[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Minutes (F.Howe); next meeting 12-11

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dec 3, 2006

Dear All,

First, my apologies for the delay in circulating the minutes reporting on our
meeting of Nov. 17th.  Unfortunately, the report will be a bit truncated
(because of pressing time constraints), which will insufficiently reflect the
particular richness of our conversation about the work of Fanny Howe.  Also,
our next meeting will be Monday Dec 11 from 3-5 (note the different day).  We
will be discussing the work of Taha Muhammad Ali.  I will say more of that
below.

Our meeting on Friday Nov 17th began with 2 questions directed to Howe?s work:
 1) what are the difficulties of writing about one?s spirituality in the
20th/21st centuries?  Does Howe do this in a way that circumvents the
literalism and overdetermination that might come with writing about faith? 2)
Howe states (in an essay that was circulated in a previous report) that she
sees ?Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics.?  In what way then do her
poems enact and/or evoke the condition of bewilderment?
In terms of the first question, most found that Howe does avoid didacticism
because she is able to reinvest her terms (her religious vocabulary: ?The
grace of God / Places a person in the truth? for example) with a kind of
metaphoric intensity both by her formal strategies and by her complex sense of
what constitutes spirituality.  What helps is that rather than being
doctrinaire Howe?s poems marry concrete language and the staging of a kind of
sensuous language with epistemological ambiguity and paradox. This allows for a
dual condition of supplication and vulnerability, with faith being an activity
of intimacy.  In that sense, Howe?s poetry extends back into a long tradition
of devotional poetry.  It also came up that in the way that Howe?s poetry is
explicitly religious, it is useful to think of the etymology of ?religion,?
which derives from religare, Latin verb meaning, ?to bind.?  That
?binding? can be the bringing into conjunction various unlike, disparate
things?a way of binding a world and/or binding one to that world.  The OED
offers this additional wrinkle: ?a. AF. religiun (11th c.), F. religion, or
ad. L. religin-em, of doubtful etymology, by Cicero connected with relegre to
read over again, but by later authors with religre to bind, RELIGATE (see Lewis
and Short, s.v.); the latter view has usually been favoured by modern writers in
explaining the force of the word by its supposed etymological meaning.]? If we
think of religion being a condition of ?reading over again,? and binding, we
might see Howe?s poetry as an activity that reading over the world again is
itself a process of binding one to it.  In this materiality, textuality, and
spirituality are brought together.  This reading becomes keenly relevant with a
poem that ends: The earth will suffer, drop, / then enter eternal doubt / and
those soft clouds / will be its literature.  Space in time goes against nature.
// This condition is called ?the future.??  This passage also demonstrates
a prevailing feeling about her language: it is deceptively simple but taken
together, its statements are anything but transparent.

We looked for example at the following poem:

There is nothing I hear as well as my name
Called when I am wild.  The grace of God
Places a person in the truth
And is always expressed as a taste in the mouth
Walking with your arms wide open
And 263 days to follow, four morning stars
And Yuri Gagarin orbiting Earth
I know I may never be found or returned
When Peter, Henri or Mary call me
Fanny, as if they know who owns me

If one sees ?the grace of god? as being too overdetermined (and too
abstract), Howe reinvigorates the phrase by locating it in a sensual context as
?a taste in the mouth.?  This is in part an allusion to communion but the
grace places a person in the truth but the grace is within the mouth in a way
that is available to the senses but is not something necessarily concrete (it
is real but intangible).  There is also possibly an erotic connotation to the
trope as well.  But the poem situates the ?I? in a state of wildness (in
the wild, being wild) that is brought to consciousness but something in a
different state.  The calculus of this difference makes distinct two conditions
(one hears ones name because it disrupts the wild?bringing the wild and the
name both into relief).  This appears in numerous poems (another example:
?Moisture and dirt/ Have entered the space between threshold and floor / A
lot is my estimate when I step on it / Sorrow can be a home to stand on so /
And see far to: another earth, a place I might know?).

