[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Kent Johnson Minutes
richard.deming at yale.edu
richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue Apr 5 02:28:45 EDT 2005
4/4/05
Dear Group Members,
First a reminder that we are scheduled to meet this Fri at 1.45. I
will say more about that at the end of the e-mail. But first, let me
recount our last session.
On Fri. March 25, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
were joined by poet, editor, translator, and literary provocateur Kent
Johnson to discuss his work. Johnson. Members may recall that we
discussed a poem by Johnson last fall in conjunction with our
conversation about poetry and Abu Ghraib. Although well known for his
various translations principally from the Spanish of such poets as
Jaime Saenz and others, Johnson is certainly most well known for his
central role in what became the controversy of Araki Yasusada. As I
recounted in the prior installment of the minutes, in the mid 1990s,
Yasusada was initially believed to be a rediscovered Japanese poet who
wrote about the horrors of Hiroshima as one bearing direct witness to
the events and their aftermath. It eventually came out that there was
no actual Yasusada and that he was by all accounts a cleverly conceived
heteronym. It is generally held that Johnson is the author of that
heteronym, though he resolutely never claims to be so.
Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects to the discussion was that
Johnson continually located Yasusada in ethical terms. He stated that
the person writing as Yasusada (who he insisted wished never to be
identified so as to displace or negate the authorial centrality of
Yasusada) wrote out of a overwhelming need to address-via the poems in
the collection Double Flowering-Hiroshima and its continued impact on
the world. This of course raised the question of who gets to represent
events of this magnitude and especially such ones imbued by such
tragedy and whether or not art, poetry, and fiction might not be able
to bear witness more compellingly than actual eyewitness accounts.
If all acts of representation are subject to distortion, then the
authority that presence lends acts of witnessing may be no more or no
less suspect than wholly fictive representations. The group discussed
this while also considering the ways that such claims set up a slippery
slope whereby eyewitness accounts can be discredited because they
arent sufficiently artful.
However, Johnsons situating of the Yasusada texts within the realm of
ethics of representation was surprising as quite usually the work is
read as being a kind of trap hoax in which the dubious politics of
large parts of literary institutions (primarily the academy and
publishers) were critiqued and satirized. In large part, the Yasusda
controversy is read as an indictment of those people who fell for the
hoax because they wanted so much to have discovered an authentic
poetry of witness. Readings of Yasusada as an avant garde cabal see it
as an attack on those who fetishize authenticity and leap at any poetry
that serves identity politics. We discussed the ways that
characterizing Yasusada in terms of a trap hoax might set up a
situation where the heteronym is seen as a means of exploiting
Hiroshima, which would be antithetical to the way Johnson had described
the impulse and intent behind the work. Johnson, who admitted his
admiration for Pessoa, the master of numerous heteronyms, never closed
the distance between himself and Yasusada, maintaining a distinction
throughout the conversation. He also discussed his belief that fiction
is the next frontier for poetry. This would entail something more than
simply adopting a persona, which never becomes anything more than a
mask or act of ventriloquism. An entire fictive context for poetic
utterance would allow for new possibilities for the way that poetry
undertakes representation and how it disinters the work from the
biography of the writer. This would not necessarily mean the
destabilizing of authorship, but would allow a rethinking of how the
author function might do more work if it were considered part of a
poets artifice, context, and composition. All agreed that Johnsons
visit sparked an extremely useful and provocative discussion of what is
at stake in representing events of such magnitude as Hiroshima and the
Holocaust and what role poetry might have in thinking through possible
ethical responses so that art remains reflective rather than
directive. Our thanks go out to Kent Johnson for his visit. I should
mention that the next collection of Yasusada poems will appear later
this spring from Combo Books in Providence RI.
On this Friday, April 8th we will devote a session to the work of the
French poet Pierre Alferi and will look specifically at the
translations into English rendered by American poet Cole Swenson.
Alferi is a particularly difficult poet who also happens to be the son
of the late Jacques Derrida. We will look primarily at OXO, which
is divided into seven sections. Each section is divided into seven
poems. And each poem describes some aspect of modern Paris in seven
short lines (plus an italicized coda which announces the noun or phrase
that is described in the poem proper). What's more, each line is seven
syllables long. A brief review can be found at
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005spring/alferi.shtml
Copies of the Alferi will be available sometime Tuesday afternoon at
the Whitney Humanities Center.
This session on Swensons translations will help prepare us for a visit
from the poet herself. In addition to being a translator, Swensen is a
poet who is on the faculty of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop.
Swenson, a recent National Book Award Finalist, is one of the strongest
and most erudite poets of her generation. Her visit will be a special
session and will occur on Friday April 15th. A packet of her work will
be available this Monday. A useful interview can be found here
http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2003/Interviews/
interviews.htm
Also a theres a helpful page provided by the Academy of American Poets:
http://www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=721
As the conversation with Cole Swensen will touch on translation and
poetic praxis, feel free to invite interested parties.
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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