[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP-- minutes 2/9 (Tarn discussion)

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

2/18/07

Dear Friends of Poetry,


On Friday Feb. 9, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetics met to discuss the
work of Nathaniel Tarn.  Tarn will be reading at the Beinecke Library on Feb.
22 at 4 PM. He will then visit our group for a discussion on Friday the 23rd at
3.  All are invited to join us.

The discussion on the 23rd will extend our initial foray into Tarn?s work
begun on the 9th.  At that meeting we began by talking about the ways that his
work as an anthropologist (one who studied with Claude Levi Strauss) intersects
with and informs his work as a poet.  Our comments centered on his _Selected
Poems, 1950-2000_(Wesleyan UP, 2002), copies of which were purchased out of the
group?s funds, as well as three essays Tarn provided us in advance of their
publication as The Embattled Lyric, a collection of his essays forthcoming from
Stanford UP. ?I take the aim of art to be the creation of an order so
surprising that it cannot fail to be perceived by receivers as new and
different from what went before.? One then can conceive of Tarn?s
anthropopoetics as being a means to recontextualize given conceptual and
tropological orders.  The imperative behind this is in Tarn?s thinking of
three operative levels of poetic production.  The first is the ?Vocal,? the
register wherein the self asserts itself and articulation of its experience. 
The second level is Silence and this is the field or space between the Vocal
and the third level, that of the Choral.  The Choral represents a
?noncompetitive,? co-operative level that manifests the
?my-voice-in-all-and-all-in-my-voice.?  This level that reveals the world
as a multiple unity (or a unified multiplicity) needs constantly to be
refreshed and so Tarn?s work in anthropology (by its very nature a means of
ordering behavior in and towards the world and others) shares a poetics with
poetry.

We looked at certain poems to think through Tarn?s complex thinking.  We began
with a long considered close reading of a selection from The Beautiful
Contradictions (first published in 1969). In his essay ?On Refining a Model
of Poetic Production,? we read, ?A requirement of all creation is
selection: a process of leaving in/leaving out.  While there many be an urge to
be all-inclusive?the new order is forced to give up on totality.  Personally,
my whole life has been haunted by the urge to totality, to the incorporation of
tehat the Chinese call the Ten Thousand Things, on the one hand, and the radical
pain of the obligation to select on the other.?  This hauntedness manifests
itself in Tarn?s work (besides a certain indebtedness to Ezra Pound) as
extremely dense, intense, lengthy lyric sequences.  Indeed, most of the group
admitted how formidable Tarn?s work is in trems of its density.  Not only are
the sequences lengthy but each line calls out to be read closely. But one also
sees Tarn?s desire to be all-inclusive (in the sense of obligation to
polysemious, polyvalent experience) playing out in the poems/ musicality, the
fluid nature of their address, the complexity f its images, and its remarkable
erudition.  The fourth section of Beautiful Contradictions begins ?My job she
told us    with some solemnity/ is to lift the myth like a bandage from his
eyes??.  We noted in the following lines how Tarn draws from Levi
Strauss?s work on taboo and incest, draws from Greek mythology, Jungian depth
psychology and archetypes, and the very discourse of structural anthropology in
order to meditate on the ways that art and myth conceals even as it reveals a
(possible) world.   We looked at work from a later collection, A Nowhere for
Vallejo, and saw there evidence of Peruvian history, translation theory,
critiques of imperialism, and so forth. In looking at these poems, we read the
poems closely line by line.  And in every case it took the group (which is
remarkably diverse in tersm of interests and disciplines) to shore up the
various references and allusions. In a later poem tarns writes, ?The land is
one vast dictionary/of nothing but the subjects I?m in love with.?  It
seems that Tarn?s all-inclusiveness, and his own situation as polymath
creates lyric that seems resonating at dizzying levels and registers.  And yet
at the same time the poems, when taken moment by moment, do not marshal their
erudition to prohibit reading,; the poems ask as much or the reader as he or
she is willing to give.  It would be best to replicate some of our close
readings but at the same time it seems that these minutes are best served in
reporting general drift of our discussions.  I hate to say it but it?s true:
you had to be there.

I will also include here the series of questions that we arrived at over the
course of our session that I have sent to Tarn and that will serve to give his
visit next Friday some shape.

++++++++++++++++
--What role does anthropology play in your poems and how does anthropology
inform and shape your poetics?  What can anthropology and poetry learn from one
another?

--What is/was/will be/could be ethnopoetics?

One cannot help but note the level of erudition in your work.  What are your
expectations of your audience especially in terms of the range of references
and allusions to various culture and practices. What is your sense of the way
that these allusions are read by readers?  Pound and Eliot, similarly allusive,
would have expected readers to do the legwork to find these allusions'
references.  What is your feeling about what a reader's responsibility ought to
be in terms of seeking out the history, culture, and so forth that his poems
bring in. (As an interesting sidenote, we also asked this of Nate Mackey.)


With now more than 50 years spent crafting your oeuvre, how has your perspective
changed on poetry and your own poetics?  Also, how does that body of work inform
the poems you continue to write?

What is American about an American poet?  Given that you chose to be an American
poet [Tarn was born in France and raised all over Europe] and think of yourself
in those terms, one imagines you don?t take such an identity for granted.


Given your investment in translation and in diverse literatures and cultures, do
you ever feel yourself negotiating the threat of imperialism?  Why or why not?

In your essays you discuss the concept of reciprocity in poetry and poetics. 
Could you say more about how you are conceiving how this works especially in
terms of what it means in the textual encounters (and negotiations) of author
and reader?

In various ways the feminine is a concept//ideal/figure that you refer to and
investigate throughout you work.  Could you give a sense of your understanding
of the feminine, especially in terms of poetry and myth.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

As you can see, this should prove to be a fascinating discussion with this
remarkably complex poet.

I sent this earlier but do so again?a useful (short) review of Tarn?s
Selected Poems written by the poet Brenda Hillman is available here: A more
recent discussion of Tarn by Brenda Hillman is found here
http://jacketmagazine.com/28/hill-tarn.html


Dutifully submitted,
Richard Deming

?The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets 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.?