[Wgcp-whc] This Friday: Joan Retallack

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All--

Last Friday, we met for the first discussion of the work of Joan Retallack. 
Below, I'll paste the series of questions that arose from that conversation. 
Then, Retallack will join us this Friday from 3-5 in Rm 116 of the Whitney
Humanities Center. These questions will be prompts or nodes of thought that
will help structure this next session.

I would direct people to this site http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/retallack/
Ths is her author page, and it includes links to additional poems as well as
links to essays and reviews about her work.

This will be our final session of the semester and as always, everyone is
welcome. There will be a celebratory mood in the air.

Also, I want to draw people's attention to a related event: this afternoon our
very own Gabriele Hayden will be giving a talk on her work on Langston Hughes. 
I'll paste the information about that here:

Who: Gabriele Hayden

When: Wednesday, December 10 at 3:30PM

Where: Room 38, downstairs in the Beinecke Library

Wow: reception to follow


Abstract:
Throughout his career, Hughes suggests that the literature that lasts is
literature that is translatable--literature rooted in the local that through
its very specificity is able to speak to readers across lines of nation,
language, and race. Indeed, Hughes was by far the most widely translated U.S.
modernist writer of the first half of the century. Hughes in turn translated in
order to connect writers from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean to each
other and to give them access to an Anglophone audience. This commitment is
evident in a wealth of correspondence and manuscripts available only at the
Beinecke.

Hughes's unpublished translations of Cuban and Mexican leftist writers reflect
on parallels between the African American fight for social and economic justice
and that of poor, black and indigenous people in Latin America. In the late poem
Ask Your Mama, Hughes suggests that the movement of literature and the "SHOUTS"
of political protest that matter most; and it is translation--and translation's
agent, the translator--that makes this movement possible.

Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator


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


Questions?Yale Seminar in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (for Dec. 12, 2008)



Could you give a sense of how it is that you came to be invested/interested in
avant-garde poetics/counterpoetics.  Clearly, your relationship with John Cage
seems to have played a foundational role in your thinking, and that influence
is something you are continuing to investigate but could you give a sense of
that initial encounters or encounters?  This question allows for a sense of
your specific early context, but at the same time, it opens up to the question
of community and the roles it plays in facilitating, forming, and fomenting
aesthetic values and investments.  We discussed these issues at length with Ron
Silliman and Michael Palmer (who gave very different responses).  In a broader
way, this also opens up to thinking about how it is one inherits (or fashions)
poetic and aesthetic genealogies.

In what might be a logical follow up question, we ask: You have described how
Cage, Wittgenstein, Stein, and Pascal intersect in your poethics- but could
discuss what element you consciously take from each of them and integrate in
the process of writing?


One of the concerns leveled at avant-garde poetry and poetics is that it can
reify as itself a reactionary response. How real a threat do you find that
danger of the avant garde becoming perpetually reactionary to be?  How do you
negotiate such positions to keep the work open and constructive?

An ongoing conversation this seminar has been having (over 5 years) is what the
limitations and benefits of the term/concept of the ?avant garde? is? 
Could you say something about your stance in terms of this term?  Is it useful?
 If so, how so?  If not, why not?  Given your interest I scientific tropes, the
term ?experimental? (and its connection to experience) seems possibly more
apt.  What uses or limitations does that alternative afford?


Listening to an online fragment of you reading from an earlier version of
Memnoir prompts us to think about the style of your reading, how your
self-interruptions serve performatively to open up speculative spaces within
the otherwise already interrupted, swerving syntax of your poems.  Could you
discuss your thinking about the act of a public reading, especially as your
work brings into question the ?speaking subject??
To what extent do you think it is possible or even imperative to engineer the
experience of swerve in the instance of making sense and, further, and what are
the dangers that the volitional aspect of that design, the act of designing a
swerve in the fabric of the text and in the action of your reading necessarily
leads to its own terms of closure?


How explicitly do you strategize engaging your reader in collaborative
conditions that sustain openness (and risk) in un-making sense?

How does presenting autobiographical elements trump or collude with your agenda
of directing a collaborative reading?

Does variations and revisions play an active role in your compositional practice
and, if so, how do you come to negotiate what finally gets presented as a
finished version of the poems, their serial structuring?

How is the notion of a book's structure inflected by your understanding of
freedom or happiness? In other words, a book seems to participate in a
determined and determining form even in its sheer materiality.  Do the new and
burgeoning possibilities for the aleatory and for new combinant potentialities
that exist online and via digital poetics have some place in your thinking
about the form of poetics and that new yet undiscovered wager it poses?

Your thinking employs to great use trope drawn from scientific discourse.  Could
you say something about what this discourse makes available that other kinds of
language may not?  How does it go beyond a desire to circumvent the
religious/Romantic tropes that other poets draw upon?


Is your practice of ?poethic?' related to Michel Deguy's poéthique?

You explicitly work within and against genres in both your essays and your
poetry. What would it mean if and when your poems might be considered essays?