[Wgcp-whc] Alferi

Tue Apr 5 15:58:44 EDT 2005

Dear Group Members,

I am now delivering copies of the Alferi texts to the WHC. The copies  
are not, as Richard stated, from OXO (Cube or), but rather translations  
of Allures Naturelles (Natural Gaits), also by Cole Swensen. The  
library copy of Oxo is unfortunately lost.

So, for this Friday, we will be considering a single work, in  
translation, by Pierre Alferi. Copies await your readings.

A vendredi!

Jean-Jacques

On Tuesday, April 5, 2005, at 02:28  AM, richard.deming at yale.edu wrote:

> 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
> aren’t sufficiently “artful.”
>
> However, Johnson’s 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
> poet’s artifice, context, and composition. All agreed that Johnson’s
> 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 Swenson’s 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 there’s 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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>
>
***************
Jean-Jacques Poucel
Assistant Professor of French Literature
Director of Undergraduate Studies

Office: 203 432-4997
Fax: 203 432 7975

Department of French
Yale University
82-90 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208251
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