[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP--Waldrop minutes, R. Back session this Fri
richard.deming at yale.edu
richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed Sep 26 11:05:29 EDT 2007
Dear All,
last Friday poet/translator/editor/publisher Rosmarie Waldrop joined the griup
to discuss her poetry and poetics. Without a doubt Waldrop's proved to be one
of our strongest discussants. The two hours went by extremely quickly and we
touched on a range of topics. Because we have a session this Friday I'm forced
to keep the notes on Wladrop's visit short. I'll try to focus on the questions
that we has posed Waldop in advance of her coming.
In response to the question about her relationship to feminism, Waldrop
indicated that she sees herself as a woman, as a feminist, and as a poet but
not as a "woman poet" or a "feminist poet." Waldrop suggested that identity
particularly in terms of artistic processes are externally produced and that an
"I" is a function of grammar, but otherwise in the activity of doing something,
of producing art, the "I" is not static and fixed but is in an act of becoming
and so resists singular or determining identity or definition.
For Waldrop, the possibility of possibilities--an openness--is a condition that
poetry can court in its slippages of grammar, meaning, interpretation, and so
forth. These slippages create gaps or an emptiness of meaning that are not
nihilistic but are instead a free range of indeterminateness. Instead of no
meaning, the emptiness is an unconstrained possible range of meaning. This
emptiness gives a glimpse into a silence that underwrites all human experience.
{An interesting sidenote: it might be fascinating to link the ways that
Waldrop's thinking connects with that of Nathaniel Tarn's--last spring we
discussed Tarn's poetics and his division of poetry and three realms or
conditions: the Silence, The Choral, and The Vocal). Again, silence is the
fullness rather than the absence of experience and suggests a kind of grounded
transcendental perspective. When asked if she thought that emptiness was a
feminine space, Waldrop acknowledged that if the womb is organ that is seen as
usually empty than the connection could be drawn but that in general the
emptiness was also between gender divisions. Still, she said, there is the
ever present fact of one's own body and so in that sense she is always a woman
writing.
Waldrop discussed the fact that she is always negotiating the German Romantics
as their poetry was a major--indeed the primary--set of texts during her
formative years. Thus, that heritage is not simply something to be denied or
resisted, though it is to be grappled with.
Rosmarie discussed her coming to write poetry primarily in English as arising
out of her activity as a translator. The fact that she began in earnest
writing in English means that she is always at some level caught between
languages and that she has a particular sensitivity to English and its idioms
she is not a native speaker. She described her coming to prose poetry as being
a result of many factors. One was that she felt a kind of claustrophobia with
the very short, quick lines she had developed in her lineated poetry. In those
poems she wrote so that the object of a given line would become the subject of
the following line. This meant the lines had a high velocity that propelled
the text ever forward. Her attempt at a novel returned to her the
possibilities of cluases and phrases and prose poetry was a way to control that
velocity she had developed. Also, the prose poem is itself a liminal
genre--caught between prose and verse--and again allows Waldrop the conditions
of in-betweenness, thereby dismantling rigid boundaries and binaries. In that
way, her work moved from a enacting a consideration of time to the enactment of
a consideration of space.
When asked about the fact that the role of science and quantum physics in her
work (at least as a set of trope) Waldrop indicated that physics is a discourse
that orders the world--like any other discourse, including gender stereotypes.
That order is a response to a complete openness of space. The problem occurs
when these ordering tendencies become rigid rather than suggestive and that her
work is an attempt to "push analogy into the texture outside of the structure"
of these totalizing ways of ordering experience. Finally, when asked what here
feelings are about being known as a "philosophical poet" Waldrop said that for
her the two disciplines are linked in that they are both forms of thinking,
activities and languages of inquiry. Thus, when someone asked whether she
composed by concept or music she said that both are part of the equation
because in many ways they aren't disconnected. "Whether listening to the mind
or to the music, [she is] chasing after the 'it' that is not there yet," she
said.
This is just a tip of the iceberg, as they say, in terms of what we covered last
Friday. I didn't recount our long discussions of space, translation,
collage,and other topics. As you can see, this was an extremely generative
session and the entire group thanks Rosmarie for joining us for such a
rewarding conversation.
