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style="width:160px;height:240px" data-height="240" data-width="160" class="rg_hi" id="rg_hi" alt="" height="240" width="160"><div style="display: none;" class="rg_ilbg" id="rg_ilbg"></div><div style="display: none;" class="rg_il" id="rg_il"></div></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Dear Poeticians,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">This email brings two points of business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>First, I wanted to remind that we will
next meet on Friday, October 21 from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities
Center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>That will be the first of
two sessions devoted to the work of Claudia Rankine. At the second session, on
November 11th, Rankine will join our conversation.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>This is the second visitor being brought to campus in
conjunction with the Grad Poets Reading Series.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Rankine will read the night before (Nov 10<sup>th</sup>) in
LC 317 at 7PM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We will focusing
our discussion on Rankine’s book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Don’t
Let Me Be Lonely</i>, as well as some new material that the poet will be
sending us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The books should
arrive next week, and I’ll let people know when (and where!) to pick them up.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The second point of business is to provide some sense of
last week’s discussion. On Friday, September 30<sup>th</sup>, the poet/novelist
Ben Lerner joined us for a very wide-ranging and generative discussion of
poetics and with special emphasis on his most recent book of poems, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Mean Free Path</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Lerner described his desire in that book of poems to
thematize throughout the work the problematized voice. Lerner came to see the
voice of Robert Creeley’s poems (and the actual recordings of Creeley’s voice)
as presenting a model for how to dramatize the effort of speech, particularly
in a love poem and its attempts to escape facile sentimentality or the
exhausted possibilities of an inherited Romantic vocabulary. In his close
attention to Creeley’s stuttering line (both on the page and in recordings of
the poet reading), Lerner came to see that hesitancy as expression itself
rather than as a resistance to expressivity.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Lerner had turned to Creeley’s line as a way of moving out
of the prose sentences of his previous book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Angle of Yaw</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What
Lerner was looking for in Creeley’s work was a way of reconceiving of the form
of the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Lerner’s interest in
imposed form and constraint is that it offers a way of dramatizing or enacting
the social struggle between a subjective series of choices operating within
larger linguistic structures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Creeley’s stutter became the plot, so to
speak. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">For Lerner, form, amongst its other possibilities, is the
enactment or ironization of content rather than a medium to be made invisible
or an objectivity that is made to disappear. Individuality appears, then, in
the conflict and encounter between the writer and language itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In working through serial forms and
constraints, failure (of communication, of meaning) is admitted into the poem’s
structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Mean Free Path </i>then walks between closure and the abjuring of
closure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The resulting undecidability
neither lets the work be a totalizing system nor does it exist completely free
of systems of meaning, perception, understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>This measure of the poems’ fractality lies in its play
between open and closed systems. The wide ranging forms of language—science,
slang, Romanticism, music, literary history—brings an openness and flexibility
(a sense of the random and arbitrary) into a poetry shaped by an a priori
compositional process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This sets
up the paradoxical condition of “emerging closure,” which Lerner described as a
legible history of small decisions.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Wary of the Romanticizing tendency for poetry to valorize
its own reactive failure as a sign of its own depth, Lerner sought instead a
language could graph an experience of resistance to abstraction and
allegory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This meant creating a
poetic register that neither embraced closure nor completely rejected it for
the sake of disjunction qua disjunction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Ultimately, the desire was to find a form within which even lines with a
kind of transparency would have that spark of disjunction in order to make
evident that the process of integration is ongoing.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The reason for this drive to find a form that is neither
resolved as linear or disjunctive goes back to the poet’s sense of that
struggle between writer (and presumably the reader as well) and language being
where subjectivity appears. So instead of linearity being imperceptible,
linearity is something that we can come acknowledge as being an experience in
and of itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is just as
much an experience of the self as wrestling with disjunction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Thus, the experience of the self comes
forth in a conscious experience of the integration of disparate parts and
elements in a given poem. The task of the contemporary poet is to avoid the
exhausted vocabulary of The Romantic poets as well as the programmatic
derangement of the Language poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Then, with an anxiety towards these influences and a wariness of
self-aggrandizement, the poet must grapple with language itself and the
negotiations of articulating the experience of experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It becomes necessary therefore not to
simply imitate the poets of prior generations (no matter how far back) and find
instead the mix of skepticism and faith in being able to articulate experience in
such a way that the function of poetry keeps moving forward without getting
mired in the mere repetition of strategies and traditions for their own
sake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This generative anxiety
signals a sense of responsibility for articulating experience but acknowledging
its difficulties, complexities, and costs. This dramatization of a fundamental
social struggle and its criticality at its best clears out dependency upon
habit and allows for the possibilities of flexibility, generousness, and
openness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For want of a better
word, Lerner described this as the possibility of grace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Attention to the ways that elegance,
beauty and overall aesthetic pleasure provides the ways of thinking about the
experience of a self finding its way to see interference as a music. In that
lies the moral (without moralizing) dimension of Lerner’s poetics, an open and
unresolved utopic reach for openness, a love with all its edges.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As is clear, this was a fascinating and complex discussion
of form that located intersections of the social and the aesthetic, ethics and
poetics. The entire company of poetics folks joins me in thanking Ben Lerner
for joining is for this compelling discussion of his work.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">So, look soon for an email about <i>Don’t Let Me Be
Lonely</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Until then,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>I remain,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator.</p>
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