[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP--Trans-siberian minutes; Bernstein's Shadowtime next session

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All--

This will be a long post. I'll try to give section Headings.


RECENT SESSION; LA PROSE DU TRANS-SIBERIAN

Last Friday, January 25, the WG in Contemporary Poetics had its first session of
the new semester.  This session focused on La Prose du Trans-Siberian, a
collaborative work between the poet Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delauney. Timothy
Young, Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of Modern Books at the Beinecke
Library, contextualized La Prose in terms of its historical moment as well as
its place in the canon of artist books. He also spoke very specifally about the
copy that the Beinecke owns, and that is now on display as part of the
exhibition, Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book now up at the
Beinecke.
http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/new-exhibition-metaphor-taking-shape-poetry-art-and-the-book/

La Prose was conceived of as an edition of 150, though only 70 were completed
initially.  8 were printed using vellum, 28 were on Japanese paper, and the
balance were printed on imitation Japanese paper. The Beinecke's copy comes
from this latter group.

Tim informed us that the records of the actual collaboration between Cendrars
and  Delaunay.  Thus, it is unclear whose idea the project was, how it too
shape, or whose contribution came first.  The text itself could be read as
periodically giving some direction to the artist--though it could be easily
read as responding post facto to Delaunay's painting. It indeed earns the title
of simultaneous text.  The implications of how one reads or engages the work
given this simultaneity are large.  One thing we didn't discuss is the way that
this simultaneity might now be part of the process of reading/decoding
contemporary advertising.

Given the intensity of the work and the clear organic interaction between the
visual and the lexical in La Prose, the book become a kind of holy grail in the
book arts world.  However, it isn't until the 1960s that the book truly is
canonized.  While Cendrar's poem was able to widely circulated, the book itself
was of course infinitely harder to reproduce, only contributing to La prose's
aura (to use Walter Benjamin's term--in fact a very interesting article could
be written on La Prose and the difficulty of reproducing it and its place
within the art and literary worlds).

We also discussed how the interaction of the words and images blur the
distinctions one might make especially in terms of the critical methodologies
one might bring to bear.  To read as a literary critic might threatens to make
Delaunay's art merely illustrative or somehow falsely mimetic. At the same
time, the art critical approach might make the poem somehow adjunct (especially
in its materiality).  This raises the question of whether each element can stand
on its own--and what does it mean to read Cendrars's poem without Delaunay's
art. Of course these questions are central to thinking of book arts and is a
primary issue of the Beinecke's current exhibition.

For more discussion of the genre of the artist book see this piece by Johanna
Drucker, one of the foremost experts in the field (and who will be delivering a
keynote lecture as part of the conference tied to the Beinecke's exhibition)
http://www.granarybooks.com/books/drucker2/drucker2.html

It was a fascinating discussion of a central text in the avant-garde canon.
many thanks to Tim Young for sharing his expertise with the group.


NEXT SESSION:

TEXT AVAILABLE

Our next session (slated for Fri. Feb 15) will focus on Charles Bernstein's
Shadowtime. We have ordered copies of the book, but these are slow in coming
and may not arrive in time.  In the meantime, however, xerox copies are
available now in our mailslot in the office of the Whitney Humanities Center.


BENSTEIN
Bernstein is well-known to our group, having visited a few years ago and having
recently read at the Beinecke Library.  An Mp3 of that reading is available
here:
http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/ycal-readings-podcasts-and-streaming-audio/

For anyone who needs a refresher I would highly recommend exploring Bernstein's
author page at the Electronic Poetry Center.  It is a thoroughly comprehensive
representation of Bernstein's work and its centrality to the current situation
of avant garde poetics. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/

As I say, this discussion will focus on Shadowtime, which is a libretto that
Bernstein wrote for an opera by Brian Ferneyhough.  The opera is a loosely
conceived interpretation of the life of Walter Benjamin, one of the foremost
things of aesthetics and historical materialism of the 20th Century.  While
that might not seem like an obvious choice for an opera allow me to quote a
passage from the New York Times review of the work:

+++
The work's creators describe "Shadowtime" as a "thought opera," but listeners
need not fear any direct translation of Benjamin's ideas: no arias about
mechanical reproduction or dialectical duets about Baudelaire. In fact, Mr.
Bernstein has almost entirely avoided quotations from Benjamin's essays.
Rather, the libretto takes general Benjaminian themes of history and loss,
mourning and memory, and interweaves them like musical motifs. It is mostly in
English, with a bit in German and a few lines in an invented language based on
a systematized transposition of English letters.

Benjamin's biography is also avoided, as is any kind of linear narrative. The
only exception is the first scene, which takes place on Benjamin's final night
and draws from the actual events. It's followed by strictly instrumental guitar
concerto called "The Rustling of the Wings of Gabriel." The rest of the opera
suggests a free-associative journey through a crepuscular netherworld stocked
with figures from Benjamin's past and through various fantastical scenarios.
++


For those interested in opera, I would recommend this small piece
http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/?page=rels/123/fabrice.html


However, we will be looking at the libretto as a text unto itself, which was the
composer's insistence as part of his commissioning Bernstein.



For a review of this work by your humble narrator this link is useful
http://www.greeninteger.com/review_detail.cfm?ReviewID=19

It is also perhaps crucial to listen to Bernstein reading Shadowtime.  A portion
that Bernstein read at Harvard is available here:
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bernstein/Harvard/Bernstein-Charles_07_from-Shadowtime_02-21-01.mp3


Also, and for good measure, I'm including as an attachment an article written by
Joel Bettridge that reads Shadowtime in terms of faith and the libretto's
intellectual context.  Bettridge also offers an illuminating close "listening"
of Bernstein's performative reading of the text.


FEB 22--PERLOFF TALK

We are discussing Bernstein's work at this point because the following week, on
Feb 22, Marjorie Perloff--Stanford emerita, former president of the MLA, and
undoubtedly the foremost critic and scholar of avant garde and experimental
writing nationally and internationally--will be giving a talk for Yale's
English Department on Shadowtime.  We of course strongly encourage everyone to
attend Professor Perloff's talk Friday, February 22nd  at 2:00, LC 319.


PLUGGING:

Also I would like to mention a forthcoming publication.  Some time ago, Lucas
Klein led a discussion on his engagement with Pound's (mis)reading of Ernest
Fenollosa's work on Chinese language and its characters.  Lucas--along with
(the indefatigable) Haun Saussy and Jonathan Stalling--have been working to
produce a definitive critical edition of Fenollosa's _The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry_.  That edition is about to appear from
Fordham UP.  Here's a link so people can preorder.  "This critical edition
allows us to see for the first time just what Fenollosa?s original essays
looked like before being submitted to Pound?s editorial excisions," says
Richard Sieburth.
http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?session=8189198f0c3ce7e21d76050e90143666&id=9780823228683

CONCLUSION:

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.


Thus,
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator





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