[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--minutes for 4/7, 4/10, 4/14 (Lauterbach and Gleize)

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

4/24/2006

Dear Friends,

These minutes will be uncharacteristically brief because of the frequency and
density of our recent meetings.  Before I get to that, I want to remind
everyone that we will be meeting this Friday to discuss the work of Emmanuel
Hocquard, one of the leading figures in French poetry?s current strain of
?negative modernity.?  Hocquard, born in 1940, is also a key figure in the
remarkably generative cross-cultural exchange between French poets and the
younger generations (LANGUAGE, post-language, and neo-modernist for those
scoring at home) of American writers.  He will be joining us for a discussion
of his work at a special session on the following Wednesday, May 3rd.  We?re
hoping that Hocquard?s friend and translator Keith Waldrop will also be able
to join us for that session.  In any event, both will be reading the day
before, May 2 at 4 at the Beinecke Library.  The readings for this Friday?s
discussion are already available at the Whitney Humanities Center.  In
addition, I direct people to an interview found at
http://www.durationpress.com/archives/code/codeofsignals.pdf
This is a PDF of a collection of essays on poetics edited by Michael Palmer.  On
page 12 of that is a dialogue (which occurred in 1982) between Hocquard and his
colleague Claude Royet-Journoud that is very helpful in getting a sense of
Hocquard?s poetics, his ideas of the line of verse, and his profound interest
in Wittgenstein.

I?ll include here Hocquard?s ?official? biography: Emmanuel Hocquard is
a French poet who was born in 1940 and grew up in Tangiers. He has been editor
of the small press "Orange Export Ltd." and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, of two
anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains d?aujour?hui
(with a corresponding English volume, 21+1 American Poets Today) and 49+1. In
1989, Hocquard founded and directed "Un bureau sur l?Atlantique", an
association fostering relations between French and American poets.  Besides
poetry, he has written essays, a novel, and translated American and Portuguese
poets including Charles Reznikoff, Michael Palmer, Paul Auster, Benjamin
Hollander, Antonio Cisneros, and Fernando Pessoa.

As for old business, we had three sessions in quick succession.  On April 7th,
we met to discuss the work of Ann Lauterbach, who would be joining us the
following week.  We looked primarily at her book of essays The Night Sky and
her recent book of poems Hum.  We noted in the essays that Lauterbach eschews
typical conventions of academic argumentation and reads texts not analytically
but in terms of what ideas and ideals represented in philosophical and
theoretical texts generate.  In that way, her reading is asystematic.  While
this makes the essays largely surveys of various thinkers and provide sometimes
very generative ?misprisions,? which serve to disrupt the ideals of
symmetry, rationalism, and polemicism that her poetry also works against and
brings into question.  Central to her thinking is the concept of the ?whole
fragment,? which moves against classical ideals of symmetry and perfection
and resists the seduction of closure because, she might argue, this
?wholeness? is a false psychological proposition.  Moreover, ?the whole
fragment? continually calls upon itself as the arbiter of its force and
legitimacy instead of continually locating its force (ethical, aesthetic,
socio-political) in terms of an ?approved? discourse and form.  In that
sense, poetry?as well as conversation?is less about reifying ideals and
more about the act of semantic exploration.

Much of our discussion was designed to arrive at questions that we could present
to the poet in advance of her visit.  Here are the questions we crafted.

1) What relationship does she see between her prose and her poetry?

2) Could she discuss her sense of what occurs in collaborating with a visual
artist?  In what ways does it impact her own ideas of composition?  In what
ways has it shaped her practice?

3) In her ongoing relationship with visual art, how has it shaped her sense of
her own poetics and is that relationship changing?

4) Could she talk a bit about her ideas of form and the line?  One gets the
sense in reading her work of a strong inner idea of measure yet the specific
rules governing that measure aren't outwardly discernible.  Thus, how does she
think of a line? Is her poetry autotelic? Is there a correlative in the visual
arts?  People were especially interested in hearing about the process of
composing the elegant and austere "Hum."

5) In Hum, one senses the trauma of 9/11 informs the entire collection of Hum
and yet this is never didactic or overt.  Could she discuss what she sees are
the dangers and dilemmas of being a poet (one based largely in NYC) after that
event?  In others words, what are the issues that she feel artists must
negotiate in representing that experience and how do you do so yourself?

