[Wgcp-whc] Sussman talk tomorrow, Willis Session on Friday

[Richard Deming]

Dear poetics people,

The end of semester busyness has meant I am slow to send along the  
minutes of the group's recent intense and provocative session with the  
poet Lyn Hejinian.  That will come later this week.  I did, however,  
want to remind people that we have a session this Friday at 3 PM in  
room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  This time we will be  
discussing the collection Meteoric Flowers by Elizabeth Willis, one of  
the foremost poets of her generation.

First, however, I also wanted to send word (if a little last minute)  
about a talk being given tomorrow by our own Henry Sussman. Henry is  
one of the foremost literary theorists in the U. S. and so this is a  
real treat:


Yale University Department of Comparative Literature

       The Open Forum Lecture Series  presents

                Henry Sussman  Visiting Professor,
                 Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,
                                                    Yale University

         “Around the Book: A Progress-Report”

             Monday, April 26, 2010 5:00 p.m.
     Comparative Literature Library,  Bingham Hall, 8th Floor



+++++++

About Elizabeth Willis

Here is the official bio:
Elizabeth Willis is the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of  
Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. She is the author of four  
books of poetry, Second Law, The Human Abstract, Turneresque, and  
Meteoric Flowers.  Her work has been selected for the National Poetry  
Series and her awards include the Boston Review Prize, an award from  
the Howard Foundation, a Walter N. Thayer Fellowship for the Arts, and  
a grant from the California Arts Council.  As a critic,  		she has  
written on 19th- and 20th- century poetry, and she has edited a  
collection of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and  
the Politics of Place.



Susan Stewart wrote of Willis's work in 2008:
  Elizabeth Willis [is] a poet whose books—The Human Abstract,  
Turneresque, and Meteoric Flowers—have always delighted and moved me  
with their fresh and canny approach to the relations between art and  
nature. These poems are striking for their lively and musical lines,  
for their precise accounts of things and of the ways we perceive them,  
and for their subtle, playful relation to tradition. They take up the  
sound of music and the surfaces of painting, yet clearly do what only  
poems can do. The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising,  
is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.



Here is a link to WIllis reading her work:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_reading_3-17-08.mp3



And here is a link to Willis being interviewed by Charles Bernstein:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_conversation_3-17-08.mp3

Attached I am sending a brief essay that WIllis contributed to a  
recent issue of boundary 2 devoted to "American Poetry after 1975."

And here I'll paste a brief but useful review of Meteoric Flowers.

  Intoxication by Daniel Kane

Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers offers the reader a strange and at  
times almost overwhelmingly pleasurable world, one that is inspired  
(as Willis informs us in her “Notes on the Text”) by Erasmus Darwin,  
“the late eighteenth-century doctor, botanist, inventor, poet, and  
intellectual precursor to his grandson Charles.” Considering that  
Darwin is Willis’s muse, perhaps it makes sense that the pleasures in  
Willis’s book are generated by a kind of baroque scholarliness which  
Willis puts to use exploring and enacting relationships between  
conventionally unrelated phenomena. Vines, Walt Whitman, devil’s bush,  
asparagus, what seems like a ghost of the ghost of Hamlet, and all  
sorts of other flora, fauna, and literary specters interact with each  
other and ultimately enchant and inform the audience.

The book is structured as a series of prose-poem “Cantos” which are  
occasionally broken up by lyrics that Willis entitles “Verses Omitted  
by Mistake” and, in one case, “Errata.” Darwin is credited as a source  
for this approach: “The poems of [Darwin’s] Botanic Garden are  
interrupted by prose footnotes, supplementary notes, summary  
descriptions, errata, and dialogues on the relation between poetry and  
prose, painting, and music. The prose cantos and lyric interruptions  
of Meteoric Flowers reverse the relation between prose and verse in  
Darwin’s work.”

The shapeliness of the prose stanzas often suggest Joseph Cornell’s  
boxes, filled as they are with disparate objects and sentiments that  
cohere to become charged relics:
The Nettle

Idly I turned your name into a kite. Poor bloom couldn’t find itself  
among the interrupted lady. A little less air for the megaphone, a  
larger flag over Brownsville. We’re knotted in eights at bossomy  
altitudes, foreshortened in the wind. Feet are but a bit of leather,  
breaking through the turf. A stroke of sunlight in a wreck of a  
bedroom, a mirror of temporary verbs. As for the daisy, I know I  
frighten you. My face a red bookishness. The rose willow produces  
other kinds of monsters but the imperishable nettle thinks for us all.
There is an entire cosmos contained in this Canto. The unnamed “I”  
links fragments of the material world – a “stroke of sunlight,” a “bit  
of leather,” “the daisy” – with a world of, well, magic where nettles  
think for us and monsters emanate from rose willows. This prose  
passage might remind us of the “prose” of Lorca, Jack Spicer, and  
especially the universe of fairy tales. (After all, Little Red Riding  
Hood even makes an appearance in this book. As Willis writes faux- 
ominously at the end of the Canto “Near and More Near,” “What long  
teeth you have”) (51).

