[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Minutes 4/8 (Alferi)

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

 Dear Group Members, 

 This coming Friday, April 15, Cole Swensen  will be a guest of the 
Working Group. In preparation for her visit, copies of her poems and 
other material will be made available early this week. Please stay 
tuned.  

Please note the special session on Friday will run from 4PM until 6.

        Also at the end of our session on Friday we have decided to 
devote the 
working session of April 22nd to the work of Robert Creeley. 

                                **** 

        On April 8th the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and 
Poetics met 
in the Whitney Humanities Center to discuss the work of the poet, film 
critic, and multimedia artist Pierre Alferi. Alferi is the author of 13 
works (see below), of which two have been translated into English by   
Cole Swensen (who will be visiting the group this week). Our discussion 
centered on Alferi's first book of poems, Les Allures naturelles 
(1991), translated as Natural Gaits (Sun & Moon Press, 1995). 

        Typical of initial discussions of Alferi, ours could not avoid 
the 
distracting fact that he is Jacques Derrida's son. That knowledge would 
occasion a reading of the one through the other... or so we imagined... 
and this led to murky talk of influence, etc. Granted that none of us 
had read Guillaume D'Ockham. Le singulier (1989), Alferi's doctoral 
thesis on this medieval philosopher,  or Chercher une phrase (a 
philosophical/poetic treatise published the same year as Les Allures 
naturelles), our various modalities attempts at finding an entry into 
that critical link might be cast as fantastical, or at least 
hyper-charged with the mystique Foucault critiqued in the notion of an 
author. 

        Once we did consider the work on its own terms, our discussion 
focused 
on the poems in relation to each section heading and on the book as a 
work of/in language. We inconclusively assessed the degree to which 
each chapter performed the phenomenon alluded to in the subheading 
(pressure, dissipation, circulation, condensation, drift, transmission, 
fall, oscillation, recoil), and we began to imagine how those phenomena 
act as encoded symbols, or screens for poetic and philosophical 
activities. The sentence itself being the essential poetic unit of this 
book, we took time to compare the French and English versions, finding 
that the rich polysemic effects were present and pleasantly confounding 
in both (for this part of the discussion, we introduced translations 
written by Chet Weiner (see Violence of the White Page attached as PDF 
herewith). Playing with the actual make-up of the actual poems turned 
out to be great fun (at least for me). 

        We finished our meeting and drinks a bit early in order to 
adjourn to 
the basement of the WHC where a few of us ventured into Alferi's 
multi-media work: Cinépoèmes et films parlants (2003). We screened two 
cinépoèmes and one film parlant (talking film) and began formulating a 
series of questions (largely generated by our mutual dis-ease with the 
project): are the words and the images of the words colluding? Are the 
images of the words, the spoken words and the images themselves all 
moving in different directions? what will become of the book? how is 
this critiquing thought as a modality of sight, sight as a modality of 
desire or thought? etc. Jean-Jacques has a copy of this DVD and would 
be happy to schedule other screenings, should anyone be interested. 


Books by Pierre Alferi: 

Guillaume d'Ockham. Le Singulier. Paris: Minuit, 1989. 
Chercher une phrase. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991. 
Les Allures Naturelles. Paris: P.O.L., 1991. 
Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif. Paris: P.O.L., 1992. 
Kub Or. Paris: P.O.L., 1994. 
Fmn. Paris: P.O.L.. 1994. 
Sentimental Journée. Paris: P.O.L., 1997. 
Personal Pong. (with Jacques Julien). ?: Villa Saint-Clair, 1997. 
Le Cinéma des familles. Paris: P.O.L., 1999. 
Handicap. (with Jacques Julien). Rroz, 1999. 
Petit petit. Paris: rup & rud, 2001 
  Cinépoèmes et films parlants. (DVD with 10 shorts) Les laboratoires 
d'Aubervilliers, 2003. 
Des Enfants et des monstres. Paris: P.O.L., 2004 
La Voi des airs. Paris: P.O.L. 2004. 

Minutes by Jean-Jacques Poucel, 
Co-organizer, who very much admires Sir Deming's way of recasting our 
meetings so they sound smart.


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