[Wgcp-whc] Spicer minutes and next session, Fri 2/4

[Richard Deming]

Dear Fellow Poeticians,



I am writing for two reasons.  The first is to remind everyone that we  
will meet this coming Friday, Feb. 4 from 3-5 PM in room 116 of the  
Whitney Humanities Center to discuss the work of Jorie Graham,  
specifically her recent book Sea Change.  The poet herself will then  
join us for a conversation on Feb. 18. I am also writing in order to  
offer a report of our last session.

On January 21, we discussed Jack Spicer's  _After Lorca_, Spicer's  
reputation and influence has continued to flourish since his death in  
1965 (at the age of 40) and in recent years (thanks in large part to  
the biographical, scholarly, and editorial efforts of Kevin Killian  
and Peter Gizzi) he has secured a decidedly prominent place in the  
landscape of post-war American poetry.  We had settled on After Lorca  
for several reasons.  The book is a collection of Spicer's  
"translations" of work by the important Spanish poet Federico Garcia  
Lorca, who was likely assassinated in 1936 during the Spanish Civil  
War. Spicer wove together very faithful translations, looser  
translations, and poems of his own along with letters to Lorca that  
articulate his poetics in prose.  We noted that there is a deep irony  
in the reception of this particular book.  Although Spicer indicates  
some frustration with the inclusion of the letters as being some form  
of obligatory conciliation in order to teach people how to read the  
work in the sense of creating his context for what Spicer himself  
seems to seek in poems (his own and, it would seem, Lorca's) and  
refers to the prose as “temporary,” that the letters are the most  
cited and most influential parts of the book.



We asked the question of why it is Lorca who serves as the book’s  
addressee and origin.  It seems significant that Spicer, who was  
himself gay, chose a very out, gay poet as a form of mentor—and  
indeed, one of the speculations is that Lorca was murdered in part  
because of his sexuality.  Furthermore, one of Lorca’s most important  
poems is a poetic engagement with Walt Whitman. Thus, Spicer is able  
to create a kind of genealogy for his own poetry and his own sense of  
references and context.  Spicer then broadens his points of citation  
and can allow for a certain distance between himself and Whitman.   
Since Spicer had strong suspicion of “the what he called the “big lie  
of the personal,” it was important to not allow Whitman to be the main  
initiating figure, since Whitman used the trope of the self as a way  
of focusing his poetics and the lens of its sweepingly inclusive  
attention. Having Lorca at the center of the book means that not only  
is Spicer able to translate important poems by a poet who helps  
establish an alternative tradition of poetry, but also Spicer’s book  
thinks through (and by way of) the trope of translation.  The  
fractured and fracturing, contingent bringing across of a poem from  
one language into another reflects Spicer’s desire to have “real  
things” appear in (and as) language and to make a poem as real as a  
lemon, though the complexities of language disrupt the wholly  
successful achievement of that desire. Lorca also becomes a kind of  
spirit haunting the work from whom Spicer takes a kind of dictation, a  
way of letting larger forces speak through him (which is a trope  
central to Spicer’s poetics).

Yet Spicer’s interventions into Lorca’s poems by making adjustments  
(sometimes very small, sometimes very large) indicate how his own  
consciousness does assert itself, so translation is the site of  
negotiations of self and other or ego and thing.  Recurring tropes—say  
of dead girls--start to resonate with Spicer’s reference to Poe (who  
believed that “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the  
most poetic topic in the world”) indicates how literary and cultural  
forbears haunt work at even the deepest levels. These also show how  
the poems and the translations reverberate across the collection as a  
whole, so although there is a built-in hybridity in terms of form and  
voice (prose and poetry, translations and “original” poems, one poet’s  
poems fused with another’s), the work holds together in the way it  
enacts its poetic of translation and “impurity” and becomes an example  
of Spicer's belief in the serial poem.

But the structure and modality of the collection also becomes also  
then a question of influence. Indeed, we also noted how Spicer had  
written an introduction in the voice of (and signed by) Lorca.  It is  
a witty introduction in which Lorca flutters between being annoyed,  
flattered, and nonplussed by Spicer and his “translations.”  On one  
hand this attitude certainly reflects any poet’s since of his or her  
own work—that a translation can never reflect the specific words and  
form of the poem.  On the other hand, it also can be read as an older  
poet’s suspicion of his progeny, and indeed the wittiness of Spicer’s  
ventriloquism could be read as a way of demystifying an older poet and  
thus an overcoming of that influence.  Thus, Spicer within After Lorca  
creates a genealogy in order to resist it and overcome it, thereby  
enacting an Oedipal anxiety of influence.



As is evident, this is complex poetry that continues to challenge  
readers in engaging and provocative ways in the questions it raises  
about authorship, voice, identity, representation, and language  
itself.  This was a terrific conversation about an important work and  
it set the pace for the semester to come.



++++++

In preparation for next week, people might be interested in reading  
some secondary material about Graham and Sea Change (in reviews and  
interviews).  Liz Gray has generously sent a file of these that she  
has gathered together.  I’m including that packet as an attachment.  
For a reading by Graham, people can look here for either video or an  
Mp3-- http://www.listeningtowords.com/lecture.php?id=1463





+++

And I also wanted to pass on some news about recent work by group  
members.



Donald Brown, one of our stalwart core members, recently published a  
very insightful review of fall WGCP visitor C.D. Wright’s newest book http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/arts-literature-articles/c-d-wrights-new-book-length-poem-has-an-effect-achieved-by-magic-041412



And our very own Gray Jacobik has a new book out--

LITTLE BOY BLUE by Gray Jacobik Publication Date: January 2011Price:  
$16.00;   ISBN: 978-1-933880-22-8





And finally, for any members who won’t be at next week’s session  
because they’ll be at the AWP conference, in Washington, DC—member-at- 
large Ravi Shankar offers the following event:







“Friday, February 4 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Location: The Biltmore, 1977 Biltmore St., DC (5 minutes from AWP)



Join the editors and authors of Drunken Boat, Defunct Magazine, Born,  
and 32 Poems for an evening of readings and revelry.

With performances by Ander Monson, Lia Purpura, Melanie Henderson,  
Patrick Rosal, Garret Socol, Don Share, DeLana Dameron, Daniel Nester,  
Bernadette Meyer, and others, including special guests.

DRUNKEN BOAT is one of the oldest online arts journals, dedicated to  
exposure of literary, visual, digital, and cross-media work from  
around the world. www.drunkenboat.com”





However, those of you who will be in New Haven, 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, Co-coordinator







  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20110129/1461f5f5/attachment-0002.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Sea-Change-Reviews.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 116286 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20110129/1461f5f5/attachment-0001.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20110129/1461f5f5/attachment-0003.html