[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP--Waldrop Discussion minutes

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Sun Sep 16 23:36:15 EDT 2007


Dear All,

last Friday the Working Group met for its first session of the 2007-8 academic
year.  We focused our attentions on the work of Rosmarie Waldrop, who will be
joining us this Friday (the 21st) to discuss her work further.

Rather than giving a detailed account of last week's discussion I would like to
submit the questions the group crafted to send to Waldrop ahead of her visit.
These questions provide a good record of the issues that we centered the
conversation around.  I would add however two additional issues hovering around
the conversation that the  questions don't necessarily reflect as these were
ideas that bear on a general poetics rather than specifically Waldrop's.

At one point, a distinction was raised between Waldrop's Lawn of Excluded Middle
and the later collection Reluctant Gravities.  The latter was described by some
as more refined in part because the poems' dialogic structure (established by
recurring conversations between a male and a female interlocutor) created or
suggested a dramatic structure allowing for the possibility of relationships to
be determined between 2 voices and thus between the reader and the work.  The
earlier work was seen as being more distant. That collection, although it
employs an "I" is an indeterminate subjectivity and is more explicitly
philosphical or meditative. Thus, it was asked whether
subjectivity is the crucial factor in this difference--and if so, what does
that mean in how one makes aesthetic judgments about poetry.  This is made more
crucial in
Waldrop's case because she prefers the prose poem--a form or genre that seems
to always need to be justifying itself as poetry.

Related to that concern was the issue of how much or to what extent an
avant-garde or alternative discourse has so cohered that readers are prepared
in advance for work that is difficult or seen in opposition to more traditional
poetics.  In other words, does this discourse simply become another tradition
that no longer challenges a dominant understanding of poetics?  This certainly
echoes the issues that Peter Burger raises but more precisely it raises the
question of what and how alternative discourses are able to hold its own
assumptions about reading practices.

As I say, after a packed 2 hour conversation, many ideas were broached but the
questions will give a sense of the discussion's range.

Please join us on Friday at 3-5 to meet with this important and insightful poet,
translator, publisher.  We have no more copies of the book to offer but I'll
attach a pdf of the second collection (Lawn of the Excluded Middle)included in
the book we read.  A selection from the 3rd collection (Reluctant Gravities) is
available here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/waldropr/reluctant.html

Also, many people asked about Waldrop's reading style.  Ssoundfiles are
available here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Waldrop.html

If anyone needs xeroxes of the essays we read, let me know and I'll try to
arrange to get extras made.

Also, here is a small taste of Jabes, a major figure for whom Waldrop serves as
the preeminent translator. 
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/jabes/adam.html


Friday should be a fascinating discussion.

Sincerely,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator


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.




+++++++++++++++++++
In your work and in discussions surrounding your work, one comes upon an
insistence on the connections between your work and feminism.  Could you give
your sense of feminism, on "feminine" writing, and the role of such thinking in
your poetry.  Moreover, how would you make distinctions between your stances in
these directions and poets/writers such as Adrienne Rich or Audre Lord?

You often cite Stein as an influence, in fact you point to her as a initiating
figure in the genealogy you describe in "Form and Discontent."  How would you
describe Stein's conception of grammar, especially in terms of the idea of form
you describe in your essay?  In other words, what are the possibilities and
limitations of grammar that you inherit and that you see at work in writers
such as Scalapino, Berssenbrugge, Susan Howe, and the others you mention?
Given that you have also made so much use of Wittgenstein's grammar and his
particular form (rather than simply his ideas on grammar) could you discuss how
Wittgenstein informs your thinking about grammar and form?  Perhaps we could
make this more specific and ask if you could say something about your
relationship to prepositions, which are so often a point of departure,
surprise, or serve as hinge  within sentences that work against standard
grammatical conventions.


Although many writers bracket off the question of a reader, could you say
something about your ideal reader.  What issues of clarity vs. difficulty do
you negotiate in looking at your work and deciding on compositional choices.
Do you feel that there are changes in poetic discourse and reading communities
(and their practices) that make it clearer about what a "difficulty" poetry can
expect of readers?

In your essays and in interviews you refer both to emptiness and silence.  Can
you say more about how those are distinct and what role each plays in your
poetics?

One notices your interest in science and physics at least as a source of tropes.
  What are the interactions (or potential of such) between science and poetry.
Is there a way that science (or scientific observation, etc) somehow offers
opportunities for a feminist poetics?
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