[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetics--Final session: Hocquard, Valery

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed May 17 18:33:55 EDT 2006


Dear All,


Here is the last set of minutes for the academic year 2005-06.  Before giving a
report on the final activities that recently took place, the group as a whole
offers it thanks to the various people that have made this year so successful. 
We first want to thank the guests we had: Ulla Dydo, Ann Lauterbach, Paolo
Valesio, Emmanuel Hocquard, Juliette Valery, and Jean-Marie Gleize.  Also,
we?d like to thank our co-sponsors The Whitney Center for the Humanities and
the Beinecke Library and especially the respective directors of these
institutions, Maria Menocal and Frank Turner.  We?d also like to acknowledge
the help and support of Patricia Willis, Curator of the Yale Collection of
American Literature and Timothy Young, Assistant Curator of Modern Literatures,
and Susan Stout of the WHC.

Also, since there are recurring queries about the minutes, I want to let people
know that the minutes are archived electronically back to August of 2004 and
are available here:
http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/

It might be worthwhile to note that there are now over 100 people who receive
the minutes, people both locally and across the United States and Europe.  Stay
tuned, as they say, for another year that will feature, books, discussions,
star-studded sessions, field trips, and a cast of thousands.

Now the minutes:

In anticipation of the visit of Emmanuel Hocquard the group met on April 29th to
discuss his work.  Much of the issues raised at that time were addressed in the
subsequent session when he and Juliette Valéry met with the group.  I?ll
save much of that for   the report provided this time by Jean-Jacques Poucel. 
In honor of the collaborations of Hocquard and Valery, it seems appropriate
that the minutes should also be a joint effort.

One issue that came to the fore in reading ?This Story Is Mine: Little
Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy? is the ways that Hocquard seeks to
dispute (rather than disrupt) the predetermined sense of the elegy.  He
characterizes this with the following schema: ?Ah!......Alas!? In other
words, he writes, ?it had begun well; time passed; and in the end it went
bad.?  Hocquard positions himself as a ?reverse elegist.?   The reverse
elegist deals with memories, but memories don?t exist in the past but only in
the present.  Thus, Hocquard avers that the reverse elegist ?investigates in
order to clarify a certain number of questions in the present.  He is the sheep
of which Panurges?  He will forever resonate to what command words?  He gyrates
inside what meticulously restricted territories?  What kind of grammar claims
to govern his thoughts??  The reverse elegy is a way to shift out of the
nostalgia and sentimentality seemingly intrinsic to the acting of writing elegy
and making the poem focus on the grammar of experience, and the experiences
possible within grammar.   This raised the question of what constitutes
Hocquard?s ?negative modernity? since the

One issue that didn?t come up during the conversation with Hocquard was the
question of reading his sequence ?Theory of Tables,? translated by Michael
Palmer. In looking at the poems, which have a recurring address to  a ?you?
as well proper names, an ?I?, and references to place, and yet are
resolutely ?disjunctive? and paratactic, we discussed how one thinks of the
diegetic situation of these poems.  Does one try to recreate and ?embody?
some dramatic situation, reconstruct out of the fragments of evidence a
speaking subject and the occasion for that articulation? That approach would
place a poem within a line of poetics informed (or described by) J.S. Mill?s
contention that lyric poems are akin to overheard soliloquies. Or do these
poems work against that very notion and so rather than attend to the dramatic
construction; the poems ask that the reader pay attention to each moment of
language as each their own act.  This question of approach, here, certainly can
extend to many Modernist / avant-garde poetries and strikes to the heart of the
matter of lyric subjectivity. The closest that we came to addressing this with
Hocquard was with his response to the first question we posed to him: ?Does
poetry translate reality?? To which he answered: ?The question suggests
that poetry, and even language is somehow not part of reality.?  It is
Hocquard?s belief that language not reality is the question.  But now I turn
the report over to my colleague.

**********************************************
Dear Friends,

On May 3rd, the working group met for a special session with French poets
Emmanuel Hocquard and Juliette Valéry. The meeting took place the morning
after Hocquard, Valéry and Keith Waldrop had delivered a bilingual reading at
the Beinecke Library (which included excerpts from Hocquard's Les Elégies (the
7th, in Pam Rhem and K. Waldrop's translation), Valéry's Le bolide immobile au
centre de l'écran (with selections in C. Swensen's translation), and K.
Waldrop's The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon). Having
already been driven back to Providence to teach his last class of the semester,
Keith Waldrop was not in attendance at the WGCP's final session of 05-06.

After enduring the noisy interruptions of passing sirens (a common feature of
events in New Haven), our discussions evolved around two principle questions:
the (im)possibility for language to "translate" the real and how Hocquard and
Valéry picture relations between poetry and photography. Throughout the
discussion, Valéry and Hocquard's responses were collaborative, and group
members sought, as best they could, to provide a running translation.


