<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div><img src="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/authors/claudia-rankine/448x/claudia-rankine.jpg" class="" alt="Claudia Rankine"></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Dear Friends,<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I am writing to say that the copies of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely are now available in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center (<b><i>not</i></b> in the office). This will be at the center of our next session, which will be on Friday the 21st (a week from tomorrow). These copies are free to any members, we just ask that you only take a copy of you believe you can make at least one of the two sessions devoted to Rankine's work. I will also direct people to Rankine's website as there you wil find some videos that are part of her current project that crosses film and poetry. Go here <a href="http://claudiarankine.com/">http://claudiarankine.com/</a></div><div>and click on "situations."</div><div><br></div><div>Here is her official bio:</div><div><br></div><div>Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University.<br> <br> Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including <em>Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric</em> (2004) and <em>Nothing in Nature is Private</em>
(1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Her work often
crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. Noting
that “hers is an art neither of epiphany nor story,” critic Calvin
Bedient observed that “Rankine’s style is the sanity, but just barely,
of the insanity, the grace, but just barely, of the grotesqueness.”
Discussing the borrowed and fragmentary sources for her work in an
interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine
stated, “I don't feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I
feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own
truth.” <br> <br> With Juliana Spahr, Rankine co-edited <em>American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language </em>(2002) and, with Lisa Sewell, <em>American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics</em> (2007). Her poems have been included in the anthologies <em>Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present </em>(2003), <em>Best American Poetry</em> (2001), and <em>The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry</em> (1996). Her play <em>Detour/South Bronx</em> premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater.<br> <br>
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American
Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation.
She has taught at the University of Houston, Barnard College, and Pomona
College. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>A terrific interview with Rankine is available here:</div><div><a href="http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.php">http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.php</a></div><div><br></div><div>+++++++++</div><div><br></div><div>Also, I wanted to send word about some projects by a current member and two of our international correspondent. <b>Lucas Klein </b>writes from Hong Kong about a blog he has created in connection to his forthcoming translation of work by Xi Chuan, who visited our group a few years ago (as well as being a general blog dealing with Chinese translations). The blog is here: <a href="http://xichuanpoetry.com/">http://xichuanpoetry.com/</a></div><div><br></div><div>And a chapbbook of Xi Chuan's work can be found here: <a href="http://tinfishpress.com/chuan.html">http://tinfishpress.com/chuan.html</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Bert Hirschhorn, our London correspondent, has posted a very thoughtful review of recent work by a past visitor, Charles Bernstein. The post can be read here: <a href="http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-review-hirschhorn-on-bernstein.html">http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-review-hirschhorn-on-bernstein.html</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>And from our current affairs desk, <b>Josh Stanley</b> has a written about Occupy Wall Street and a recent poetry reading held amidst those happenings. I post that below.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>In the meantime, we will meet a week from tomorrow from 3-5 PM in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Thus,</div><div><br></div><div>Richard Deming, Minister of Information</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>++++++++</div><div>
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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal">Dear All,</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:
.5in;line-height:normal">Last night, I went down to NYC to check out Occupy
Wall Street and attend a poetry reading being held there. I arrived at Liberty
Plaza at 7:45 and the poetry reading was at 9. At 8:30, after having walked around
the occupation, Edgar and I went for a drink and wrote poems to read. We stayed
at the reading until 10:30.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:
.5in;line-height:normal">The reading took place at the northwest corner of
Liberty Plaza, close to Occupy Wall Street’s library boxes (plastic tubs filled
with books). No microphone no megaphone and a loud organizational meeting about
twenty yards away (and music twenty yards south of that). So a human megaphone was
utilized: the speaker said a phrase, line or sentence and everyone close to the
speaker chanted it back so those at a greater distance could hear. This was how
the organizational meeting behind us was being conducted too. Most of what I
have to say about the reading is determined by this fact. People read for 3-5
minutes, but everything took a while because of the crowd repeating back the
phrases, lines or sentences. First names and some second names were written on
pieces of paper, which were then collected in a cardboard box. The organizers
pulled out a name and then you went up onto the steps.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:
.5in;line-height:normal">Only two poets whom I saw read chose to go without
this chanting (and neither actually *read*; they recited from memory). The
first of these was a guy who read a poem about Neda Agha-Soltan called, I
think, “What can be said”; the second was a woman who performed a poem about
hooker school, dressed only in lingerie. Both were interesting performances,
the second less inclined to bombastic language, but turned from satirically
performed spoken language (conversations with cops and GRD instructors) to a
somewhat earnestly delivered refrain of “your pussy is a sword, even if you
don’t know it”, a phrase which seems to me to be making a few distinct
arguments at the same time and invoking an archaic supposed poetic habitus of
swords and sorcery, and my not buying all this makes me feel uncomfortable. But
neither of these are what I want to talk about.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:
.5in;line-height:normal">What I learnt at this event I am not sure I want to
develop into any type of principal, but it does produce a truth I need to know.
