, but has a larger context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The initial catalyst of the form was a rivulet of water that she noticed and had thought about the form of that water’s movement and its visual and textual implications for form. She explained that she had become profoundly impacted by the information about global climate change that becomes more and more evident every day. Poets can provide the imaginative language version of science by vivifying data with metaphors, lyricism, and so forth. These aesthetics elements can make the information become experiential—thus loss and crisis are felt and lived through, rather than simply an inundation of facts and statistics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For Graham, there is a deeply empathic element to art and she wanted to write poems of praise and deep attention that would enable people to identify with the natural world that is so threatened. Indeed, she argued that the use of imagination is a political act inasmuch as it shapes people’s ideals and investments and at some level pushes against rhetoric and dogma in that poetry (and the arts in general) call for profound attention to the world in its particulars and a correlative sensitivity to how these particularities work upon us. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The attention that creates the possibilities for empathy and identification flows towards her belief tthat to imagine the deep future, one needs to imagine a deep past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Moreover, she wanted to write poems that could be read by people generations and generations hence and that these future readers would see what we have now have. As long as the poems are, she concived of them as exploded haiku, and intended them to be held in the mind all at once; thereby stretching the duration of attention so that becomes more and more nuanced (as opposed to sudden insight that the haiku masters sought to facilitate)</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Graham wanted to encode this spectrum of past, present, and future into the form of her poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As she envisions it, the left hand side is the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is that which we are always moving away from.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As she composed, she made sure that left side is always the same number of characters, and so there is a mathematical quality to them; also, these lines can work together in their own right as a poem. The center column would serve as the core or throat of the poem; and the right hand side is the future, thus broken and chaotic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For her the right hand margin is always the most vulnerable in any poem since its works according to its own logic—it is the most revealing of choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The left hand margin is always a beginning and is less vulnerable, less exposing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>At the same time, that left hand margin in <i>Sea Change</i><span style="font-style:normal"> marks the possibility of a new beginning from which the lines can spill out from. Moreover, the moving back and forth between the long and short lines create an effect of the presence of absence in their variations (each length pointing to the variation from the other), while the short lines are generally accented so as to more or less spring forward and create a rapidity, which makes the reader also aware of time and pace.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Graham began the discussion by saying for her aesthetic form is not only a question of writing poems, but speaks to how we imagine our ways of being in the world. Given that the discussion ranged from William’s imagist poems to the increase in yearly rainfall to the state of American education, it is clear that Graham sees that imagination (both in absence and presence) touches on all aspects of life. We can see then that for her poetry and poetics bring to the fore profound ethical issues. The conversation was as far-reaching as we had anticipated after having read the ambitious <i>Sea Change</i><span style="font-style:normal">. So, we thank her for a terrific conversation that brought back to mind the sense of stakes that thinking about poetry and poetics can hold.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Our next session will not be until March 25<sup>th</sup>, when we will hold our conversation at the Beinecke Library.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>That day we will be joined by the scholar Kaplan Harris who will discuss his research, insights, methods, and so forth in his work as one of the editors of the forthcoming volume of the selected letters of Robert Creeley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I’ll say more about that next week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the meantime, spring break is here—so enjoy!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the meantime, let me recommend to you a valuable link. D<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; ">etailed information about </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><i>Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "> is now available online: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><a href="http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/"><font color="#0e16f8" style="color: #0e16f8">http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/</font></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; ">; the “Checklists and Object Descriptions” page (</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><a href="http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/2011/02/28/checklists/"><font color="#0e16f8" style="color: #0e16f8">http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/2011/02/28/checklists/</font></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; ">) links to PDF documents providing information about all exhibited materials. This a truly riveting and important exhibition, that our own Nancy Kuhl executive produced.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; ">And also some good news: Susan Howe, past guest and ongoing friend to the WGCP, was awarded the Bollingen Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets in the United States. Congratulations to Susan for this much deserved accolade. The official announcement is here:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; "><a href="http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/howe-bollingen/">http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/howe-bollingen/</a></span></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Calibri" size="4" style="font: 15.0px Calibri"> </font></p><div class="MsoNormal"><br></div><div class="MsoNormal">Onward!</div><div class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <!--EndFragment-->
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