[Wgcp-whc] Book party today and Minutes--Andrew Zawacki visit

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

 

I wanted to send a report regarding out last session of the semester and, sadly, for the academic year.

 

First, however, a reminder that a party is about to happen!

BOOK PARTY: Little Winter Theater by Nancy Kuhl & poem for the house by Katie Yates

 

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

from 5:30 - 7:30 pm

at The Bourse – 839 Chapel Street 2nd floor (go through English Market to find stairs / elevator): http://www.boursenewhaven.com/our-location

 

More about the books:

Nancy Kuhl, Little Winter Theater, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY:  http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=202

Katie Yates, poem for the house, Stockport Flats, Ithaca, NY: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780984028511/poem-for-the-house.aspx

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Last Friday, December 9th, we held our second session devoted to the work of Andrew Zawacki’s Petals of Zero, Petals of One.  The poet himself joined us for a discussion of the work. The book’s three sequences—“Georgia,” Arrow’s Shadow,” and “Storm, Lustral” were written in reverse order in which they appear, with “Storm, Lustral” being the sequence closest in tone and strategies to his pervious book, Anabranch (2004). 

The poems were written over the period (roughly) of 2004-2007. Within this time, the poet Gustaf Sobin passed away. Zawacki had been in correspondence with Sobin since the 90s and because Zawacki was living for stretches of time in Paris, the two writers’ friendship deepened.  After Sobin passed, Zawacki and the poet Andrew Joron became the late writer’s executors.  This intensity of connection meant that Zawacki wanted to write a poetic sequence that both paid homage to and argued with Sobin’s work. In fact, near the end of his life Sobin directly challenged Zawacki with the task of writing an ars poetica. For a good introduction to Sobin, you can look at a review of Sobin’s collected poems (edited by Zawacki) written by our Hong Kong correspondent Lucas Klein available here: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2010summer/sobin.shtml

Sobin wasn’t the only force shaping Zawacki’s poetics during the period he was working on the poems that would become Petals of Zero, Petals of One.  He described a moment when he was staying at his in-law’s home and saw in the juxtaposition of a cherry tree and CDs hanging from the branches to scare away birds the confluence of the natural and technological modes. It struck Zawacki that he wanted to create a poetry that acknowledged the interpenetration of the technological and the natural that marks most people’s existence.  The poetry would entail the tensions without necessarily becoming neither a screed against technology nor an apologist for it.  There is sense that these tensions are not the background but are the very context of contemporary life.

 This sense of technology was tied to Zawacki’s fascination with the sound of the dial-up modem he used much longer than others who were able to switch to DSLs. What interested Zawacki in terms of the sound was that it embodied a tension between noise and signal. Noise, he suggested, is an excess or overabundance of signals that create a cacophony. Yet he wanted to write a poetry that positioned noise as the signal itself.  This would entail utilizing words and language in such a way that its myriad meanings and significations become activated all at once. 

 We discussed the fact that there are discrepancies between the way the poem “Georgia” is scored on the page and the fact that when he reads the work aloud caesuras, emphases, the suggestion of differing lineation all creep into the work. Some of those variations have to do with the very act of reading.  Indeed, “Georgia” originally arose from an act of reading, as Zawacki translated the poem “Georgia” by French surrealist Philippe Soupault and in a sense pushed past translation into consuming and amplifying that poem.  It became the maximal poet it now is.  In fact, Zawacki mentioned the poem was 50 % longer than the final version at one point in its drafting.

 As Zawacki indicated, the variations that shape the live experience of the poem allow him to change the performance for himself, if no one else, so that he hears things a different way. Rather than settling the question of which is definitive or authoritative (the live reading, or the poem on the page), the discussion addressed the fact that with the proliferation of recordings via the internet and the fact that multiple “live” versions exist all at once, there is a destabilization that can occur in terms of what defines the poem (and its voicing).  The reading can now displace the text.  While at one time a single reading might somehow hold special authority, the reading was limited in its dissemination.  Now it can be quite common that the audience for poetry can more easily hear multiple versions of a poem than read the poem on the page. Zawacki reflected on the fact that he is somewhat reluctant reader, preferring that the page be the decisive site of the work rather than the performance at a reading. One way of reading this new reality is that Zawacki’s thinking about the bundling of signals starts to be a way of considering the multiple incarnations of the poems via recordings and the like. The presence if all the variations create a network of linked but slightly different signals that ultimately manifests the constantly changing, differing conditions of listening, interpreting, thinking, and so forth.  Thus the excess of noise (in a technical sense) can be read as the context itself.

 As is evident, the implications of the conversation of Zawacki’s work was wide-ranging and had implications for how one thinks of the variety of forces and tensions that shape contemporary life and what the roles of language and voice are within the dizzying proliferation of signals. We extend our warm thanks to Andrew Zawacki for his provocative and generative engagement of these issues as they arise within his poetics.

 And this is the final WGCP session until next fall.  It was a terrific way to end the semester in which we focused on the work of younger and mid-career poets. Our thanks to all our visitors, to our thoughtful and generous regular members, and of course all thanks to listeners like you.  The listserv will still be up of course and if things specifically relevant to the group arise, I’ll periodically send word, even from my far-flung position in Berlin.

 

 

Until Autumn,

 Richard Deming, Group Coordinator and your humble narrator
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