[Wgcp-whc] Next session (2/6); books available; and Minutes--J Retallack session

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All,


Last Friday, we had our first session of the semester.  Before I offer a sense
of what that session is like I want to say that our nest session will be on
Feb. 6.  For that session, we will read the work of Forrest Gander. Gander is
the author of several books of poems and he is a prolific translator as well as
novelist and he is a professor of poetry and comparative literature at Brown
University. Two of Gander?s books have been ordered and are now sitting on
the shelf in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  The books are a
collection of poems--Eye against Eye (New Directions, 2005)--and a collection
of essays--A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, & Transcendence  (Shoemaker
and Hoard, 2005).  I wouldn?t take too long to swing by a grab copies as they
might go quickly.


Three reviews of Gander?s book of essays can be found here:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/people/Forrest/Chicago_Faith_review.html
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2006winter/gander.shtml
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/people/Forrest/Welish_Test_Oppen.html

Here also is a useful interview:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/people/Forrest/Postmodern_Lyricism.html

Links to Gander reading can be found here (including his 2004 reading at the
Beinecke).
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Gander.html

The good news is that gander will be joining us to discuss his work on Feb 20.
As ever, do spread the word to any interested parties. There are a few
straggling copies of the book of poems that will be arriving in a day or two. 
If we run out of copies of either book and people would like to attend the
sessions, email me and perhaps we can arrange some photocopies (the books are
also in the library).


Retallack visit:

Joan Retallack joined the group on Friday, Jan 16, to discuss her work,
especially Memnoir, her most recent book of poems, and The Poethical Wager, a
book of essays on poetics.  In response to the question of how it is that she
came to be invested in an avant-grade/counterpoetic poetry, Retallack offered a
sense of her background.  She did say first, however, that ?counterpoetics?
is a term that she is wary of in that it suggests a reified position that moves
perpetually in opposition.  ?Avant garde? is useful insofar as it offers a
link to an historical continuity and as such creates a form of tradition of
genealogy.  One would take this tradition to be that did not simply replicate
or reproduce aesthetic forms handed down via tradition but in seeking to
?make it new? created the possibilities for difference and experimentation.
This experimentation leads to changed relationships with the here and now in
specific ways.

This tradition had early beginnings for Retallack.  Her formative years were
spent in New York City, where she frequented art museums with her parents. 
Even as a youngster, Retallack had a sense of loss that the intense aesthetic
experiences of the art in the museums didn?t reach outside the walls.  She
felt the need to create those possibilities in the world around her.  This
early inkling would later develop into the desire to explore the sensual
interest in unexpected places and to attend to the intensities of everyday
life.  A pivotal relationship in Retallack?s life was her long connection to
composer John Cage, whom she met while she was a philosophy student at the
University of Chicago.  Cage?s various methodologies were, in large part,
marshaled so as to discover the ?aesthetics of the everyday.?  It is this
idea of the conflation of art and life that Retallack took from a tradition of
the avant garde and from Cage in particular.

For Retallack, Gertrude Stein?s call to ?live one?s contemporaneity?
becomes a vital call in terms of poetics and one?s ethos.  Stein writes:
?Everybody is contemporary with his [sic] period...and the whole business of
writing is the question of living in that contemporariness...The thing that is
important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words,
they don?t know where they are going, but they are on their way.?

Retallack?s formal innovations then are a way of having form open up and thus
expand or prolong the dimensions and parameters of patterning.  Rather than
smaller and more complete (that is to say, ?closed off?) forms (and this
includes conventions of discourse), Retallack?s work attempts expanding a
sense of where patterns begin and end, so that the form is a pattern one is
within but that is not yet fully determined.  For Retallack, in that ?all we
have is the present,? this makes possible the feeling that the present in
ongoing To live one?s contemporaneity is to see the contemporary as being an
ongoing experience of here and now.

Retallack described how Memnoir is a response to the genre of memoir in the form
of antic-memoir.  The perpetual use of the present tense in that collection of
prose poems was an attempt to stave off the embalming of experience in the
past.  Retallack believes that the preset is shot through with pastness? and
so a recounting of one?s life needs to be sensitive to or inclusive of
methods of enacting the blurred distinctions of past and present.  Invoking
recent discoveries about memories in cognitive science that suggest that memory
is in fact not static but is a continually reconstructed representation formed
not once in the past but reformed every time a memory is brought to mind,
Retallack sees poetry as having a fractal relationship to a complex world. In
response to the question of whether or not a disjunctive syntax and diction is
some mimetic representation of language and thought and perspective (a
suggestion that Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman both made last semester),
Retallack suggested that rather than being mimetic, poetry is metonymic.  In
fact, what becomes clear in the ways that Memnoir brings together prose and
poetry (as prose poems) and brings together various kinds of discourse?the
essayistic, the academic, the poetic, the journalistic?Retallack seeks to
provide occasions whereby relationships between and among modes, thoughts, and
styles, suggest a new form of patterning (interconnected rather than discrete).
 This sense that chance, swerve, repatterning creates new perspectives that
suggest how things, languages, timeframes, and spaces all are interrelated
clearly indicates Retallack?s belief in a poethical wager, that as
Wittgenstein would say, ?ethics and aesthetics are one.? The experimental
nature on Retallack?s wager entails the openness to an unfinished
contemporariness that one is ever in the process of discovering.

As is evident, the discussion was extremely generative and their was a clear
emphasis on the real stakes of thinking about poetry and poetics and that these
things make possible.  Again, we thank professor Retallack for her visit and for
the discussions she provoked before, during, and after the session.


Interestingly. Retallack recently worked on a collaborative poem with our next
guest.  If possible, I?ll try to circulate the piece as a useful bridge
between the two very different poets.

In the meantime, be sure to get gander?s books and we?ll see everyone on the
6th of Feb.


Unswervingly yours,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator




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