[Wgcp-whc] minutes--Claudia Rankine visit; Andrew Zawacki 12-2 & 12-9

[Richard Deming]

Dear All,

 Greetings to everyone at the day before Thanksgiving.  I wanted to send this email in which I give some introduction to our upcoming sessions devoted to the work of poet/translator/editor Andrew Zawacki and then provide a sense of our most recent session and the visit by Clauida Rankine.

 But first a congratulations to two of our own. The intrepid Katie Yates has a beautiful new book out entitled Poem for the House. This is a sequence of very lyrical prose poems combined with exquisite watercolors.  You can get a sense of the book here:

http://www.stockportflats.org/house.htm

 And Nancy Kuhl has a beautiful new chapbook (entitled Little Winter Theater) now out in the world.  Check it out here:

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=202

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 Our final two sessions of the semester will be on Friday Dec 2nd and Friday Dec 9th and will focus on the work of Andrew Zawacki. Our main focus will be his most recent collection of poems, Petals of Zero Petals of One.  A useful review is found here http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-zawacki-rb-shoemaker.shtml

 

All the copies have been claimed, but it is pretty affordable via Amazon.

 At the beginning of next week, I will send links to other reviews, soundfiles, and an interview.  In the meantime, here is Zawacki’s official bio:

 

 Andrew Zawacki (Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, Chicago) is the author of three poetry books: Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia).  His latest book, Videotape, is due from Counterpath in 2013.  His work has appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande), Walt Whitman hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point), The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (Iowa), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner), and other anthologies, as well as in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic.  Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse), he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2, Open Letter, New German Critique, Australian Book Review, Religion and Literature, and elsewhere in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.  A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia (Persea).  His translation, from the French, of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is due from Burning Deck.  Zawacki has held fellowships from the Salzburg Seminar (Austria), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Le Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), the Fulbright Foundation (Australia), the Rhodes Trust (England), the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Bread Loaf.

 

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 On Friday November 11th, Claudia Rankine joined the WGCP and its second session devoted to her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a long sequence that works against easy categorization.  The book is written in prose, but refers to itself as “An American lyric.”  The back of the book describes the work as a “lyric essay,” but this descriptor was decided upon by the publisher, not Rankine herself.

 In many ways, the issues with genre and mode contribute to some of the aims of the work and its themes.  Rankine informed the group that there was a watershed moment that caused her to start working on this particular project.  In 1999, during the Bush/Gore Presidential debates, George W. Bush was asked about James Byrd, who was murdered by three white supremacists in Texas.  Bush’s callous response to this murder, along with the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the 2000 election activated in Rankine a sense that she needed to create a project that would be an act of attention to the events that were occurring and that would occur throughout President Bush’s first term in office. Even the book’s typography—a version of a familiar type used by major newspapers—was employed as a means of indicating that the form was to evoke a sense that what she was writing was “news.” Don’t Let Me Be Lonely isn’t an act of witnessing  (which sounds somehow outside of events or at least reporting to those not present) but of articulating the experience of the times themselves.

 The challenge that Rankine wrestled most keenly with was the issue of how to write a text that seems to be happening as it goes, yet still is a vehicle for deeper structures of thought, reference, and meaning. Finding a form that straddles poetry and prose maintains that sense of unfolding, of the text finding its terms as it goes.  Rankine found that by paring back the language as much as possible facilitated an ease of movement.  Moreover, Rankine was distressed by the rhetorical machinations of the Bush administration and so wanted to use a language that was spare, but precise, while still charged with meaning.  For her, the Bush administration’s rhetoric disrupted language in a way that fostered a sense of displacement.  Don’t Let Me be Lonely then arises out of this displacement.  Rather than resolving that displacement, Rankine sought to create a textual space that extends that feeling of estrangement (and a derangement of the senses).  Rankine noted that distress  is a very real response and can be a barometer of necessary change.  Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is not, then, a political poem.  Rather, the lyric allows for a form of meditation and that the poem is not a political tool but creates a space for consciousness.  In the case of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, it allows a consciousness of disruption. 

 Rankine was quick to point out that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is not autobiographical and that the “I” is a construct built out of various people’s experiences.  The lyric, she insists, is a space of intangibility that can lead to an awareness of a sublingual connection among people. Again, she wanted that disruption and anxiety that was so endemic in the zeitgeist to manifest itself in the work. The juxtaposition of the images and the text occurring throughout the book, for instance, created a need for the reader to negotiate to the two (finding and losing connection, prioritizing, etc) and thereby creating a kind of anxiety at the formal level, an anxiety also registering in the ways that the book flows between and among generic modes. The lyric itself stands outside of the linearity of time and is thus dependent on rupture of continuousness that is otherwise situated in time and narrative sequencing. Even the notes at the end dispute or controvert some of the claims made in the main body of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, thereby further destabilizing our reliance on familiar structures. These moments of disruption, anxiety, and destabilization create a space where readers can re-cognize (that is, “think again”) the political disruptions occurring.  For Rankine, there is no separation of politics and the personal (“Polis is this,” Charles Olson would have added). Thus, will all forms of order disrupted, readers are allowed to enter the space of the text and then move in their own directions. The shared sense of ungroundedness internalizes the external and readers share in a common experience as an experience rather than just things happening to them. In this way, readers accumulate experiences the way that the body of poem’s speaker does—and yet they become aware of (and not just subject to) the accruing of these experiences.  And in that way, loneliness is acknowledged and shared rather than denied or allowed to remain unconscious.

 As is evident, this was an extremely provocative, ambitious, thoughtful discussion about poetics, politics, and the dream of a common language of experience and awareness.  It was a thrilling discussion and we all join together in thanking Claudia for her deeply human responses and contributions.

 

And that seems like a place to break momentarily for Thanksgiving.

 All best to everyone!

 Richard Deming, Co-coordinator
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