When you say a phrase and hear it said back, what falls away is the internal
logic or complexity of the poem. One version of the poem only could be locked
in, and this was very clear and conscious for me. To refuse the human
megaphone, as I almost did, meant to invest the power of language to express
suffering and argument only in the windpipe and bones of a single speaker, and
not in the shared momentary voice of a crowd of people collected in Liberty
Plaza, New York, on the 7<sup>th</sup> October to peacefully protest against
the current conditions of capitalism (I put this as vaguely as I can because I
do not think even the vagueness of calling the occupation *anticapitalist* is
vague enough). The logic of the poem belonged to the crowd. Every phrase was
chanted back. Critical judgment was for me a secondary faculty. Primarily, I
wanted to involve myself with how every phrase was an attempt to give voice to
suffering, a condition of truth which could not be avoided for the reason that
I simply was there, in attendance, and listening in the act of chanting. The
unity of a poem was secondary to the unity of the line first read and the line chanted
back; that a poem was a whole unit was knowable because the person standing on
the steps a few yards away from you was the same person. This is to say, the
reading became a joint project. The passion of an individual was unsustainable
because the lines could not be held together, and no prosodic or tonal intensity
could be worked up into music because the chants were near-monotone, the
prosody necessarily slow and simple. The passion of the collective of
reader-chanters-auditors was predicated on a (vague) political commitment. I
don’t think it was a poet’s job, here, to provide passion in language to a
political organization, with an individual’s language chanted out as emblematic
of the spirit of an occasion. Instead, the reading became implicitly a
religious-service-esque expression of conviction with respect to two things.
First, that a repeated phrase belonged to the whole group (or language
community) and must be known, without hesitation, as a voice for suffering.
Second, that this language community was in fact speaking and thinking in a
very precise language, so that words and phrases from various poems were
immediately processed from English into smaller signifiers, with reference only
to the geographical and historical context (even the Arab Spring was being
reprocessed in my brain).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>A
man called Joseph went up second and read Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius”,
the last poem of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The White Stones</i>.
The first sentence of this poem reads:</p><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; "><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Leave
it with the slender distraction, again this</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>is
the city shaken down to its weakness.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal">Potentially, these are two parallel statements either side of a comma
and consciously either side of the verse turn, with the second line conditioned
as a reiteration of the first: say “this”, what has just been said, “again”. At
OWS, though, this sentence progressed logically. You leave the city into the
minute exile of the occupation, away from the slender distraction which I heard
as dollar bills, and the result is the city being shaken down to its weakness.
The mutilation of life which distraction is suggested to be meets its counter
force in the occupation, which shakes down the city, replacing the con-artist
with the activist collective, bringing power down to its knees. Untrue. But
longed for. The corrupt version of an ideal city does not imply backwards a
moral imperative to “Leave”; the city is an actual city, New York, which has
been left behind in the act of resisting business as usual. Contemporary praxis
is no problem, but is instead a solution to real humans owning all the money.
That is to say, no city nostalgia was even thinkable for me when these phrases
were being chanted. The later lines “O how farre | art thou gone from thy
Country, not being | driven away, but wandering of thine owne accord” (see Reitha
Pattison’s commentary on this poem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Glossator
</i>on this quotation from Boethius’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Consolation</i>)
were interpreted (by me) in the context of the nationalism of the occupation
(with people shouting things like “This country was built on liberty! Where’s
the liberty? You’ve replaced it with slavery!” – when this great country was of
course built on slavery). You (our political society and especially you, the
bankers) have strayed far from the ideals of the grand USA, not because you
have been forced to, but because proper regulations were never put in place.
The city of New York becomes in transfigured in turn into an exile from the
America of yore. I heard the lines as moving, delicate stuff, but the
consciousness with which I received them wasn’t mine. The poem was a fracture
of its form on the page. But the reading, for all its poverty, denounced the
abyss, at the entrance to which is an instruction to words to abandon all
feeling and experience of physical sounds. The liquid matter discovered is
being worked into pebbles, not the hard rock of meanings which would compel us
to make capitalism yield. If that should ever come, when that comes, it will be
a very different event from OWS, but the discovery of these fractured rocks
within the array of available political responses (Banks are bad! Stop the
bailouts! Money shouldn’t rule, so just separate money from the state! The
banks are the new John Bull!) is a prologue toward possibilities.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I
feel compelled to stand with the badness of the poetry as much as I feel I
ought to be disgusted by the bad interpretations of poems forced on me by the
context. Attending to the feeling and sound of every utterance was the virtue
of the occasion. The wrong way I heard poems, in the fragmented whole of the
evening, is something that perhaps may be correctable by a poetry that learns
from this. If the poetry readings continue and continue to be amplified by
chanting, this may happen; if so, the interpretive consciousness produced in
that corner of Liberty Plaza may do some good for the whole occupation. As it
is, I think the fragmented-feel-good thinking of OWS at the moment constitutes
how poetry exists there too. This is not to say I do not admire what is being
done.</p>
<!--EndFragment--></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Josh Stanley</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></body></html>