The first question was, in part, posed in response to the short texts that J.
Valéry had read from Le bolide immobile au centre de l'écran (2004). That
work offers precise descriptions and reactions to a series of 38 objets Valéry
received from the artist, Jean-Baptiste Audat. If the objects themselves were
not actually present at the reading, and if images of the objects in question
were not actually shown, the descriptive texts themselves presented the
audience with something akin to a translation, or a transposition of the
objects themselves, or rather, of the senses the objects restored, or
instigated, in Valéry.  The presence of the actual object, Valéry later said,
is of diminished importance, for what is most important to the poet is how each
iteration provides occasion for novelty.

A similar, or parallel, statement, this time articulating the relationship
between poetry written in English and poetry written in French, can be found in
Hocquard's presentation of 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains (1991). In that
context, Hocquard admits to most enjoying reading American poetry when
translated, and largely because the second life of the work, if well translated
into French, never ceases to state its otherness. It is precisely in the
recognition of that otherness that, for Hocquard, suddenly something happens.
That is, in the context of translation, his pleasure as reader might be reduced
to the following exclamation : "That, a French poet would never have written!"
The strangeness of an American poem in French is thus also a function of it not
being entirely absorbed within the language.

It was suggested that the question of translatability relates, willy nilly, to
the inability of language to account for the world. As such, the query helps
articulate some of the problems and potential opportunities that inhabit the
drive to represent, pointing out
that representation is always also a question of repetition.  The very act of
returning to prior experience but paying explicit attention to a conscious
difference is what most interests Hocquard, both in his appreciation for the
work of others, and in his own writerly quest, a creative process he
characterizes as a form of "idiotness," or a "vocation of ignorance" (a term he
borrows from Claude Royet-Jouroud). Proust's madeleine, for example, epitomizes
the process of representation as deeply conditioned by the return of the
familiar, but with the notable difference of a heightened self-consciousness,
one from which an entire novelistic world is brought forth.

Another example animating our discussion was Charles Reznikoff's Testimony.
Insisting on the subtitle, Recitative, Hocquard explained that he admired the
manner Reznikoff adapted the concrete elements of a legalistic discourse with
the effect of making the everyday lives of the infamous both moving and
irreducible. The process of versification in Testimony, it was suggested, was
akin to an installation of ready-mades; the hand of the poet thereby lending
new life to an entirely transposed discourse. It is this process of
shifting the way in which language speaks the real that underlies Hocquard's
version of littéralité (a term we discussed in from different angles with J-M
Gleize).

The terms of (dis)playing reference was most concisely articulated as we
discussed the place of photography in Hocquard and Valéry's work. While citing
a selection of films (particularly Blow Up and Red Desert, both by Antonioni) as
well as their own romans-photos (Le commanditaire and Allô, Freddy?), Hocquard
and Valéry said that they seek, through a variety of techniques, to expose the
way the most literal linguistic expressions utterly fail to correspond with what
is otherwise plainly visible in an image. At times it is matter of juxtaposing
two seeming unrelated worlds of reference, such that their intersections resist
assimilation. At other times, it is simply a matter of saying flatly what is
pictured so that the many ways that language means is juxtaposed to the
polysemy of the image itself. In any case, for Hocquard and Valéry the images
and the enunciations that come to their encounter retain something entirely of
their own, irreducible and enigmatic.

Hocquard also spoke of his relationship to Francis Ponge, citing first an
anecdote about the publication of his first book and also some of his private
sentiments about the poet often mistaken as the French objectivist. Granted
that for Hocquard anecdote intones performance, no reproduction of that tale
will be attempted here. I will, however, mention that, as a closing gesture,
Hocquard displayed a copy of the terrible book that had been imposed upon him
in first grade?the elementary grammar book gave resonance to his insistent
claim that "A dress are red."

The WGCP will reconvene again in the fall. Until then, all group members are
hereby wished a restful and productive summer full of words, images and
élégiabilité.


Jean-Jacques Poucel

WGCP Treasurer

***********************************************

I would just also suggest  as a coda to various conversations that have occurred
in and around the group this semester that people look to this online article by
Eliot Weinberger located by Lucas Klein that discusses the importance of
Reznikoff to Lorine Niedecker, another objectivist poet whom we read earlier in
the semester.  Weinberger makes the case that Zukofksy?s influence on
Niedecker as been dramatically overemphasized and that perhaps her work is
better seen in dialogue with Reznikoff.  This can be found here
http://jacketmagazine.com/30/wein-nied-rezn.html

This concludes another broadcast.  Many thanks to all our listeners.  Good night
and good luck.


The rest is silence,
Richard Deming, Group Secretary.


END TRANSMISSION


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