[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetics--Spring agenda, Minutes 12/16

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All,

At the cusp of a new semester (already!), thoughts turn towards poetry (at least
for some).  In this e-mail, I will first give our upcoming agenda and then
relate an account of our last session of the fall semester, which fell on Dec
16.

Semester?s Agenda:
Our working group will reconvene on Friday January 20.  The subsequent dates
(although tentative enough to allow for changes if need arises) would be 2/3,
2/15, (a break because of spring recess) 3/24, 4/7, 4/14, and possibly 4/21 or
4/28, if interest is strong enough and people?s schedules allow.  We will
have back to back meetings in April because the poet Ann Lauterbach has
graciously agreed to join us for a discussion of her work on 4/14.  A Macarthur
award recipient, Lauterbach is a major poet whose papers are housed at the
Beinecke.  Her two most recent books are a Hum, a collection of poems, and The
Night Sky, a collection of essays on art, culture, and poetics.

In February, the poet/scholar/novelist Paolo Valesio?and also one of our
members-at-large?
will meet with us to discuss his work on Marinetti and the Italian futurists.
Paolo has been one of our most sought after discussants and we?re very
pleased that he will be able to join us.  Given the breadth of his knowledge
and his particular authority on this subject, that will be a session not to
miss (see his author page at
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/italian/valesio/text.html).  There is also another
discussant that might be joining us, and when I receive final confirmation I
will be sure to announce the name and date.

With the first session, we will focus our attentions on the poetry of Lorine
Niedecker. Niedecker (1903-1970) was linked by friendship and correspondence
(and possible romance) to Louis Zukofsky and was herself a late figure in the
cluster of American objectivists, who lived in Wisconsin.  While always admired
by those that knew the work, in recent years her work has garnered increasing
attention for its own merit, rather than because of her attachments to other
authors. You can see her author page (located at UBuffalo?s Electonic Poetry
Center) at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/

The reading packet of Niedecker?s work will be available at the middle of this
week and I will announce when they can be picked up.  Other authors on the list
for this semester include Charles Olson, Basil Bunting, and Emmanuel Hocquard.

Last Session?12/16

At our last meeting (Dec 16th), our conversation focused on the work of Armand
Schwerner and a large selection form his life?s work, The Tablets, begin in
1968 and published as a whole in 1999.   Put concisely, and I will cite Brian
McHale?s article ?Topology of a Phantom City: The Tablets as Hoax,? an
essay we read in conjunction with our last session, ?The Tablets purports to
be scholarly translations of Sumerian pictographs incised on clay tablets some
5,000 years ago.  Schwerner?s poem mimics the conventions observed in real
scholarly editions of ancient cuneiform texts.  In particular, it introduces
conventional symbols of the kind used in these editions to indicate lacunae in
the texts: dots of ellipsis (?.) for untranslatable passages; plus signs
(++++) for missing passages; questions marks (?) for variant readings; square
brackets for material supplied by the translator; and so on.?  What is
interesting is that the translator/scholar (sometimes eloquent, sometimes
bumbling and fatuous) provides a ?critical apparatus? that doesn?t really
maintain objectivity or editorial distance.  For instance, at the end of the
line ?the blood of the four bodies tuna? the reader is directed to a note
that reads, ?four bodies her; six of them in the previous mention. Odd.?
Other notes are more speculative?my own favorite being the conclusion of an
extensive commentary that follows the otherwise innocuous line, ?give a
drainage system for the miserable without pattern (shoes?)? with the
translator?s contention that ?No contemporary of mine can conceive of the
genius and will necessary for one man to break through the almost total
though-control of the archaic hierarchies.?  Those must be some shoes.

However, these aren?t actual translations, since the ?Sumerian tablets?
don?t exist.  It?s hard to classify this text as hoax, since although
Schwerner maintains the continuity of his context, neither he nor the text
attempts to ?hide his tracks.?  It also isn?t quite the same as a
heteronym since there isn?t a specific persona to which the text is ascribed
(as is the case of Pessoa?s poems or in Rexroth?s Marichko poems).  It
might then be best to consider the text as operating within a fictive frame.
Many of the translators in the group did see the merit?in fact the kind of
libratory element?of being able to incorporate doubt and self-consciousness
and even metacommentary of the act of translation into the translated text. 
This changes the parameters of how one approaches the new text--not as a
mimetic representation of the original text but a new text that bears the mark
of the translingual negotiations and changes the terms of authority.

In any event, the aesthetic question was raised about The Tablets and the work
that its frame performs.  In other words, is the poem itself interesting,
valuable, and worth one?s investment outside of it's frame.  As one might
imagine, this inevitably raised the question whether it can be said that any
poem operates outside of some kind of frame?biographical, cultural,
historical, materialist, or otherwise.  In other words, a work of art is always
surrounded by a frame (although it wasn?t specifically cited, echoes of
Derrida?s Truth in Painting can be heard in this particular aspect of the
discussion), perhaps, and to ?bracket off? this element as extrinsic in
this case is an exception that proves an aesthetic rule.  In point of fact,
many members saw that the poems qua poems were in fact quite strong in the ways
that they were pastiches of Sumerian translations that wove together a bawdy
humor and a metaphysical reach.   For many, the various tablets circled round
the tenth in the series in which out of 24 lines wholly consisting of the
various scholarly symbols there are only two words, ?the the,?  which is
itself a bracketed phrase and thus supplied by the ?translator.?  It is a
subtle enough way of both emptying the language by indicating it all as missing
or untranslatable except for the one phrase, which is itself a tentative
possibility supplied by the translator.  And in this case, the possibility is
also an allusion to Stevens?s poem ?The Man on the Dump,? which ends,
?Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the,? which might also be
read as an act of translating the ineffable.  In this reading of Schwerner?s
Tablets, the poem is romantic in its reading of language as being finally
unable to get at the res itself, but is thus itself a more articulate truth
than any argument.  In this case, Schwerner transfigures by way of its
impotence the didactic authority of his scholar/translator into a poem.

Not everyone of our group was convinced, however, of the merit of Schwerner?s
project because it was so self-conscious.  However, fictive its frame might be,
that fiction could be seen as an indulgent contrivance and so the claims and
achievements that the context allowed for were unconvincing and that
Schwerner?s appropriation of anthropology and archaeology (and in couching
familiar claims seemed at best quaint and dated.  In that respect, some charged
that The Tablets seem to participate in the blurring of genres, contexts,
discourses, and personae that marked the late 60s and early 70s in various art
forms. While the counterarguments held up Quixote, Blake, and others as having
similar projects, some members maintained that those texts represented forms of
imagination that outstripped authorial intention and the limitations and
cleverness of their frames.  The session concluded on a profitable dissensus,
as they say.

We will pick up our conversation on 1/20.  May everyone have a terrific turn of
the year.

Your humble servant,
Richard Deming, Secretary, Scribe, and Scrivener

?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.?