[Wgcp-whc] C.D. Wright this Fri

[Richard Deming]

Dear Contemporary Poeticians,

As tends to be our practice, I am sending a series of questions that  
were drawn from our discussion of C. D. Wright’s Rising, Falling,  
Hovering (Copper Canyon 2008).  These questions are being sent to  
Wright as well.  These will help shape the conversation we will have  
when the poet joins us this Friday from 3-5 in room 116 of the Whitney  
Humanities Center.

As the questions will testify, the tensions between the personal and  
the political are at the center of this particular book. In light of  
that I thought I would include a passage from the essay “Wages of  
Poetry” :
  Poetry for me is compatibly tendentious and personal. It is both  
reproachful and irresistible. It thrives on errancy (as well as an  
excess of pride and piety). Writing is a discretionary activity; it  
follows that reading is too. Controversies between strains of poetry  
are useful tools of refinement, perhaps especially to those of us who  
see ourselves on the sidelines but affected by similar concerns. But  
literary hegemony, the drive to prevail, seems insupportable, and  
poisonously reflective of class allegiances. Both the vanguard and the  
rearguard simulate the dominant hierarchies. Of the vanguard I can  
say, I admire their procedures, but I think their attitude stinks. Of  
the rearguard I admit I think their procedures and their attitudes  
stink. When this discord erupts into an all-or-none competition, the  
last reader can exit in a body bag. "Writing," as Colette wrote,  
"leads only to writing." I do not see any end to it.

++++

And also I recommend her piece entitled” Concerning Why Poetry Offers  
A Better Deal Than The World’s Biggest Retailer.” http://lanaturnerjournal.com/article.php?article=wr 
ight


Here are the questions—the “you” refers to Wright, of course:


1) In reading Rising, Falling, Hovering, we discussed at great length  
the ways that political and the subjective intersect another.  What  
are the ways that you see that these two modes can come together.  The  
dangers have been well-discussed by both sides of the equation: a poem  
that brings in politics can become political, rhetorical; a poem that  
is subjective or personal doesn’t have the efficacy or singleness of  
purpose to motivate people to direct action. Is this a false schism  
between the two modes?  How do you negotiate these questions in that  
your work so often walks this space. Do you see the work as  
intergrating the two modes or does it instead not keeping them to  
segregated

2) In what ways do you see the relationship of your work and its  
concerns (thematic as well as formal) to your contemporaries?

3) Auden famously—or infamously—wrote, “Poetry makes nothing  
happen.” Do you think that the poet can serve a function as a public  
intellectual?  What is that function?

4) Given the intensity of the political climate in the U. S. around  
the publication of Rising, Falling, Hovering, did you have a different  
sense of audience for this book—did you imagine it changing votes?

5) The speaker of the book is addressed as "C" thus declaring this  
book to be a portrait or self-portrait.  What is the representation of  
the self that appears in this book.  Is it a form of you?  Is it a  
persona? And what is the sense of responsibility you feel towards  
representing others in terms of fashioning a kind of portrait?

6) In the book, the form flows between prose, long lines, short lines— 
even within the same poem.  What is your thinking about form as it  
relates to speech or to conventions of genre?  How does motherhood—in  
that this is a factor that seems to recur throughout the book-- shape  
your sense of poetry and of form?


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

Also, the night before C.D. joins us there is a reading by Timothy  
Donnelly happening:




  November 4 @ 7pm

Grad Poets Reading Series: Timothy Donnelly

63 High Street, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 317



Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books,
2010) and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
(Grove Press, 2003). His work has been translated into German and
Italian and has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including
Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Isn’t It
Romantic: 100 Love Poems, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American
Spiritual Poetry, and Poet, Poems, Poetry edited by Helen Vendler. A
graduate of Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Princeton Universities, he is
a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program
at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with
his wife and two daughters.

  “When they approach you with plates of soft fruit

and erotic objects, they have already singled you out”



—from “Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom”



Graduate student poets, you are warmly invited to read briefly from  
your work at this or future events. Please contact Sarah Stone, sarah.stone at yale.edu



The Grad Poets Reading Series is supported by the Dean’s Fund, the  
Yale Review, and GPSS.

+++++



see everyone this Friday.  And remember: The Working Group in  
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday at 3.00 PM in  
room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University to  
discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within  
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric  
poetry. All are welcome to attend.



Onward,

Richard Deming

  
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