This is not to say that the “Cantos” are lacking in “poetry” in the  
technical sense of the word. I suspect Willis includes the lineated  
and prose stanzas in order to complicate the aura of the modern many  
readers immediately cede to prose. For example, one can look to  
“Errata,” a lineated poem propelled by anaphora and see-sawing word  
pairs (“for isle, read isles / for boated, read bloated / for poetry,  
read poetic / for second, read third / for his, read her”) (59). This  
poem is immediately followed by the prose Canto “Loud Cracks From Ice  
Mountains Explained.” “Loud Cracks” agitates against the lyricism of  
the preceding poem by beginning with an inherently Surrealist  
discursive line – “The alarm in my heart is made of silly brass, some  
of us can’t help but mourn the end of Lorca.” However, as if to resist  
the linear trajectory of prose, “Loud Cracks” ends with a single line  
that, when scanned, reveals itself as two lines of Blakean iambic  
tetrameter: “A footstep bound for weary day awaits its sound upon the  
grain.” Prose resonates with the “errata” of poetry and all ends hymn.

Willis doesn’t just make genre trouble to perform the fact that she’s  
writing poetry and we’re reading it. Indeed, after a couple of  
readings of Meteoric Flowers we sense the book aims in part to  
question and even trespass the lines that divide the past from the  
present, particularly as that past is represented in literature. The  
poetry in this book (as Willis puts it in “Tiptoe Lightning”) is “a  
modern letter sent from antiquity,” (47) one which reinvigorates the  
possibilities in a millennia-long tradition even as that tradition is  
leavened and implicitly critiqued by an at times biting and  
colloquially-driven humor. Look at the poem “With New Prolific Power,”  
for example:

Let me just say that I’m hanging from this screen into an icy  
darkness. All this planetary turning on a hinge. My head is fair but  
plain, thinking of Rutherford. I was looking in the window of a newer  
Canaan, but the dew on its lilies tasted like salt. This piece of my  
mind is just beyond the hammering, a dog in the yard drifting like  
trash. Every season cannot be thought at once, even when the world can  
name it. (48)

The good Dr. Williams makes an appearance here when his hometown  
Rutherford is summoned. And yet the radically material nature of  
Williams’ poetics, one that insists famously (if at this point perhaps  
tiresomely) that there are “no ideas but in things,” is here gently  
subverted by Willis’s inclusion of specifically Biblical allusions.  
(We should note that Williams appears in the very first poem in this  
book, albeit elliptically, in the line “The world is clanking: noun,  
noun, noun”) (3). Materiality becomes metaphysics: the reader is led  
from Williams’ hometown to the pre-Israelite land of Canaan, then to a  
contemporary “dog in the yard” “drifting” surrealistically “like  
trash,” and ending with “Every season cannot be thought at once, even  
when the world can name it.” This last line is crucial. I’m pretty  
sure it’s designed as an improvisation off of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8,  
which begins “For everything there is a season, and a time for every  
matter under heaven.” Even when we in the world can “name” its  
objects, its seasons, we are still not capable of transcendence and  
simultaneity. That, as poem after poem makes clear, is possible only  
in the realm of what we can tentatively call the spiritual.

In light of the variety of worlds provided us in Meteoric Flowers, I  
think it’s safe to say that Willis is an ambitious and – dare I say  
it? – inspired poet. And let’s not forget how gorgeous so many of the  
lines are throughout the book. I can think of very few poets who would  
risk writing something like “I don’t remember my first brush with  
pollen, yet I’ve watched words flower sideways across your mouth.”  
Willis provides us with this and other intoxicating delights. She  
works onward to position such consistently surprising and mysterious  
beauties of language within an intellectually-driven framework, one  
predicated on the exploration of literary, natural, and spiritual  
histories as they determine our contemporary “reality.” I can’t wait  
to see what Willis  comes up with next.



Daniel Kane’s publications include All Poets Welcome: The Lower East  
Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2003),  
What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (Teachers  
& Writers, 2003), and, as editor and contributor, Don’t Ever Get  
Famous: Essays on New York Writing After the New York School  
(Forthcoming, Dalkey Archives, 2006). His poetry is published in  
TriQuarterly, Exquisite Corpse, The Hat, Fence, and other journals.


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