Lauterbach?s actual visit on April 14th was too much of a polyvalent
conversation to give the exact responses she gave to the previous questions,
though all these issues were touched upon.  Lauterbach discussed her desire to
avoid polemics in that political discourse is ?always already?
overdetermined and complicit with ongoing agon rather than discovery,
communication, or dialogue.  She believes that her emphasis on aesthetics has
made some skeptical of her work.  This is an intriguing parallel to the debates
between hermeneutic philosophy and critical theory.  In any event, Lauterbach
sees her work as always being in some dialogue with spiritual realities and
that poems are the articulation and an exploration of an ethics of being with
others.  For her, working with artists has been an ongoing process that allows
for the blurring of divisions between those who emphasize materiality as
somehow more ?real? and those who see abstraction as being inherently
transcendental in its ability to conceive of a larger context for things.  In
Lauterbach?s work, she seeks to trouble these false divisions. ?The poem
announces the materiality of the world,? she said, ?and collapses it back
into the world.? She spoke about her view that the middle ground of discourse
is shrinking and things are either all foregrounded or set in the back, and so
what results is the loss of depth and nuance.  Poetry, then, needs to be a
means of restoring that middle ground when polemics and the ?inauthentic?
(from television/entertainment media to political pundits to co-opted trauma).

In between the Lauterbach sessions, the working group had a visit from
Jean-Marie Gleize, whose work we had discussed at an earlier session.  Gleize
actually had not dissimilar concerns in terms of coming to an understanding of
the ?real.?  He discussed his profound skepticism of images?those found
in print as well as visual culture?as they can be manipulated and can come
between a person and ?the Real.?  Indeed, Gleize?s suspicions made him
periodically sound like Wallace Stevens, who also had an anxiety about the ways
that metaphors and tropes can displace or elide experience, even as it made
sensory experience understandable.    Gleize seeks out an immediacy (in the
sense of direct or non-mediated experience) of the Real, a denuded perception
of reality, shorn of abstraction, figuration, and reference.  Despite the
relative impossibility of such direct apprehension of things, Gleize still
holds this as a goal in that such perception would cut through ontological or
metaphysical illusion and ideological collusion. This ?principle integral of
nudity? renders matter as non-idealized and revealed in its finitude.  What
came across in Gleize?s discussion was his anxiety about things that are
hidden or obscured by language, ideology, or illusion.  His work is an attempt
to bring the world out of the shadows of ideas and ideology into the light of
day.
	Gleize discussed the ways that collaborations with visual artists offered him a
vocabulary or discourse alternative to that which he has inherited as a writer. 
This new vocabulary by which to consider the world of things makes its
mechanisms more visible.  In the discussion of his work, Gleize noted that he
is recurrently drawn to the question of physical space, which announces its
existence as a materiality that negates false distinctions between depth and
surface.

Jean-Jacques Poucel offers this passage from Gleize?s writing as a coda to
Gleize?s visit to our group.

 From Altitude zero. Poètes, etcetera: costumes.?Bord de fleuve? (Java,
1997) p. 46.


Some see a link between literality and writing without images. The well informed
smile nicely. Metaphor is already in language. It?s there before we place it.
In one of his books, Claude Royet-Journoud phrased the question
interrogatively: ?Will we escape analogy.? Well, no, evidently, everyone
knows that we don?t escape it. In Michel Deguy?s terms (La poésie n?est
pas seule, 78): ?In speaking, the spoken assumes the costs of the precious
figures. There is no neutral discourse, no a-rhetorical, isotropic
discourse,? including, for example, the utterances of the Civil Code invoked
by Stendhal as the natural counter poetic model [see also Reznikoff?s
Testimony]. Yet, everyone can see that that there is considerable difference
between a poetics based on the unity of the real, on the hypothesis of meaning,
on the principle of correspondences, on the passion and cult of images, on the
ascendant and exalted aegis of analogy, and a poësis founded on difference, on
doubting a first or last meaning, on the avoidance or critical treatment of
images, on the refusal of analogy as a principle of explication. It is
certainly something along these lines that opposes the work of André Breton to
that of Francis Ponge, for example. I can understand that we may not like being
trapped into this type of idiotic alternative. Yet, it is merely (precisely) a
figure of speech to say that if a poetry without images does not exist, since
we are always already trapped in the tapestry of tropes, then we can understand
what I call the literal effort, or the literal worry, the toil toward breaking
outward, grounded, with an ?edge-of-the-river-color? to name everything, to
do it all.

Both visits represented the best that contemporary poetics offers with two poets
extremely invested in the ethical implications of poetics and poetic discourse. 
The erudition of both poets as well as their respective intellect and acumen
provided generative, provocative discussions.  One wishes that the two visits
could have coincided to see what Lauterbach and Gleize could find as common
language and as points of dissensus. The Working Group offers its thanks to the
poets for their visits and to the Whitney Humanities Center and to the Beinecke
Library for their aid in bringing these poets.

Thus,
Richard Deming, Group Secretary

?The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday
at 3.00 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.?