[Wgcp-whc] Gander Report, House Reading announcement, More to come...

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Fri Mar 13 12:07:17 EDT 2009


Dear Fellow Poetics Seminarians,

There a great deal to cover in this note.  First I?ll give the minutes of our
most recent session; then I?ll give an announcement of an upcoming reading.  I
will then forward a subsequent email from Jean-Jacques Poucel that will give the
specific of our next 2 sessions.

Before that, however, the WGCP would like to publicly congratulate Gabriele
Hayden, a sustaining member of our group.  Gabriele has just accepted a
position at Reed College in Portland, OR.  Our loss is Reed's gain!



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(1)
On Friday, Feb 20, the poet/translator/novelist Forrest Gander joined our group
to discuss his work, particularly his most recent collection of poems, Eye
against Eye, and his collection of poetics essays, Faithful Existence.

We began with a conversation about how Gander sees his upbringing in the South
(he grew up in Virginia) as influencing how work.  He is often contextualized
in terms of the South and the fact that in Eye against Eye he collaborates with
Sally Mann, the eminent photographer whose landscape photographs of the
Virginian landscape in quintessential ways, only underlines his connection to
that region.   Rather than feeling a cultural connection to a Southern
tradition, Gander sees the physical geography of that place begin an enduring
influence.  He suggested that different landscapes facilitate different rhythms
of perception.  The overgrown landscape of Virginia, particularly in its
representations by Sally Mann, means that in rural areas people walk a great
deal and in walking through such terrain, one develops a slowed, staggered
relationship to the physical environment.

For Gander, erotics and the body as cite of contact are central to his
understanding of perception and thus to writing.  Poetry is a bodily art, he
believes, and the body is one?s form of being in the world (quite literally).
 The rhythm of the body in walking through space shapes the lines, images, and
perspective of space in his poems.  The erotics of poetry?in terms of how it
sounds or resonates in the body (and from the body) means that poetry can
return one to his/her body and reminds one that the body is one?s being in
the world. The poem then is an intensified act of perception that reminds us of
the ongoing process of perception.  These offer sophisticated extensions of the
imperative of the ?here and now? so important in various aesthetic projects
of the 50s and 60s (from the Beats to John Cage).

This also led to a discussion of his complex idea of silence, which in his
essays he indicates is central to his poetics.  Sounds bind people to a place
inasmuch as they produce a kind of attunement. Poetry, as an act (or is it an
art?) of attention filters out noise and chatter. Rather than seeing a pure,
idealized form of silence?the danger of which would be that the silence is an
escape from the self?poetry enables a form of concentration that reduces noise
and distraction.  The silence that Gander feels the poem courts is one that
intensifies the focused concentration.  The more intense a poem is, the more
silence that forms around it.  The poem is an attempt at redeeming the self
from its distracted and distracting tendencies.

To enable this kind of concentration or attunement, poems need to vary texture
and mode so that the form of attention never reifies.  Gander discussed his
interest in how things are bound together?he repeatedly insisted on the
complexities of poetry and the specificities of science as indicating
possibilities for perceiving deep sets of relationship between people and the
world, and among various forms of consciousness.  The attention to forms of
relationships and the forms of being bound together is evident throughout
Gander?s work.  In the case of Eye Against Eye, the ligature series is a
sequence that binds together the entire book.  Sequences offer the means by
which different kinds of questions can be asked, over and over.  In this way,
there is no true repetition as the questions and textures continually
recontextualize one another and there is a continuous condition of creativity
that a poet and a reader engage in.  Although he resisted explicit discussion
of poetry and spirituality, Gander?s language returned again and again to the
tropes of faith and redemption; however, one hears in Gander?s comments one of
Wallace Steven?s aphorisms: ?After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry
is that essence which takes its place as life?s redemption."

When asked about his interest in science, Gander indicated that his background
in geology helped him to see that discourse as being a way locating the
particularities of the material world as an intractable fact. He finds
Oppen?s claims that ?The self is no mystery, the mystery is that / there is
something for us to stand on,? is axiomatic. At the same time, what most
interests Gander is an model of inquiry in which an absolute truth is held in
suspension, with no determined answer.

As is evident, the discussion was particularly intense and far-ranging.  Above
all, Gander continually made clear the stakes of poetry are the highest
imaginable (quite literally).  The group thanks him for his extremely
generative and provocative conversation.

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(2)

Whitney Humanities fellow and stalwart WGCP member David Larsen is hosting a
reading at his home.
The date for K. Silem Mohammad's New Haven house reading has been set: Thurs.
March 26 at 8 pm. Interested parties
contact david.larsen at yale.edu.

K. Silem Mohammad is a founding member of the Flarf colletive and a professor of
English at Southern Oregon University, where he curates the Emergent Forms
reading series. Collections of his poetry include Deer Head Nation (Tougher
Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Breathalyzer (Edge
Books, 2008). Mohammad co-edits the journal Abraham Lincoln, and contends with
the online world at http://lime-tree.blogspot.com/


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Now over to Jean-Jacques after this short reminder.  The Working Group in
Contemporary Poetics meets in Rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center from 3-5,
roughly every other Friday.  This group is open to all visitors and interested
parties. Feel free to spread the word.

--Richard Deming, Co-coordinator


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