[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetry & Poetics--minutes 10-15

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

10/21/04

Dear comrades,


Recently we had two meetings and I will report briefly what 
transpired.  On Thursday, October 14th, the group convened for a 
session of “show and tell” at the Beinecke in which the group looked at 
manuscripts, correspondence, archives, and family photos from such 
writers as H.D., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis 
Zukofsky, and Ezra Pound. There was no formal discussion other than 
brief descriptions of the materials that were made available by 
Patricia Willis, curator of American Literature, and Nancy Kuhl, group 
member and assistant curator of American Literature at the Beinecke.  
The group extends its thanks to the two of them especially, as well as 
the entire support staff of the Beinecke.  Of course, everyone found 
the experience enlightening and educational and the special meeting 
prompted return visits by various members to follow up some of the 
research that they were inspired to do upon seeing these primary 
materials.

On Friday, Oct 15, the group met for its first thematically determined 
discussion.  The texts that we focused on were poems, prose poems, and 
essays by Kent Johnson, Jean-Michel Espitallier, Dominique Fourcade, 
Susan Sontag, and Martha Sandweiss, all of which engage the 
possibilities and impossibilities of an artist’s ability to “bear 
witness” to political violence.  Johnson’s prose poems take up in 
various verse paragraphs the personae of the American soldiers who 
tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  In his self-mocking and ironic 
last paragraph, the poet turns the tables on himself and the community 
of American poets in a critique that exposes a tacit complicity in the 
torture that occurred.   Questions were raised about the flatness of 
the poem’s language and whether or not that made the poem less than 
effective.  It was suggested that the flatness was indicative of the 
poet’s skepticism of using a heightened diction that would possibly 
aestheticize the horrors of what occurred.  This, of course, brings 
back the many arguments against political poetry that eschews lyricism 
for directness.  In Johnson’s poem, however, the flatness also speaks 
to the various personae and the way that they characterize a banality 
of evil.  Art the same time, we discussed the ways that Johnson’s poem 
might be overdetermined, that the guilt he draws upon is itself banal, 
and that the critique of poetry and poetry audiences might end up being 
caught in the very thing that is trying to be critiqued.  In other 
words, the rhetoric involved in pointing out the complicity might shift 
focus from the act of witnessing to being a poem about poetry.  Thus, 
the actual events shift from being the primary focus and moral impetus 
to becoming simply a rhetorical device.  This raised, as one might 
expect, a discussion of the ethics of representation.

We next discussed some poems by Espitallier, who visited Yale earlier 
this week to give a talk on poetry as a performance medium.  The first 
poem that we looked at “Donald Rumsfeld as Contemporary Artist” has a 
speaker seeing journalistic photographs relating events in the war on 
Iraq through the lens of contemporary performance artists such as 
Joseph Beuys.  The group was divided on whether Espitallier was able to 
rise above the bourgeois references or whether he was guilty of the 
critique Johnson leveled in his poem.  On the other hand, some felt 
that by transforming the art into the images of war (rather than the 
other way around), the poet redeemed his efforts.  

We also looked at his poem “Civil War,” which is a formal experiment 
that repeats a phrase (“The friends of my friends are my friends/ The 
enemies of my friends are my friends” and so on), adding to each claim 
incrementally and thereby changing the sense and possible validity of 
each claim while also serving to empty out the words by sheer 
repetition.  The latter, of course, isn’t so directly a poem that 
attempts to bear witness and stands in contrast to 
Fourcade’s “Enleash,” which more directly inserts the poem into the 
problematics of representing war by having the speaker objectifying 
himself within the sadomasochistic economy of the Abu Ghraib photograph 
in which a female soldier, dominatrix style, has an Iraqi soldier on a 
leash.   Even this poem, however, seemed to run against Martha 
Sandweiss’s assertion “No image of war is ever as brutal as war itself” 
and Sontag’s argument that “words alter, words add, words subtract.”  
Finally, we were left with the consideration that if poems can only be 
about poetry, is there a way that poets (and readers as well) can 
engage war by way of art.  Of course, the function of art in a time of 
war was not one could resolve in a single meeting.  At the same time, 
the discussion was lively and generative.

As I circulated earlier, for next time the group will meet (on Fri the 
29th at 1 PM) to discuss a selection of poems from Michael Palmer’s 
book Notes from Echo Lake. The reading packet is available at the 
Whitney Humanities Center. In the remaining weeks we will also look at 
Lorine Niedecker (one of the objectivists) and Walt Whitman, father of 
radical poetics and also a significant poet in terms of thinking about 
war poetry and bearing witness.


“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