[Wgcp-whc] spring schedule--1st session 1/16: Retallack redux

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue Jan 6 10:37:51 EST 2009


Dear All--

a new semester is about to be upon us and so it is time to circulate the
schedule of spring meetings and events for the WGCP.  The first session will be
Friday the 16th and this will be the rescheduled visit from Joan Retallack (as
people will recall an ice storm in the Hudson Valley forced us to set a new
date).  I will post at the bottom of this message the questions that we had
composed for Retallack's visit. These questions serve as a record of the
session we devoted to discussing her work.  Also, this is a version helpful
author page: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/retallack/

Among the things upcoming--visits from Forrest Gander and Jaques Roubaud; a
reading/performance of Susan Howe and the musician David Grubbs; visits from
scholars Steve Evans and Adelaide Russo, and more. These events can also be
found at  the Beinecke blog
http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/working-group-in-contemporary-poetry/wgcp-schedule-and-readings/


And as always, feel free to pass word of the group's activities to any
interested parties.  All are welcome to attend.  We meet (roughly) every other
Friday from 3-5 in Rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.

Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator


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

WGCP Meeting: Joan Retallack Visit
Friday, January 16, 3pm
Readings: Memnoir, essays

WGCP Meeting
Friday, February 6, 3pm
Readings:  Forrest Gander poems and essays, TBA

WGCP Related Event: Susan Howe and David Grubbs Performance
Tuesday, February 10, 4pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature Readings Series

WGCP Meeting: Forrest Gander Visit
Friday, February 20, 3pm
Readings: Forrest Gander poems and essays, TBA

WGCP Meeting
Friday, March 27, 3pm
Readings: Selections from Jacques Roubaud, TBA

WGCP Meeting: Jacques Roubaud Visit
Monday, March 30, 3pm
Meeting at Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Readings: Selections from Jacques Roubaud, TBA

WGCP Meeting
Friday, April 10, 3pm; Adelaide Russo
Readings: Selections from Michel Deguy, TBA

WGCP Related Event: G. E. Patterson and Jennifer Moxley, Poetry Readings
Thursday, April 23, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature Readings Series

WGCP Meeting: Steve Evans Visit
?Sounding the Seventies: Poetics, the Phonotext, and Period Style?
Friday, April 24, 3pm
Readings & Recordings: TBA


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



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?


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