[Wgcp-whc] minutes re: 1st Marjorie Welish session

[Richard Deming]

Dear fellow Poeticians,



On Friday, Sept. 19th, we met for the first time of the new academic  
year.  This first session was devoted to the work of Marjorie Welish.   
Welish is, in many ways, a relatively unique figure in that she is  
quite equally accomplished as a painter, a poet, and an art critic.   
Indeed, in most ways, it is difficult to see any one of these as her  
primary identity or occupation.  Accordingly, her work and thinking  
move across these different fields in ways that are surprising,  
thereby throwing into questions some of the expectations and  
assumptions that tend to inform, or at least traditionally do, one’s  
understanding of a given field or mode of artistic endeavor.  For  
example, we noted that in the long poem “Isle of Signatories,” the  
poet works through the implications of the painter Nicolas Poussin and  
his meditation on a phrase from Virgil, “et in Arcadia ego.”  The  
phrase speaks to the idea that in any situation, no matter how much  
like paradise it seems, death exists. There is a canonical argument  
about Poussin’s work because there are two paintings that take on the  
phrase, each showing shepherds at a tomb.



Version 1:

http://www.aiwaz.net/uploads/gallery/et-in-arcadia-ego-4952-mid.jpg



Version 2:

http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/lsi/arcadia/poussin.jpg





However, the expressions of the shepherds in the two paintings are  
quite different.  Erwin Panofsky argued that the differences in the  
works suggest a changing attitude about death (in the former death is  
a confrontation, in the latter death is a metaphysical matter to be  
contemplated). Louis Marin argued that the different expressions spoke  
more about the changing attitudes toward representation. This is, as I  
mentioned, a canonical debate that reveals important distinctions in  
art history (for instance, both arguments offer different views of  
what to look at when looking at a painting—what are we meant to read?  
The expression in its historical/conceptual moment or in its art  
historical moment?). [i]



In Welish’s work, the argument cited here is a reference that informs  
the poem, while also giving the poem in the possibility of enacting a  
concern about how, if at all, language and poetry serves to  
memorialize both experience and lyric subjectivity. Does poetry and  
language then displace present experience or attention in its desires  
to envision a futurity in which its subjectivity is to be reclaimed  
or, to use Welish’s term, to be a form of salvage?  The poems don’t  
offer an argument; rather they enact the paradoxical implications of  
the ideas and positions Marin and Panofsky offer, especially in the  
relationship of death to representation.  But as we see, Welish  
combines the concerns of poetry, art, and art history into her work in  
ways that are inextricable from each other.  These also raise the  
questions of how we read the poems.  Are they comments on criticism,  
on poetics, or on philosophical ideas?  Can we separate these at all?  
Does death underwrite all acts of writing, which by their nature  
lodged language in a stream outside of experience or the very being of  
the being who wrote the texts.  Do these texts then displace the  
subject?  And do changing ideas of technology make these matters even  
more complex (if there is no longer a physical object)? Think, for  
instance, of the relationship of the signature to the signatory  
(specific act of representation that has an origin) and the signatory  
to the e-signature. In many ways, Welish is considering both the  
positive and negative implications of how the work of art or creation  
serves to stand for or displace the artist or writer.



This brief recounting of just the opening of her latest collection  
gives an idea of the ambition and complexity of Welish’s work.  In any  
event, the following questions that were developed out of last week’s  
session will serve as a report on the drift of the group’s  
conversation about Welish’s work and its implications.  These  
questions will serve as prompts or a general outline for the  
discussion when Welish visits our group on Friday, Oct 9 (3-5 pm in  
room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center)





--In Isle of  The Signatories, there are a number of references and  
allusions.  Some are more overt, as in the dedication to Keith Waldrop  
or the quoting of Mallarme, some are more embedded—as in the “thinking  
through” of Poussin and “et in Arcadia ego” of the title poem, while  
others are quite below the surface, as in the allusion to Rilke’s  
first Sonnet to Orpheus in sec 30 of “From Dedicated to” (you write :  
“A tree has arisen. Translucence / A tree has arisen in air” and Rilke  
begins “Da steig ein Baum,” and where Rilke writes “Ohr” you write the  
close sound of “air” (one could say that translating homphonically,  
you are translating by ear, which seems both ironic and apt here).  
What role do you see reference and quotation playing in your work?   
What responsibility do you see the reader as having?



--Last year, a number of our visitors—Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman  
in particular—articulated their sense of how social formations and  
communities impact or shape their writing.  Given that you circulate  
among different disciplines and different groups what is your sense of  
how communities shape your thinking about poetics.  This question of  
community leads to another question: What is the social function of  
art and or poetry.  How might they differ?  Or do they?



--Are you writing, as you see it, in, against, toward, or away from  
(a) tradition?  How do you conceive of that tradition?  What  
constitutes it? In part this would lead us to consider your ideas  
about what tradition does in terms of setting up grammars and  
languages for understanding poetry and painting.



--Are there figures that you see yourself addressing in terms of a  
genealogy of writers or artists.  In some ways, this would be a  
question of what it is that you see your own work as doing in terms of  
salvage.



--In discussing Isles of the Signatories, we noted the concerns for  
materiality and the object that recurs through the various poems.  Is  
the object something you see as needing redemption or reclamation?  Is  
the loss of the object something that needs elegizing or are your  
poems more insistent on seeing that process of an object’s material  
degradation as unavoidable (yet that still demands attention)? In  
other words, what are the stakes of the object (and perhaps  
subjectivity)?





--One notes the iterations and repetitions in Isle of the  
Signatories.  Could you give a sense of what function repetition  
serves in general.  For instance, one might see the New York School of  
painters as arguing that there is no repetition, and iterations demand  
closer attention to difference rather than similarity.  Is there such  
a thing as repetition?



--If one might say that your work thinks through the potentiality of  
codes and operations, can you say something about what you look to  
pass on to your students.  How does someone go about teaching this to  
students (either students who wish to be makers of poetry and those  
who are readers in general). In other, broader ways, this might be a  
way of asking how you answer the question “what is poetry” to your  
students.



Does art have a pedagogical element?



How would you see your work’s relation to the Futurists (since you do  
periodically discuss their work)?



Can you say more about your thinking about salvage?  Do you see this  
as connected somehow to Rauschenberg’s use of salvaged materials for  
his assemblages and combines.





+++++++



These questions offer a range of the areas touched upon last Friday.   
Again, Marjorie Welish will join us on Oct 9, so please join us.  Also  
spread the word—we always welcome visitors and observers.



If you did not receive copies of her work, please contact me  
directly.  Last Friday, we also distributed copies of some essays from  
her book of art writing, Signifying Art (Oxford UP).  Some people  
requested that I send along the table of contents for this book.  I’ll  
paste that below. There is one more interview (very recent) that I’ll  
be distributing later this week.  I’ll be in touch about that.



Onward,

Richard Deming










[i] For further discussion, one might look at T. J.  Clark’s recent  
meditation on Poussin, The Sight of Death, for yet another reading.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20090921/bf653519/attachment.html