We discussed in the midst of this inquiry about poems and spirituality (in a
felt, direct way) question of ?bewilderment.?  Jim Berger offered a
felicitous observation: that the poems are ?bewilderment recollected in
tranquility.? The poems seek to facilitate bewilderment and yet the craft of
the poems and their ability to set up fascinating paradoxes suggest that Howe
seeks the form to represent the experience of being bewildered; there is also a
certain assurance of the pet?s authority. There was the concern that since the
poet has a desired condition that it seeks to represent, the danger is that the
poems could become familiar in its gestures.  There was some feeling that the
prose poems we read (from the book Glasstown/Lives of a Spirit) might more
fully create the condition for a reader?s bewilderment.  Given that the work
there is all prose poems that coalesce around narrative conventions and tropes
while never offering a ?story? and because there moments when the
typography gives way to the poet?s handwriting, typical, familiar reading
practices (however contingently described) seem not to suffice.  The prose poem
by its very nature is a liminal form and that creates and then frustrates
expectations of argument (at moments the pieces are essayistic), narrative, and
lyric subjectivity. As I say, there was much more discussion but let this serve
to give the general arc of the conversation.

We meet again on Monday Dec 11.  We will be discussing the work of Taha Muhammad
Ali.  Ali is one of the foremost Palestinian poets and increasingly holds the
attention poets and readers all across the globe.


Here is a brief passage that gives some context for Ali by Gabriel Levin:

It is hard to think of another Palestinian poet of Ali?s generation who writes
with such intimacy while skillfully modulating between the personal and the
public spheres of life.
Written in a forceful, direct style, in short lines of varying beats, with a
minimum of fuss and a rich array of images drawn primarily from village life,
Ali?s poetry recalls in contemporary terms the work of the great modern
Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, as well as the Central and Eastern European poetry
of Ungaretti, of Holan, of Ró¿ewicz and Herbert, and of Weöres and Juhász,
poets who wrote with unflinching honesty as the lights dimmed in their native
lands. Such poets replaced the ?poeticisms? of their elders with a stark,
emotional directness. Montale spoke of wanting to ?wring the neck of the
eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the risk of a
counter-eloquence,? a turn of phrase which seems particularly applicable to
Ali?s own poetics. But the poet?s spoken rhythms and lean diction also
suggests the down-to-earth vitality and inventiveness of America?s early
modernist poets. Williams Carlos Williams comes to mind: ?And in proportion
as a man has bestirred himself to become awake to his own locality he will
perceive more and more of what is disclosed and find himself in a position to
make the necessary translations. The disclosures will then and only then come
to him as reality, as joy, as release.?

A useful site giving more information, poems, etc is found here:
http://israel.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3181

Video of a particularly powerful reading by Ali with his translator Peter Cole
can be seen here:
http://www.grdodge.org/2006festival_revenge_quicktime_withsubs.htm

Our discussion will be led by Peter Cole himself, who has been attending our
sessions all semesters during his tenure as Franke Visiting Fellow for the
Whitney Humanities Center.  But even better than having the poet?s translator
on hand we will also have his biographer Adina Hoffman joining us.  Hoffman is
an essayist, film critic, and author of the powerful House of Windows, an
extended meditation about her life as an American expatriate living in
Jerusalem.  An except can be seen at
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780767910194&view=printexcerpt


This is indeed a terrific opportunity to talk about a poet of international
importance with the two people who may know his work the best.  What better way
to bring the semester to a close?

We will be reading So What the latest collection of the poet?s work.  Copies
will be provided to regular attendees (information about distribution
forthcoming).  If there is demand, I can assemble a selection of readings for
those who would like to come but won?t have a copy of the book.

This will be our last meeting of the semester.  With the next set of minutes I
will provide the dates of meetings in the spring.  We are anticipating as
special session with poet/translator/editor/anthropologist/raconteur Nathaniel
Tarn (who will be reading Feb 22nd at the Beinecke); a likely session with the
poet Xi Chuan on contemporary Chinese poetry; and one more guest, who will be
revealed ?in the fullness of time.?


?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.?


Respectfully,
Richard Deming, Resident Amanuensis