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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear Friends,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On Friday, September 20<sup>th</sup>, the WGCP met to discuss
the work of the poet Geoffrey G O’Brien—specifically his newest book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">People on Sunday</i>. The poet himself
joined us for this discussion, and provided valuable insight into his process
and his poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Given the references to the Occupy movement and certain
contemporary and economic and political realities that are woven throughout the
book, a recurring focus of the discussion was the interface of politics and
poetry and the attempt to balance the two modes of discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>O’Brien mentioned that two powerful early
influences on his work were John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For him, Stevens’s poems described a kind of
private and consistent language in which private and personal reality and
circumstances were only touched upon in very sidelong or hidden ways, although
there was a kind of peerless intellectual reach of the poems.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In his earlier apprenticeship years, O’Brien
then moved to Ashbery, whose work allowed room for concrete, specific objects
and even specific references to a personal world.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">O’Brien described the tension between “aesthetic poems” and
“the political” as being tied to the sense that poems which concentrate on form
and aesthetic experience are perceived as lacking the possibility of urgency so
necessary to political engagement.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes">
</span>Attention to complex form can be seen as creating a tie between
“mastery” and form, thereby suggesting a kind of solipsism that offers no room
for response to the daily lives of political subjects. In addition, O’Brien
wanted to find a way to write a “city poems” that allowed for the disarticulation
of subjectivity within the economic, technological, and institutional
structures of the City.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">People on Sunday</i>
became a useful reference (both as an ekphrastic poem within the collection and
then as a title for the collection as a whole) in that this silent film from
Germany in 1930 depicts a Sunday afternoon picnic occurring on the outskirts of
Berlin. O’Brien noted a fraught distance that rises between the film and how we
might look back upon that moment decades later. The ease and idyllic sentiment
of the film depicting a group of young people enjoying a respite from the
demands of the workweek is contrasted with our knowledge of just how the
political realities of Germany were just then changing in devastating ways.
O’Brien felt that attention to that historical, dramatic irony was able to put
into perspective any sentimental idealism that might arise up around
considering the Occupy movement a truly important moment in American history.
O’Brien wanted to find a mode of acknowledging the anger at social injustice
that motivated the movement, while not settling for an easy consolation regarding
its actual efficacy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In terms of his poems, O’Brien wants to find a form that is receptive
to the anger in the face of social realities, while being able to channel it by
way of a complexity of form that requires participatory readings in order to
determine meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The lines of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">People on Sunday</i> accrue context, revising it as the poem unfolds.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>O’Brien strives to offer an openness of
syntax so that each line as it appears in the page recontextualizes what came
before it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Thus, the line has its own integrity
and yet also bears a place within the poem’s larger economy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The lines have multiple identities, in a
sense, and of course also allow for an openness to interpretation that allows
that multiplicity to flow out into readers and back into the poem by way of
readers’ varied and varying interpretations. If there is a resolution, then, it
also a contingent reading and so cannot banish the problems of syntactical
richness. The tension between a fullness of meaning and a doubt in the face of
any perceived d answer to problems of address, meaning, and value allows for
conversation to continue.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As one can tell, the conversation that day was rich, open,
and with a clear sense of stakes regarding how poetry does have room with considerations
of politics through the way it poses questions, rather than how it makes claims
and provides answers. We all gratefully acknowledge Geoffrey G O’Brien’s thoughtful
and generative answers to our questions that afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And a special thanks to our own David Gorin
for helping bring him to campus once again.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Our next meeting is slated for Friday October 11<sup>th</sup>
from 3PM-5PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That day we will begin our first of two
discussions focused on C. K. Williams and his latest collection of poems, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Writers Writing Dying</i>. The poet will
join us on October 25<sup>th</sup> for our second discussion of that book.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><img id="ea32bea2-a51b-485c-b1e4-583eac7eb8ed" height="120" width="100" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:F9844E32-7D9F-4C29-99D9-70CAE4DF8382@gateway.2wire.net">Here is the official bio of our next guest, one of America’s
most lauded poets:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">C. K. Williams is the author of eleven
books of poetry, including <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:
minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Writers Writing Dying </span></em>(Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2012);<em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:
minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin"> Wait </span></em>(2010);
and <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Collected Poems </span></em>(FSG, 2007),
which shows the long arc of Williams' career, from the morbid sanguinities of
his apprentice work to the careful, moving, stanzaic focus evident in twenty
one new poems. <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:
minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">The Singing</span></em> won the
National Book Award in 2003; and his previous book, <em><span style="font-family:
Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Repair</span></em>,
was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His
collection <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Flesh and Blood</span></em> received the
National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams has also published a memoir, <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself</span></em>, in 2000, and
has published translations of Sophocles’ <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Women of
Trachis</span></em>, Euripides’ <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Bacchae</span></em>,
and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. A prose book entitled <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:
minor-latin">Williams, On Whitman</span></em>, was released in 2010
from Princeton University Press. He is also the author of two books
of essays: <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">Poetry and Consciousness</span></em> (1998)
and <em><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin">In Time </span></em>(University of Chicago
Press, 2012).</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here is a review from NPR: <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/11/15/165233725/book-review-writers-writing-dying">http://www.npr.org/2012/11/15/165233725/book-review-writers-writing-dying</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And here’s a review from the New York Times: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/books/poems-on-mortality-by-c-k-williams-and-cynthia-cruz.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/books/poems-on-mortality-by-c-k-williams-and-cynthia-cruz.html?_r=0</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And here is a brief interview with Williams:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQn2Y1Z9XHA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQn2Y1Z9XHA</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Copies of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Writers
Writing Dying</i> are forthcoming.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I
will send a note when they arrive.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">By the way, here is a link to an essay about poetry and
medicine published in Poetry by our very own Laura Manuelidis. <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246082#article">http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246082#article</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Ever and on,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Group Coordinator<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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