[Wgcp-whc] Steve Evans minutes, Final Broadcast of the semester

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue May 19 14:43:24 EDT 2009


Dear All--

many apologies for the delay in getting out the minutes reporting the  
visit of Steve Evans on Friday April 23.  My thanks to Jean-Jacques  
Poucel and Caitie Barrett for their thorough and illuminating  
reporting on Adelaide Russo's discussion of the work of Michel Deguy.

Let me first give the minutes of Evans's visit and then close with  
some announcements.


++++++++++++
Steve Evans, an important voice in the work being done on  
contemporary poetics, joined us to discuss his seminal work on  
phonotextuality.  Evans's opening insistence is that recordings of  
poets reading their poems are treated as somehow illustrating the  
poem, and are not considered as texts in and of themselves.  Given  
the proliferation of recordings, Evans suggests that the time of  
seeing these recordings as somehow adjunct is past and that  
considering them as texts opens  a valuable field of inquiry in ways  
that combine developments in performance studies, sociology, and  
literary studies. The proliferation of recordings means that what  
were transient, ephemeral events--readings--are now captured in time,  
but that their very presence suggests that the recordings offer  
something that people are interested in.  The interest alone serves  
as a point of entry for thinking about what cultural function the  
recordings serve.

Evans suggested that the recordings provide a historical record of an  
event by providing documents that can serve to indicate who were  
present at given readings.  It also indicates patterns of an  
audience's immediate reception.  What lines or asides were marked  
with laughter?  What kinds of gestures elicited response?  Were  
proper names used? Thus, one might ask, is there a distinction  
between what listeners in an audience in San Franscisco respond to as  
opposed to listeners in New York? These aspects can offer ways of  
reading given social formations and comparative listenings can  
provide evidence for how different types of audiences respond in  
different ways to different factors. Do the poets change their  
reading strategies depending on the place, time, event, and overall  
context of the reading? An additional question would be to ask where  
and how recordings and events occurred--were they at halls or in  
people's living rooms?  Have these sites changed over time? Moreover,  
with the ubiquity of recordings online, what need is there for people  
to go out and attend readings?

Are there differences in a poet's reading style or timbre over time.   
For instance, Evans has noted that as certain  women poets matured  
and gained stature, their reading styles became more authoritative  
along ways reflective of masculine reading styles in terms of  
delivery (for instance, by deepening their reading voices.  Evan's  
use of tools that illustrate a spectral analysis provided evidence  
for this sort of line of inquiry.

Evans also offered a phenomonological (albeit somewhat grim) point  
about the recordings: the soundfiles offer a record of the "dying  
animal"  (paraphrasing Jean-Luc Godard's,that is any human body.  The  
recorded voice when compared against recordings over time demonstrate  
the change and shift over a period of years and deacades of the body  
itself. Evans also suggested that comparative listenings allow for  
the charting of a genealogy of sorts in terms of what clear  
performative markers of either artistic coteries or even aesthetic  
forebears seem to be conjured in a poet's delivery?

Over the course of our discussion, we raised the question of how the  
discrepancies between a poems' "score" on the page and its being read  
by the author complicates our understanding the authority of the  
text.  Can one be said to be "definitive"?  On what grounds?  Also,  
the point was made that the recordings could offer possibilities for  
teaching close reading in terms of words that a poet emphasizes in  
his or her recording.

What makes all of these questions that much more intricate are the  
temporal, circumstantial,  and environmental factors that bear on the  
moments when a poet reads his or her poems.  Yet, Evans seems to be  
suggesting, these factors need not be bracketed off but instead serve  
to unfix perceived notions (or habitualized thinking) of the  
continuity or stability of how we understand textuality.

As is clear, Evans continually opened up this burgeoning filed in  
terms of the questions and issues that it engenders.  Continually,  
Evans pointed to the ways that thinking of phonotextuality can offer  
not simply extensions of existing critical methodologies but  
challenging old approaches and offering implicationS of how  
technology continues to shape and reshape our understanding of what  
constitutes textuality.

The whole group was impressed with Evans's facility and erudition and  
we all thank him for his provocative insights.

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

This will be the final report of the academic year.  It has been a  
very successful year and our online list of members connected to WGCP  
far and wide is nearly 200.

How can one keep in touch with the activities of the WGCP?  Well, we  
now have a blog--this just went up and we'll be making use of it next  
year. http://wgcp.wordpress.com/

Our thanks to all supporting members, all visitors to the group this  
semester, and specific thanks to our sponsors the Whitney Humanities  
Center and the Beinecke library and the respective staff and  
directors of the institutions.  And many thanks to my fellow  
coordinators Nancy Kuhl and Jean-Jacques Poucel.

Now, let the summer hiatus begin.  Until late August, this list will  
be quiet.

Thus,
Richard Deming, Group Co-coordinator and tactician

END TRANSMISSION


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