[Wgcp-whc] WG Poetics--Minutes

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Sun Sep 19 13:03:39 EDT 2004


9/19/04


Comrades,

On Friday Sept. 17, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and 
Poetics met for the first time this semester at 1:45.  People should be 
aware that an e-mail was circulated to various department lists that 
erroneously reported the wrong time of 3:45 as the start time.  A 
correction was submitted but not everyone might have gotten it.  We’re 
sorry for any confusion.

The meeting was divided into two undertakings—the first half was 
devoted to setting the agenda for the semester (and the next).  The 
second half was devoted to a preliminary discussion of Zukofsky’s “A”-
9.  I will report on these two halves in turn.

Business:  

The group will meet at 1:45 every other Friday in the WHC.  The dates 
for the regular meetings will be: 9/17, 10/15, 10/29, 11/12, and 12/3.  
In addition, we proposed, so as not to overwhelm the few regular 
meeting times and take away from the opportunities to discuss agreed 
upon texts, that we have special meetings to accommodate guests or 
other events.  Our first such event is the visit on this Weds (the 
22nd ) at 4 PM by poet, translator, and Zukofsky scholar Abigail Lang 
(UNIVERSITÉ PARIS III-SORBONNE NOUVELLE), who will  Professor Lang will 
be discussing with our group Zukofsky’s difficult but fascinating “A,” 
and offering a close reading of section 9 in particular.  Other special 
meetings will include a visit to the Beinecke where Nancy Kuhl, group 
member and assistant curator of the American Literature Collection, 
will present key archival materials relevant to the group’s interests.  
There were also names for possible visitors that were put forward.  
Members present on Friday agreed to pursue some options and then 
present possibilities to the group.  

Also, we began discussions of what to read this semester.  Names that 
were put forward include: George Oppen, Michael Palmer, Lorine 
Niedecker, Walt Whitman, Ceasar Vallejo, Dominic Fourcade, and a group 
of Japanese futurists.  If people could e-mail me directly 
(Richard.deming at yale.edu) their preferences I can quickly put together 
an agenda.  This can also include names not mentioned here.  A reminder 
that Palmer will himself be reading at the Beinecke in November so 
he’ll no doubt remain, but the others are all optional.

Zukofsky Discussion:

For some members present on Friday the discussion was a return to the 
group’s first semester when we read through the first half of “A” over 
several weeks.  Much attention was given to the ideological and 
aesthetic tensions that inform the piece, which is a series of 
interconnected sonnets taking its form from Cavalcanti’s incredibly 
complex “donna mi priegha.”  We discussed the ways that Zukofsky 
explores Marxist arguments about the alienation of labor by way of a 
poetics whose obscurity necessitates the reader’s active engagements.  
The poem’s opening lines signal metacommentary on rhyme and its place 
within an epistemological and poetic economy.  The poem’s investigation 
of these things by way of its form and its relation to a complex, even 
dense musicality, because it acts as an operation that disrupts the 
mechanisms of alienation.  In this the poem’s second half turns from 
(arguably) vulgar Marxism to thinking of love as a system of exchange 
values.  Rather than the poem thus ending as an act of consolation or 
redemption, which would be ideologically suspect, and love is left more 
complex and so, as he writes, “how else is love’s distance 
approximated.” In that way, Zukofsky brings together strains of 
Romanticism and Marxism without resolving them.  

We talked also about reading the poem with and without Barry Ahearn’s 
extremely thoughtful gloss of the text, in which he traces down the 
obscure allusions and references.  What does one need and how much 
should one need in terms of additional apparatus and how does it 
recontextualize the poem.  We had a few glancing comments also about 
the unique burdens faced by a critic attempting one of the first major 
readings of such a difficult poet.  

All agreed that this was an excellent preliminary discussion of the 
work, which will be extended on Weds at 4 with Prof. Lang. 



“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets 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








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