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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear All,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Greetings to everyone at the day before Thanksgiving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I wanted to send this email in which I
give some introduction to our upcoming sessions devoted to the work of
poet/translator/editor Andrew Zawacki and then provide a sense of our most
recent session and the visit by Clauida Rankine.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>But first a congratulations to two of our own. The intrepid
Katie Yates has a beautiful new book out entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Poem for the House</i>. This is a sequence of very lyrical prose poems
combined with exquisite watercolors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>You can get a sense of the book here:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.stockportflats.org/house.htm">http://www.stockportflats.org/house.htm</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>And Nancy Kuhl has a beautiful new chapbook (entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Little Winter Theater</i>) now out in the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Check it out here:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=202">http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=202</a></p><p class="MsoNormal">+++++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Our final two sessions of the semester will be on <b>Friday Dec
2nd and Friday Dec 9<sup>th</sup> </b>and will focus on the work of Andrew Zawacki.
Our main focus will be his most recent collection of poems, Petals of Zero
Petals of One.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A useful review is
found here <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-zawacki-rb-shoemaker.shtml">http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-zawacki-rb-shoemaker.shtml</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">All the copies have been claimed, but it is pretty
affordable via Amazon.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>At the beginning of next week, I will send links to other reviews,
soundfiles, and an interview.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In
the meantime, here is Zawacki�s official bio:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Andrew Zawacki (Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, Chicago)
is the author of three poetry books: <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Petals of
Zero Petals of One</span></em> (Talisman House), <em><span style="font-family:
Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Anabranch</span></em>
(Wesleyan), and <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">By Reason of Breakings</span></em> (Georgia).
His latest book, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:
minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Videotape</span></em>, is due
from Counterpath in 2013. His work has appeared in <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century</span></em>
(Sarabande), <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Walt Whitman hom(m)age, 2005/1855</span></em>
(Turtle Point), <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries</span></em>
(Iowa), <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the
Present</span></em> (Scribner), and other anthologies, as well as in magazines
such as <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">The New Yorker</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">The Nation</span></em>, and <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">The New
Republic</span></em>. Coeditor of <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Verse</span></em>
and of <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">The Verse Book of Interviews</span></em>
(Verse), he has published criticism in the <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">TLS</span></em>,
<em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Boston Review</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">Talisman</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">How2</span></em>,
<em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Open Letter</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">New German Critique</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:
Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Australian
Book Review</span></em>, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:
minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Religion and Literature</span></em>,
and elsewhere in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. A former fellow of the
Slovenian Writers� Association, he edited <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Afterwards:
Slovenian Writing 1945-1995</span></em> (White Pine) and edited and
co-translated Ale� Debeljak�s new and selected poems, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">Without Anesthesia (</span></em>Persea). His translation,
from the French, of S�bastien Smirou, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">My Lorenzo</span></em>,
is due from Burning Deck. Zawacki has held fellowships from the Salzburg
Seminar (Austria), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Bogliasco Foundation
(Italy), Le Ch�teau de Lavigny (Switzerland), the Fulbright Foundation
(Australia), the Rhodes Trust (England), the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall
Foundation, and Bread Loaf.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">++++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>On Friday November 11<sup>th</sup>, Claudia Rankine joined
the WGCP and its second session devoted to her book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Don�t Let Me Be Lonely</i>, a long sequence that works against easy
categorization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The book is
written in prose, but refers to itself as �An American lyric.�<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The back of the book describes the work
as a �lyric essay,� but this descriptor was decided upon by the publisher, not
Rankine herself.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>In many ways, the issues with genre and mode contribute to some
of the aims of the work and its themes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Rankine informed the group that there was a watershed moment that caused
her to start working on this particular project.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>In 1999, during the Bush/Gore Presidential debates, George
W. Bush was asked about James Byrd, who was murdered by three white
supremacists in Texas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Bush�s
callous response to this murder, along with the Supreme Court�s decisions
regarding the 2000 election activated in Rankine a sense that she needed to
create a project that would be an act of attention to the events that were occurring
and that would occur throughout President Bush�s first term in office. Even the
book�s typography�a version of a familiar type used by major newspapers�was
employed as a means of indicating that the form was to evoke a sense that what
she was writing was �news.� Don�t Let Me Be Lonely isn�t an act of witnessing <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>(which sounds somehow outside of events
or at least reporting to those not present) but of articulating the experience of
the times themselves.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>The challenge that Rankine wrestled most keenly with was the
issue of how to write a text that seems to be happening as it goes, yet still
is a vehicle for deeper structures of thought, reference, and meaning. Finding
a form that straddles poetry and prose maintains that sense of unfolding, of
the text finding its terms as it goes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Rankine found that by paring back the language as much as possible
facilitated an ease of movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Moreover, Rankine was distressed by the rhetorical machinations of the
Bush administration and so wanted to use a language that was spare, but
precise, while still charged with meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>For her, the Bush administration�s rhetoric disrupted
language in a way that fostered a sense of displacement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Don�t
Let Me be Lonely</i> then arises out of this displacement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Rather than resolving that displacement,
Rankine sought to create a textual space that extends that feeling of
estrangement (and a derangement of the senses).<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Rankine noted that distress<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>is a very real response and can be a barometer of necessary
change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Don�t Let Me Be Lonely</i> is not, then, a political poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Rather, the lyric allows for a form of
meditation and that the poem is not a political tool but creates a space for
consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Don�t Let Me Be Lonely</i>, it allows a
consciousness of disruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Rankine was quick to point out that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Don�t Let Me Be Lonely</i> is not autobiographical and that the �I� is
a construct built out of various people�s experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The lyric, she insists, is a space of
intangibility that can lead to an awareness of a sublingual connection among
people. Again, she wanted that disruption and anxiety that was so endemic in
the zeitgeist to manifest itself in the work. The juxtaposition of the images
and the text occurring throughout the book, for instance, created a need for the
reader to negotiate to the two (finding and losing connection, prioritizing, etc)
and thereby creating a kind of anxiety at the formal level, an anxiety also registering
in the ways that the book flows between and among generic modes. The lyric
itself stands outside of the linearity of time and is thus dependent on rupture
of continuousness that is otherwise situated in time and narrative sequencing.
Even the notes at the end dispute or controvert some of the claims made in the
main body of Don�t Let Me Be Lonely, thereby further destabilizing our reliance
on familiar structures. These moments of disruption, anxiety, and
destabilization create a space where readers can re-cognize (that is, �think
again�) the political disruptions occurring.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>For Rankine, there is no separation of politics and the
personal (�Polis is this,� Charles Olson would have added). Thus, will all
forms of order disrupted, readers are allowed to enter the space of the text
and then move in their own directions. The shared sense of ungroundedness
internalizes the external and readers share in a common experience as an
experience rather than just things happening to them. In this way, readers
accumulate experiences the way that the body of poem�s speaker does�and yet
they become aware of (and not just subject to) the accruing of these
experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And in that way,
loneliness is acknowledged and shared rather than denied or allowed to remain
unconscious.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>As is evident, this was an extremely provocative, ambitious,
thoughtful discussion about poetics, politics, and the dream of a common
language of experience and awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>It was a thrilling discussion and we all join together in thanking Claudia
for her deeply human responses and contributions.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And that seems like a place to break momentarily for
Thanksgiving.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>All best to everyone!</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</p>
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