We continue our back to back sessions this Friday (Sept 28) when we read the
work of Rachel Tzvia Back. Back is a translator, poet, activist and a scholar
and we will read her recent book "On Ruins and Return." Back is American born,
but has lived in Israel for the last 27 years. She is also one of the foremost
scholars on the work of Susan Howe. We will also read excerpts from her book
on Howe, Led By Language.
We did distribute copies of her book at the last meeting. I believe one is left
and that is found on the bookshelves across from the doorway in Rm. 116 in the
Whitney Humanities Center. There should also be copies of the essays there.
Please stop by there and get these (while supplies last).
Below I will paste an extensive bio on Back but here one can find an interview
with here:http://www.literarymama.com/profiles/archives/000951.html
and a link to her book (published by Shearsman) is here
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/back.html
And a very useful and detailed account of a recent talk Back gave is here:
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2006/03/placing_the_voi.html
Back will then visit our group on the following Friday (Oct.5). I'll e-mail a
reminder next week.
At the end of the bio of Back you'll see a blurb by Peter Cole. Members will
recall that Peter joined us all last fall while he and his wife Adina Hoffman
were fellows at the Whitney Humanities Center, and Peter and Adina led a
session on the work of Taha Muhammad Ali last December. Some good news: Peter
was just recently awarded the MacArthur Award, aka the "genius grant." Such
accolades could not have happened to a worthier, more deserving
poet/scholar/editor/thinker than Peter. I am sure I speak for the whole group
in congratulating him on his terrific news.
And so,
Richard Deming, Group scribe and Co-cordinator.
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.
Rachel Tzvia Back
Rachel Tzvia Back, born in 1960 in Buffalo NY, is the 7th generation of her
family in Palestine. Her grandfather left Palestine in the 1920s, looking for
the ?golden medina? on America's shores ? in the 1980s, Back returned to
Israel, to make her home here. She studied at Yale, Temple and Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, where she wrote her PhD dissertation on post-modern
American poetry.
Her collection of poetry entitled Azimuth was published in 2001 by Sheep
Meadow Press - a Hebrew version of this collection was published in 2000 by
Kibbutz Hameuchad Press (translated into Hebrew by Aharon Shabtai). A new
chapbook entitled The Buffalo Poems , a collection which records the
heart-breaking cycle of violence and loss defining Israeli and Palestinian
lives these last years, was recently published by Duration Press. In addition,
Rachel Tzvia Back's poetry has appeared in numerous journals in America and
abroad, including The American Poetry Review,Sulfur, Bridges, Tikkun and Modern
Poetry in Translation, and in several anthologies including the Suny Press
Anthology Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women
Writers. In 1996 she was a recipient of the Israeli Absorption Minister's award
for Immigrant writers, which included a grant to have her collection of poetry
translated into Hebrew. Her own translations of Hebrew poetry into English have
appeared in various volumes, including the Feminist Press anthology The Defiant
Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems From Antiquity to the Present and in the recently
published biography of Lea Goldberg entitled About Lea. Back's critical work
Led by Language: the Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe was published in January
2002 by The University of Alabama Pess, in their Contemporary and Modern
Poetics Series.
In February 2002, Rachel Tzvia Back participated in a reading series of
Israeli poets presenting their work in America. The series, entitled ?Poetry
of a Punished Land,? hosted Meir Weisletier, Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammed
Ali, Peter Cole and Back at various venues, including Wesleyan University and
Princeton. She was also guest writer at Rutgers, Hofstra, Makor (NY),
University of Alabama, and NYU and, in February 2003, she was
scholar-in-residence at Cabrini College, Philadelphia, as part of their
globalization project.
Rachel Tzvia Back works as senior lecturer at Oranim College, Haifa, and
in the MA Writing Program at Bar-Ilan University. She resides in a small
village in the Galilee with her life-partner and their three children.
Peter Cole wrote of Azimuth: ?With grace and gravity, with a gentle,
quiet tenacity, Rachel Tzvia Back brings the poetics of indeterminacy to bear
on Israel's over-determined landscape. Her verse hurts as the land itself has
been hurt: its rippling music is delicate and achieved, its evocation of
intimacy stunning. As political as it is personal, Azimuth shows us, again, how
history and linguistic horizons meet, and who we are or might be before them.?
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