[Wgcp-whc] Report on Silliman's visit, This Fri Retallack session

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed Dec 3 13:03:24 EST 2008


Dear All?

My apologies for the delay in sending a report on Ron Silliman?s visit to our
last session of the poetics seminar (Nov. 7th).  Silliman had mentioned after
our meeting that he was thinking of posting on his blog more formal responses
to the questions we had sent him.  I was hoping he would do this and it would
serve as document for our meeting.  Since that hasn?t materialized yet,
I?ll give a brief sense of how the conversation went.

In many ways, Silliman offered an interesting counterpoint to Michael Palmer?s
visit.  Both began by historicizing their interest and involvement in a
counterpoetics of avant-garde poetry community.  Whereas Palmer, however,
argued for community as being the means for allowing a poet to create the
conditions for his or her aesthetic values and commitments and then the thing
to be overcome, Silliman seemed to insist on the continuing need for
communities of value that articulate themselves against dominant aesthetic
ideologies that are linked with (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly)
political and economic power.  Silliman did insist that what is often called
?avant-garde practices? are in reality what he sees as poetic practices
that are as present in William Blake or William Wordsworth (at least in terms
of the preface to Lyrical Ballads) and that continue through Gertrude Stein and
Louis Zukofsky and to the present day (as evidenced in the work of Rae
Armantrout, Lyn Heijinian and others).  He worries about the term ?avant
garde? being mischaracterized as a rejection of tradition and community.  In
reality, Silliman believe that the avant garde is in dialogue with literary
heritage.  In fact, he believes that avant-garde practices emphasize that a
writer must be responsible (and even accountable) for the process of inheriting
prior traditions and historical moments rather than simply repeating what has
happened before. Silliman?s conversation enacted this believe as he
continually historicized his writing life, his body of work, and poetry in
general.

To begin with, Silliman gave some background for how he came to invest in the
radical poetics of which he has been a part for decades.  He was able to place
poems in national magazines at the precociously young age of 19?magazines
such as Poetry, the Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He came
to feel that if he, a mere nineteen-year-old could get into these esteemed
places, there must be something lacking in the editors.  Through a variety of
occurrences Silliman found himself in San Francisco and meeting a number of
poets who were seeking to develop conversations about poetry that re-thought
what the art might do in terms of questioning forms of tradition and critiquing
the most unexamined aspects of representation (voice, for instance, as well as
image). This determining company included such figures as Armantrout, David
Melnick, Barret Watten and Robert Grenier.  A collective autobiography that
recounts the tenor of the times in 1970s San Francisco at the beginning of the
rise of Language poetry is being assembled by many of these writers.  Further
sense of the project (called the Grand Piano) is available here:
http://www.thegrandpiano.org/about.html

One of the most provocative things that Silliman said during his visit was that
?ambition is par of the process of any act of articulation.?   Part of that
ambition is Silliman?s belief that the part of writing is the initial (or
initiating) conception of writing as bringing into the world something that had
not existed prior.

Silliman indicated that he is interested in poetry rather than poems and so the
expansiveness of massive collection The Alphabet is his attempt to think beyond
discrete sections and to think of each part participating in a larger economy.
In light of this, he sees his work as being a response to works such as
Williams?s Paterson and Pound?s Cantos. Fascinatingly, this idea of
thinking about a part?s relationship to a greater whole is evident also in
Silliman?s belief in a continuing community and in terms of an ongoing poetic
tradition.  There is nothing that ever exists separate of some larger collective
being.  The Alphabet offers multiple perspectives around the ?I??sometimes
competing, sometimes compensatory--rather than a single, stable ?I? that
perspectives refer back to. In that way, the larger whole does not stabilize
and become a kind of absolutism and the relationship between parts and the
whole is continually evident and visible.

Silliman argued that art, at some level, is a kind of realism, depending on
one?s perspective of what constitutes ?reality.? Rather than being a
mimetic or pictorializing representation, realism could work on other levels. 
For instance, Silliman indicated that a Jackson Pollack painting is realist in
the sense that it brings one?s attention to the material reality of the paint
itself.  Thus, the disjunctive, paratactic nature of his work?and his
insistence to include the banal, the ugly, the ?non-aesthetic??is
realistic in terms of the multiplicitious nature of consciousness and the
world.  Again, this reflects Silliman?s concern with revealing the ongoing
relationships and tensions between parts and whole.  I cite a passage from his
essay ?Wild Forms? that seems apt:


++++
The gestalt "realism" of normative fiction occurs not because words and phrases
refer hypotactically to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to
chapters, chapters to the book as a whole, but rather because these appear to
move through an indirect path to
symbolic constructions: character, scene, plot, mood. The double hypotaxis of
fiction is its secret allure, and indeed the origin of many of its effects. The
symbolic chain of meaning, existing solely on the plane of the signified, serves
to veil the linguistic chain, which is everywhere. Thus the invisibility of the
omnipresent invests the symbolic with an animus that is all the more "lifelike"
for its seeming inexplicability. This is called emotion, feeling, _sincerity_.
In reality, it is none of the above.
++++

Silliman?s thinking about community and critique also manifests itself in the
blog that he writes (keeps? maintains?).  At one level, this has served as a
staging area for his thinking about how the world has changed and continues to
change.  The dailiness of the blog and its immediacy is a means of  responding
to that ongoing and constant change.  The blog also has become a more immediate
space for critical exchange, one existing outside the normativity of educational
institutions (wait a minute?does that include our very own seminar?!).  In a
sense this online exchange becomes a virtual form of the bar or coffeehouse
(significantly, the Grand Piano takes its title form the name of a coffeehouse
in San Francisco that served as locus for Silliman and his confreres to meet). 
So, the ideal of community, conversation, and exchange continues at all levels
of Silliman?s poetics.

This was an informative and illuminating conversation with Silliman that offered
a great deal of insight into the context of his massive work The Alphabet. 
He?s now underway in the bigger effort, The Universe, which certainly bears
out his interest n ambition.  We thank Silliman for his visiting our group.

The seminar meets again this Friday (the 5th) from 3-5 in Rm. 116 of the Whitney
Humanities Center.  Our focus will be the work of Joan Retallack, specifically
the relatively brief collection of poetry Memnoir and the first 80 pages or so
of her book on poetics The Poethical Wager. Here is a description of Poetical
Wager:

In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist,
conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship between
art and life in today's chaotic world. In the tradition of the essay as complex
humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle's
definition of happiness, Epicurus's swerve into unpredictable possibility,
Montaigne's essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage's redefinition
of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader
plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of examples, situations, and texts
through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from
Gertrude Stein's favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental
feminine, a John Cage performance?all serve as occasions for inquiry and
speculation on the way to her poethics of a "complex realism."


Retallack is an exceptionally rigorous, thoughtful, and complex thinker and poet
and so the discussion will be particularly generative.  Then Retallack will join
us the following Friday (the 12th) so we can continue our conversation.  Please
feel free to mention these sessions to anyone who might be interested.  All are
welcome.


Finally, I bring news from two of our members at large who have completed
projects that would be of interest to the group as a whole.

>From our Cambridge, MA office: an article about George Oppen and Michael Palmer
(entitled Writing the Disasters: Late Modernism and the Persistence of the
Messianic) by Patrick Pritchett is now available online:
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/oppen-pritchett.shtml


>From our Singapore office: as part of the current issue of the journal
Transnational Literature Kirpal Singh has put together a symposium of
respondents to Robert Lumsden?s provocative question ?Does Literature
exist?? http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/current.html

In the meantime, let me close in our usual way:

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.



Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator


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