[Wgcp-whc] Hejinian minutes and Willis session today

[Richard Deming]

Dear All,



Today, April 30th, we will be meeting from 3-5 in rm 116 of the  
Whitney Humanities Center to discuss the work of Elizabeth Willis,  
particularly Meteoric Flowers, a collection of (mainly) prose pomes  
that write through the work of British poet and naturalist Erasmus  
Darwin (1732-1802). Of course, we will be discussing—among other things 
—the unstable form of the prose poem, the nature of history, and  
allusions (and palimpsestic writing) as poetic modalities.  
Interestingly, the very paratactic nature of Willis’s poems links to  
comments made by our most recent guest, Lyn Hejinian, describe  
parataxis as enacting a lateral aesthetics, one which underprivileges  
subjectivity, allowing every place to serve as its own focus as the  
poem continually reestablishes its grammar and structure.

On April 14th, Lyn Hejinian joined us for a discussion of her work  
with a specific focus on Saga/Circus, her latest collection.  This was  
an intense, productive conversation held at the Beinecke Library.



In that Hejinian is one of the most widely known and acclaimed poets  
connected to Language writing, she began by contextualizing the  
earliest development of her sense of poetics as being informed by the  
method and intense investment in aesthetics and materiality of the  
Abstract Expressionists, whose work she had been exposed to at a young  
age.  The painters’ ideas that art was an action that crossed from the  
individual gesture into public space grounded her later thinking on  
the intersections of poetry and politics, with poetry being a close  
attention to the material of language as it engaged and was engaged by  
groups of people. The earlier mention I made of her thinking about  
parataxis also served to display her profound debt to and interest in  
Gertrude Stein. A fascinating talk Hejinian gave on the subject of  
Stein is available here: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Hejinian/Heijinian-Lyn_9poets_KWH_10-12-00.mp3



The development of her poetics was in sense ratified by the poetry  
community of the San Francisco Bay area in the mid-1970s. There was in  
that moment and place a prevailing sense within the community that  
poetry was at stake and so Language writing served as a collective  
effort and communal engagement—despite a plurality of practices—of the  
terms of what was possible and available to the art particularly as a  
mode of aesthetico-critical intervention into discourses of cultural  
power.

For Hejinian, Saga/Circus was a way of creating a space for the  
marginalized voices of carnival workers or roustabouts inasmuch as the  
workers were largely migrant workers who were often victims of  
violence (such as lynching) because they were “outsiders” (or  
racialized others) brought from outside the community and thus largely  
unprotected. Hejinian described the tension as existing between  
players and payers (or attendees). The circus is a contact zone for  
classes and races and for that reason it is often violent.  Moreover,  
the circuses tropes were often militaristic —in its use of cannons  
going off, and so forth. Saga/Circus then explores the presence of  
violence that so often comes with entertainment. Saga/Circus presents  
the violence that comes with entertainment indicating how  
hyperactivity and aporia are often obverse sides of the same coin.   
Both sections that form the collection are diasporic works in terms  
how each are representing narratives of movement, and forms of  
political and economic Diaspora in which people are forced to do this  
because of money). The project of the diptych of the parts of the  
collection allowed her to work around the “problem” of beginnings and  
endings, which have been sites of creative and epistemological  
difficulty for her as a writer.

Hejinian put together Lola (the Circus potion of Saga/Circus) because  
of “novel envy.”  As a poet, she has often worked against the fullness  
of a novel’s created world and she wished the take on that challenge.   
She wanted to create an alternate world, and the circus is itself an  
artificial world that facilitates illusion as entertainment. Hejinian  
drew some inspiration from the work of outsider artist Henry Darger  
(1892-1973) who created a vast narrative for his collage work. In  
large part Hejinian wished to think through (or write into) the  
question of what entertainment is.  Her idea was to take entertainment  
seriously. She coupled this with the 19th century genre of the sea  
saga because of the emphasis placed on generic conventions and the  
foregrounding of artifice. She sees the work, then, as ironizing the  
historic conventions in that they are revisions of what might be seen  
as poetic reversions to bygone literary forms.  We might consider this  
as late style revisions of early style genres. Such banal details of  
extended narrative became occasions for attention to mechanisms of  
meaning, for instance she was interested in sound of names of  
characters in that their sounds could not only locate persons but  
added amatory and sardonic/ironic textures of narrative.  Moreover,  
adding names allowed her to keep the narrative proliferating,  
disrupting the linear, sequential imaginative movement of the text.



The ironized tropes of the circus and the sea saga become forms of  
allegory by which to live one’s postmodernity, which Hejinian defines  
as life within late capitalism.  In that late capitalism keeps itself  
abstract under the guise of openness, diversity, and pluralisms,  
“Everything good about it is everything bad about it.” Postmodern  
language writing’s irony becomes a site for understanding the  
mechanisms of affect. Art presents sensible objects by which the  
mapping of a possible lateralization of democracy or political  
interests provides allegorical structure for thinking about political  
activism. Hejinian distinguishes between exegetical allegory (reader  
experience) and authorial allegory. Allegory calls attention to itself  
as a trope and this self-conscious poetics of narrative or generic  
conventions serves as Political intervention because the aesthetic  
threatens politics which are dependent on stable symbols—the aesthetic  
constantly points to symbolism’s intrinsic instability. Allegory  
especially insists on its made rather than found significance.  The  
conflation of aesthetic investments and political action were enacted  
throughout our conversation with Hejinian, as the focus ranged from  
California’s political crisis to Jacques Ranciere’s belief that the  
aesthetic reframes relationships to ordinary, sensible objects  
revealing the processes of interpretation. The intensely abstract  
nature of the conversation, however, was always grounded in the  
specificities of the poem on one hand, and the political realities  
that, in Hejinian’s view, have only continued to become direr since  
the 1970s.  As is fully evident, this session was provocative on a  
wide range of levels and entirely generative in terms if thinking of  
the inextricability of history, politics, and poetics.  Our many  
thanks to Lyn for her thoughtful, insightful discussion of her work  
and of the politics of poetics/the poetics of politics.



Until soon,

Richard Deming, Minister of Information





Here is a bit of Henry Darger;







































  
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