[Wgcp-whc] next session 10/8 & minutes of Alferi visit

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Sat Sep 25 12:47:52 EDT 2010



>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear All—
>
>
>
>
>
> On Friday, September 17, the poet, novelist, and filmmaker Pierre  
> Alferi joined us for a discussion of his work, particularly his  
> collection OXO (French title: Kub Or), translated by Cole Swensen.   
> I will give an overview of that discussion, but first I want to  
> alert everyone to our next session, which will occur Fri Oct 8 from  
> 3-5 PM in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
>
>
>
> On that day we will be discussing the work of the Brazilian poet  
> Angelica Freitas.  Specifically we will be reading a selection of  
> poems from her book Rilke Shake. Our discussion that day will be  
> shaped by the input of Hilary Kaplan, a WGCP member-at-large and  
> Freitas’ American translator.  I am attaching to this email the  
> original versions in Portuguese and Hilary’s translations. These  
> will be the texts on which we’ll we focus our discussion on 10/8.
>
>
>
>  Hilary has a terrific essay on translating Freitas here: http://digitalartifactmagazine.com/issue2/Translating_Poems_from_Angelica_Freitas_Rilke_shake
>
>
>
>
>
> And I’ll clip the first two paragraphs to provide a biography for  
> this poet:
>
>
>
> Rilke shake (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), a collection of 45 short  
> poems, is the first book by the young Brazilian poet Angélica  
> Freitas. The title, a pun on milkshake (which in Brazil’s  
> vernacular means just what it does in English), indicates the  
> book’s contents: poetry approached as a shake of languages, words,  
> canonical tradition and a measure of delight, whirred in  
> postmodernity's ironic blender. The often first-person poems grapple  
> with shaking off the influence of not only Rilke but also  
> Shakespeare (the pun is not lost), Stein, Keats, Moore, Bishop,  
> Bashō, Blake, Brodsky and Pound. In “não consigo ler os  
> cantos” (“i can’t manage to read the cantos”) the speaker,  
> established as female at the beginning of the book, asks the  
> revolutionary and rhetorical question, “vamos nos livrar de ezra  
> pound?/…/vamos nos livrar de mariane moore?” (“shall we free  
> ourselves from ezra pound?/.../shall we free ourselves from marianne  
> moore?”). Since she can't shake free of these titans, she shakes  
> them together with everything else real and imagined from her life— 
> family, languages learned or overheard, travels, dreams, homeland,  
> and so on—to see if anything tasty results.
> Born 8 April 1973 in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Freitas studied  
> journalism at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)  
> in Porto Alegre, then worked as a reporter in São Paulo. She now  
> lives in Pelotas and Holland, where she is translating poetry and  
> working on a second book. She has published poems in the Brazilian  
> journal Inimigo Rumor, and in Diário de Poesía (Argentina) and  
> aguasfurtadas (Portugal). A translation of “love (collage)”  
> appeared in Issue 6 (Spring 2007), dedicated to Brazilian poetry, of  
> the American poetry journal Aufgabe; translations into English of  
> “What is a tschüsstschüss?” (“o que é um baibai?”) and  
> “Love, a collage” can be found in the German online art magazine  
> Hilda. Freitas’ work is also included in the anthology Cuatro  
> poetas recientes de Brasil (Buenos Aires: Black & Vermelho, 2006).  
> She co-edits the Brazilian poetry journal Modo de Usar & Co (in  
> print and online at revistamododeusar.blogspot.com) and keeps her  
> own blog, tome uma xícara de chá (loop.blogspot.com).
>
> The work of this poet seems to be in some ways sympathetic with  
> Alferi’s work (and may set up our discussion later this semester of  
> and with second-generation New York School poet David Shapiro).
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ++
>
> Our discussion with Alferi began with a question to him about how he  
> navigates his sense of the various media and literary forms in which  
> he is invested.  Alferi responded, and in large part this speaks to  
> his process as an artist is that he sees himself as a land surveyor  
> rather than a geometrist.  The surveyor enters into a mapless space  
> with no prior image of the territory.  Alferi believes that through  
> writing he feels his way into the space.  Feeling his way, there is  
> a trajectory for his thinking, but one without a map or without  
> general knowledge.  There are techniques of orientation such as  
> triangulating position by way of fixed stars, but there don’t  
> predetermine what is actually to be discovered.
>
>
>
> In some ways, constraints are like these fixed stars as they are the  
> pretext for generating his own responses so he can sort through his  
