[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. Were
sorry for any confusion.
The meeting was divided into two undertakingsthe first half was
devoted to setting the agenda for the semester (and the next). The
second half was devoted to a preliminary discussion of Zukofskys 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 Zukofskys 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 groups 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
hell no doubt remain, but the others are all optional.
Zukofsky Discussion:
For some members present on Friday the discussion was a return to the
groups 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 Cavalcantis 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 readers active engagements.
The poems opening lines signal metacommentary on rhyme and its place
within an epistemological and poetic economy. The poems 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 poems 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 loves 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 Ahearns
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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