[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetics--minutes 11-12 (M. Palmer)

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

11/21/04 (Better late than never)

Dear Friends,

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met on Friday, 
November 12, to continue discussing selections from Michael Palmer’s 
The Lion Bridge, Poems 1972-1995, focusing primarily from the section 
drawing from Notes for Echo Lake, published in 1984.  The group also 
bought eight copies of the book and regularly attending members each 
received a copy.

The first part of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of Palmer’s 
reading, which occurred two days before at the Beinecke Library.  We 
took note that although on the page his poems themselves work to 
diffuse a singular lyric voice and work against the notion of presence 
(perhaps to consciously dismantle John Stuart Mill’s conception of 
lyric poetry as akin to “utterance overheard”), at the dais Palmer 
often contextualized many of the poems, locating particular references 
and giving a sense of some the personal allusions that occurred within 
the poems.  The group discussed in light of this that a poet who wants 
to work against the naturalized model of the “voice” of a poem as being 
its governing trope might be in a strange position when reading the 
poem to an audience, thereby enacting that singular voicing and having 
a presence of the poet be evident by virtue of his (or her) being 
actually present.  One possibility, as we discussed, was the 
alternative types of “readings” that are actually closer to what are 
called performances that poets such as Jean-Paul Espitallier and James 
Shivers (among numerous others in the avant-garde tradition) engage 
in.  These poets rely on incorporating various kinds of media to 
diffuse the lyric voices.  Palmer, in that regard, despite his 
linguistic innovation and philosophical prolixity, is a bit more 
conventional.  We discussed that he might be better of that of as 
responding to tradition rather than either attacking it or ignoring.  
In following up the question of the tension between what occurs on the 
page and what he then contends with while reading, I put the question 
to Palmer via e-mail.  This is his response:

“The tension between the poem on the page and the voicing of the poem 
can be very great, and sometimes I fall into the abyss in between. 
Also, the space between the voice(s) of the poem and that one we bring 
to the reading of it, as we impersonate its author. Presenting the 
work, I just try to find its measure, which may actually vary greatly 
from reading to reading, since we are also ‘reading’ the work as we 
present it, discovering new elements as we go. Often enough, in a 
public reading, I hear things speaking from the poem that I've never 
heard or seen before. What's good about reading is that it can make 
things less strange--i.e. the music such as it is offers its own logic 
more prominently than in a silent reading of the text. I suppose that 
can also make it stranger. One hopes the audience doesn't think it must 
listen as if there will be a quiz tomorrow on the material. So many 
aspects to that question, but that's a start off the top of my head.”

The group went on to discuss at some length two particular 
poems, “False Portrait of D.B. and Paganini” and “Portrait Now before 
Then.”  The conversation surrounding these two were particularly 
generative.  The first poem, while characteristically difficult and 
complex at the same time has both a recurring form and a cohesive 
narrative frame.  The poem is built on tercets, with each line being 
about eight syllables each, although the stresses are variable—the only 
exception is the last two lines of the poem, “he still took a princess 
as his lover/ and let nations strike medals in his name,” which follows 
(either ironically, self-consciously, or both) the line “irreverent of 
tradition.”  The poem’s discourse while adhering to its formal 
constraints seems to work against certain aesthetic assumptions by 
being quite prosaic at times and by still courting certain paradoxes, 
for instance it announces itself as a “false” portrait, perhaps 
critiquing the possibilities of mimetic representation in lyric 
poetry.  Is a portrait that is false no longer a portrait?  And in this 
case the reader knows the referent “Paganini” but not the subject (and 
possible addressee), D.B.  Moreover, the addressee gets troped as 
Paganini but since the addressee disappears in the fourth (out of 23) 
tercet, the vehicle overwhelms the tenor, as portraits sometimes do 
with their subjects.

If in general, members of the group liked that poem, the feelings were 
more divided on “Portrait Now and Then.”  In this case, the narrative 
and scenic elements are far less stable.  There were connections drawn—
both positively and negatively— between this poem and contemporary 
art.  One recurring question dealt with how one might determine the 
formal principles of the poem’s composition since some sections were 
possibly lineated and some seemed to refuse lineation (as the 
poet/critic Lisa Steinman might say). For some members, the feeling was 
that the poem was sentential, that meaning and thought were constructed 
by way of the sentence and that was the freight of meaning, rather than 
a line.  In this way, the poem hovers between a verse poem and a prose 
poem, which in and of itself remains an indeterminate form (or genre, 
depending on how one is scoring).   Also, there was the possibility 
that rather than being predetermined, meaning and lyric effect was 
autotelic (and thus performing or enacting its composition rather than 
being pre-formed by tradition).  Other members felt that this form that 
has no form might be a slippery slope leading to a “word salad.”  The 
problems of form also perhaps lead to the larger question of what might 
the place of abstraction within lyric poetry, a question that we 
discussed earlier in the semester with the work of George Oppen.  But 
some wondered if the poem were simply too self-conscious.  
Interestingly, this lead to a divide between those who felt that the 
poem was beautiful and those for whom it remained opaque.  What is 
interesting is that this raises the question of what makes poetic 
diction and how something is beautiful if we can’t rely on the 
traditional aesthetic criteria.  Palmer’s work, then, seems to force 
the reader to be cognizant and accountable for the very basis of one’s 
won aesthetic judgments.  What makes poetic diction?  What counts 
as “form”—and is a formless poem possible?  The stakes of Palmer’s 
poetry are obviously large and ambitious.  

Ambition is what leads us to the poet featured in our next meeting, 
Walt Whitman.  We will meet again (for the last time this semester) to 
discuss the 1855 version of Whitman’s leaves of Grass.  We will read 
the work in terms of the questions of radicality, the avant-garde 
(within which, because of their engagements with poetry and politics, 
Whitman’s poems might located), and the questions of form and 
influence.  We would recommend that people focus on The Sleepers and 
the preface, to begin with and then anything else that they can work 
in.  It was decided that we would begin next semester by returning to  
Whitman, so “Song of Myself” could be brought up in the fullness of 
time.  The group has ordered eight copies of the Penguin classics 
edition of the text and a copy will be available to each regularly 
attending member.  These will be arriving next week.  In the meantime 
the text is available on line here: 
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/works/leaves/1855/text/frameset.html

As a postscript to an earlier discussion about Palmer we returned to 
the question of Language poetry.  For anyone interested, there is an 
online archive of the complete run of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the journal that 
started the movement available here:
http://www.princeton.edu/eclipse/projects/LANGUAGE/language.html

Again, we will meet Dec. 3 at 1.45 in Rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities 
Center.  Next semester, things are already being planned including a 
visit from the poet/translator Kent Johnson (March 21), poet/translator 
Cole Swenson, and our group is cosponsoring a reading by Palestinian 
poet Taha Muhammad Ali, with translator Peter Cole on Wednesday, 
February 23, 5:00pm.  The co-sponsors include: Whitney Humanities 
Center, Yale Arabic Poetry Colloquium,
WHC Working Group in Contemporary Poetry. Location TBD

May everyone have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.  

“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met every other 
Friday at 1:45 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale 
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within 
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric 
poetry. All are welcome to attend.”  

---R. Deming, group secretary