> experiences.  Alferi then shifted metaphors and suggested that form  
> serves as a kind of sieve by which he can sift everyday experience  
> for the moments of revelation, intuition and surprise that are part  
> of daily life (and which too often go otherwise unnoticed).   
> Beginning a work is the opportunity to invent (or find) the most  
> effective sieve to make these discoveries possible.
>
>
>
> When asked if there were any models that he had in mind in terms of  
> his approach to working with language and with images he confessed  
> that he often desired to emulate scientists insofar as there is a  
> precision to their experimenting.  In other words, his goal is not  
> to arbitrarily play with language but to do things that produce new  
> possibilities for insight and representation. In that way, we come  
> to know the capabilities of consciousness that much better.
>
>
>
> Alferi mentioned that when his work his characterized as  
> “playful” it often seems that people feel the work lacks  
> seriousness.  In reality, he hopes that the use of language through  
> poetic operations yields a broadened sense of what it means that we  
> are primarily linguistic beings. It also indicates how form and  
> language are organic, living things, susceptible to change,  
> evolution, and adaptation.  Poetry reveals the flexibility of  
> language.
>
>
>
> He discussed, for instance, the constraints of OXO—the seven lines  
> of seven syllables across seven sections.  With a seven-syllable  
> line, there can be no caesura that establishes symmetry within the  
> line.  Any pause will group the elements of the line in odd  
> patterns, resulting in a fundamental instability that appears line  
> by line. The fact that Swensen’s translation breaks the lines in  
> different places and places the caesuras in places different than in  
> the French indicates how that instability is maintained across  
> languages.  The cubic trope that develops also lends itself to  
> compactness within the lines and across the poem that visually  
> signals his work’s decisive split from a more classical line.  The  
> difference is evident to the eye as well as the ear.
>
>
>
> Alferi referred to this as a formless form, which sparked further  
> discussion of what constitutes form. Alferi argued that poetry is  
> not simply form but is the negotiation—and even the struggle--of an  
> animating force with the plastic nature of linguistic form.  We  
> might see this as some animus (perhaps we might call this  
> consciousness) working with and against the limitations of language.  
> This also goes beyond simply one’s ideas of the literary and  
> engages with metaphysical concerns with what constitutes being  
> itself.  This is another way, that the stakes of Alferi’s  
> “playing" with language are revealed as being quite ambitious and  
> profound.
>
>
>
> In his films, which often incorporate linguistic tropes, Alferi  
> feels he can represent the evanescence and ephemerality of language  
> because time is such an essential part of cinema.  His use of  
> soundtracks allows him to create rhythmic pulses that enable one to  
> scan (as one scans a poem’s prosody) the visual images. The  
> combining of cinema and poetry into a shared poetics represents the  
> fact that the ordering of perception is constantly occurring no  
> matter how conscious or unconscious that process might be.   
> Alferi’s work brings that process into view, makes it somewhat  
> opaque is that we can be aware of the fact that the sieves we create  
> to understand our experiences occur not just in the arts but in  
> everyday life as well.
>
>
>
> As is evident, the discussion of what constitutes form and the  
> impact of aesthetic experience on one’s sense of the world was  
> extremely generative and provocative.  All agreed that this was a  
> thoughtful and at times profound conversation and set the bar high  
> for the rest of the semester.  Our collective thanks to Pierre  
> Alferi for his engaging thoughts and his willingness to join our  
> group to discuss the issues arising from our reading of his work
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20100925/8d93bf96/attachment-0003.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: WGCP-Freitas Portuguese Originals.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 95411 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20100925/8d93bf96/attachment-0002.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20100925/8d93bf96/attachment-0004.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: WGCP-Freitas Translations_HK.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 97950 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20100925/8d93bf96/attachment-0003.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20100925/8d93bf96/attachment-0005.html 


More information about the Wgcp-whc mailing list