[Wgcp-whc] Report on CD Wright's visit

[Richard Deming]

Post-session conviviality: from left to right--Omar Berrada, Peter  
Cole, Brian Johnson, Donald Brown, and C.D. Wright

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Dear All,



I wanted to send an email that conveys the provocative, generative  
discussion of our most recent session of the WGCP.  On November 5, the  
Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics were joined by the  
poet (and recent National Book Award finalist) C. D. Wright to discuss  
her book Rising, Hovering, Falling.



In following some of the issues raised during the group’s initial  
engagement of the book during a prior session, we began by asking  
about the dilemma of writing about politics and political realities in  
poetry.  Often, one camp will insist that political poetry needs to be  
clear and populist in order to have any efficacy.  Another camp will  
counter and argue instead that what results is not poetry but  
rhetoric. Wright indicated that much of the poems of Rising, Hovering,  
Falling (as well as many of her other collections) were fueled by  
moral outrage in terms of some of the political and social turns  
America had taken.  The conversation continued to hover around the  
difficulty of writing about and from moral outrage without becoming  
moralizing and didactic. The outrage does not define her work, but it  
does give shape to it.  In terms of the split that can seem to occur  
in terms of the arguments for how poetry can be political—perhaps most  
famously and contentiously debated by Denise Levertov and Robert  
Duncan (see http://jacketmagazine.com/28/dunc-bert-lev-essay.html) -- 
Wright indicated that as she sees it there is “no way out of the  
concerns of one’s time.” She suggested that in conventional models of  
understanding politics and narrativity tend to travel together  
(political discourse often being the construction of competing  
narrative’s) but pointed to lyric poets—such as Michael Palmer—who are  
able to use the lyric to address the political.



For Wright, the virtue of narrative is its mutability and flexibility,  
while politics and dogma can too easily make narrative intractable.   
Her work then strips narrative down to find its point of maximum  
flexibility, generosity, and openness.  This commitment to narrative  
is, she points out, part of her Southern birthright. She does not  
establish the shape of a book ahead of time.  Instead she writes as a  
means of finding the form.  Her experiments with minimal narrative are  
a way of blending the fragmented, overlapping experiences of urban  
spaces with a sense of location and that she is building a book as a  
habitable space.  To this end, Wright conceives of form as a way of  
sculpting with words and language. The repetitions and the recurring  
condition of “incompletion” in Rising, Hovering, Falling (for instance  
in the collection’s title poem, Wright broke the poem in half  
publishing this long poem in consecutive issues of the Chicago Review,  
making it literally a serial poem as she drew upon the Victorian  
convention of serial publication) bear out that the poems are means of  
discovering how to see things as clearly as possible, but also to keep  
possibility an open question rather than a specific claim of how  
things are. What informs her poetics is the belief that poetry remains  
a utopian undertaking.



 From this position, the poems are at some level attempts to “expel  
the scorpions” of contemporary discourse. This is a cathartic action  
as much as it is a means of making part of the record the process of  
resistance to illegitimate power.  Poetry is a kind of safe space to  
do this because although it makes injustice and the witnessing of  
injustice part of the record of the contemporary moment, a poem is  
“like a leaf in the Grand Canyon.”  That does not mean there is no  
value, but that the poem itself is not decisive.  Wright is trying do,  
she stated (using a chiasmus), is maintain the conditions of “the  
experience of language, and the language of experience.”  Writing is  
not simply about one’s own sense of how things are but it is a way of  
objectivizing a moral vision, which again helps transfer moral vision  
into the public sphere of shared experience and makes the language of  
experience a matter of public record. In an interview with Wright  
conducted by Kent Johnson that I sent in advance of her visit, Wright  
mentioned that in visiting prison inmates to write the book One Big  
Self, Wright felt that it is the guest’s job to honor the host. We see  
that this idea of ethics of poetry being enacted by Wright is this  
process of thinking of self and other, collectivity and individuality  
as interrelated and interdependent situations and states of being. The  
back and forth, chiasmic sensibility informs—consciously and  
unconsciously—the poetics of this singular writer who reminded us,  
both in her poems and in her conversation—that poetry is an art that  
has stakes that must be acknowledged. We thank her for this intense,  
thoughtful, and involving conversation.



As I mentioned earlier, our next guest will be David Shapiro.  Our  
first session devoted to his work will be 12/3 from 3-5.  He will then  
join us on 12/10.



Here is the official Bio:



David Shapiro (b. 1947) is an American poet, literary critic, and art  
historian. Shapiro has written some twenty volumes of poetry,  
literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of  
thirteen, and his first book was published at the age of eighteen.  
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Shapiro grew up in Newark, New Jersey and  
attended Weequahic High School, and attended Columbia University, from  
which he holds a B.A. (magna cum laude) and a Ph.D. (with  
distinction), as well at the University of Cambridge, from which he  
holds degrees with first honors. Shapiro has taught at Columbia, Bard  
College, Cooper Union, Princeton University, and William Paterson  
University. Shapiro wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery, the  
first book on Jim Dine's paintings, the first book on Piet Mondrian's  
flower studies, and the first book on Jasper Johns' drawings. He has  
translated Rafael Alberti's poems on Pablo Picasso, and the writings  
of the Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Shapiro has won National Endowment  
for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships,  
been nominated for a National Book Award, and been the recipient of  
numerous grants for his work. Shapiro lives in Riverdale, The Bronx,  
New York City, with his wife and son.



Here is a review of Shapiro’s Selected Poems: Maxwell Heller http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/02/books/david-shapiro-poems



And here is a a great interview at Pataphysics Magazine:

http://www.yanniflorence.net/pataphysicsmagazine/shapiro_interview.html

In the meantime, be sure to get your copy of the Selected Poems from  
our mailbox in the Whitney Humanities Center.  Hurry, though—copies go  
fast.



And have a great Thanksgiving.



Thus,

Richard Deming, Group Co-coordinator



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