[Wgcp-whc] Session 2/20--Forrest Gander visits

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear Comrades,


Last Friday, the WGCP met to discuss the poetry and poetics of Forrest Gander. 
Gander himself will be joining us Friday Feb 20 from 3-5 in Rm 116 of the
Whitney Humanities Center when we continue our conversation about his work.

Rather than offering a detailed report of last week's session, I will instead
provide a series of questions that arose from that discussion.  These questions
have been sent to Professor Gander and will serve as a rough guide or point of
departure for our next session. As ever, our visitors engage in a dialogue
rather than a Q and A session. These questions below offer a measure of the
intense, compelling conversation we had about the work.  As ever, our sessions
are opened to all, so please feel free to pass word of Forrest's visit to
anyone who might be interested.

Onward,
Richard Deming, WGCP Tactician


+++++++++++++++++++++++
In many ways, you are presented (or at least contextualized) as a ?southern
poet.?  Is this an identity that shapes your work?  Could you say something
about how you might locate your work in terms of a Southern writing (however
you might conceive or define that)? The models of southern writing tend to have
strong exemplars in fiction.  In poetry, the tradition seems to be concerned
primarily with narrative.  How would you characterize what you see as the
possibilities of a Southern lyric?

We discussed last week that although it isn?t linear or continuous, there do
seem to be narrative threads that weave throughout Eye against Eye. Do you see
a difference between story and narrative as it plays in your work?  This gets
more complex now that you?re a novelist, one imagines.  What can poetry do
that the novel can?t?

The narrative gestures that play throughout Eye Against Eye, especially in terms
of the ?Ligatures? sequence, seem to engage the possibilities of a masculine
domesticity.  In what ways does dwelling (with or without a Heideggerian
inflection) or the domestic inform your work?

In your essays, you indicate that silence is an important part of your poetics. 
Can you say more about how you envision (and thus ?enlyric?) that silence? 
Is it a foundation for experience?  Does poetry produce a silence?  Do you
imagine the silence as a form of disruption in your poems or an act of
suturing?  Or is it that poetry produces a voice/sound/musicality by which (via
difference) silence can be recognized? In explicitly phenomenological terms, we
might ask, what is the silence of silence?

We were interested in your claim that in writing you pass from time to space
(Faithful Existence, p. 46).  The long poem ?Burning Towers, Standing Wall?
seems to thematize that.  Can you say more about what you mean in terms of this
transition.  And how is it connected to the silence you mention?


Translation is a large part of your life.  What draws you to translate specific
writers?  What is your impetus to translate?  Is it a kind of service work to
the world of poetry?  Is it a desire to enlarge the possibilities open to an
American readership?  Is it a way of placing your own work in a wider
conversation?

The question of translation leads also to questions about genealogy.  Your
interest and devotion to older writers?Creeley, Oppen, and others?is quite
apparent.  How do you conceive of your relationship to a genealogy of writers
and writing?  In a sense, this is a question about how you think of your
inheritance of certain concerns.  What are those concerns?  How then do you
think of your own contemporaries in terms of the aesthetic issues that most
challenge and most excite you?  What are the poetic methodologies and
strategies that you feel you share with those peers?  Conversely, which
strategies and concerns do you feel most skeptical of?

Can you discuss your ekphrastic work with Sally Mann?s photographs. What is
the relationship, as you see it, between her images and your texts?  What are
the dangers of the text/image combination?  Do you see this as the different
media being in conversation with one another?  Do these, when combined, produce
a third kind of text?or do they remain separate. Why, for instance, include
the photographs in Eye against Eye?

What role, to your mind, should poets play in society? And, how, if at all,
is your thinking on that question revealed or placed in tension in the last
sentence of "If not a writer" ("Not a selfless fucking doctor")?