[Wgcp-whc] Rankine Books now available (& more)

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,


I am writing to say that the copies of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely are now available in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center (not in the office). This will be at the center of our next session, which will be on Friday the 21st (a week from tomorrow).  These copies are free to any members, we just ask that you only take a copy of you believe you can make at least one of the two sessions devoted to Rankine's work.  I will also direct people to Rankine's website as there you wil find some videos that are part of her current project that crosses film and poetry.  Go here http://claudiarankine.com/
and click on "situations."

Here is her official bio:

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University.
 
Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. Noting that “hers is an art neither of epiphany nor story,” critic Calvin Bedient observed that “Rankine’s style is the sanity, but just barely, of the insanity, the grace, but just barely, of the grotesqueness.” Discussing the borrowed and fragmentary sources for her work in an interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine stated, “I don't feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth.” 
 
With Juliana Spahr, Rankine co-edited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) and, with Lisa Sewell, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater.
 
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She has taught at the University of Houston, Barnard College, and Pomona College. 


A terrific interview with Rankine is available here:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.php

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Also, I wanted to send word about some projects by a current member and two of our international correspondent.  Lucas Klein writes from Hong Kong  about a blog he has created in connection to his forthcoming translation of work by Xi Chuan, who visited our group a few years ago (as well as being a general blog dealing with Chinese translations).  The blog is here: http://xichuanpoetry.com/

And a chapbbook of Xi Chuan's work can be found here: http://tinfishpress.com/chuan.html


Bert Hirschhorn, our London correspondent, has posted a very thoughtful review of recent work by a past visitor, Charles Bernstein.  The post can be read here: http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-review-hirschhorn-on-bernstein.html


And from our current affairs desk, Josh Stanley has a written about Occupy Wall Street and a recent poetry reading held amidst those happenings.  I post that below.


In the meantime, we will meet a week from tomorrow from 3-5 PM in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.


Thus,

Richard Deming, Minister of Information


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Dear All,
Last night, I went down to NYC to check out Occupy Wall Street and attend a poetry reading being held there. I arrived at Liberty Plaza at 7:45 and the poetry reading was at 9. At 8:30, after having walked around the occupation, Edgar and I went for a drink and wrote poems to read. We stayed at the reading until 10:30.
The reading took place at the northwest corner of Liberty Plaza, close to Occupy Wall Street’s library boxes (plastic tubs filled with books). No microphone no megaphone and a loud organizational meeting about twenty yards away (and music twenty yards south of that). So a human megaphone was utilized: the speaker said a phrase, line or sentence and everyone close to the speaker chanted it back so those at a greater distance could hear. This was how the organizational meeting behind us was being conducted too. Most of what I have to say about the reading is determined by this fact. People read for 3-5 minutes, but everything took a while because of the crowd repeating back the phrases, lines or sentences. First names and some second names were written on pieces of paper, which were then collected in a cardboard box. The organizers pulled out a name and then you went up onto the steps.
Only two poets whom I saw read chose to go without this chanting (and neither actually *read*; they recited from memory). The first of these was a guy who read a poem about Neda Agha-Soltan called, I think, “What can be said”; the second was a woman who performed a poem about hooker school, dressed only in lingerie. Both were interesting performances, the second less inclined to bombastic language, but turned from satirically performed spoken language (conversations with cops and GRD instructors) to a somewhat earnestly delivered refrain of “your pussy is a sword, even if you don’t know it”, a phrase which seems to me to be making a few distinct arguments at the same time and invoking an archaic supposed poetic habitus of swords and sorcery, and my not buying all this makes me feel uncomfortable. But neither of these are what I want to talk about.
What I learnt at this event I am not sure I want to develop into any type of principal, but it does produce a truth I need to know. When you say a phrase and hear it said back, what falls away is the internal logic or complexity of the poem. One version of the poem only could be locked in, and this was very clear and conscious for me. To refuse the human megaphone, as I almost did, meant to invest the power of language to express suffering and argument only in the windpipe and bones of a single speaker, and not in the shared momentary voice of a crowd of people collected in Liberty Plaza, New York, on the 7th October to peacefully protest against the current conditions of capitalism (I put this as vaguely as I can because I do not think even the vagueness of calling the occupation *anticapitalist* is vague enough). The logic of the poem belonged to the crowd. Every phrase was chanted back. Critical judgment was for me a secondary faculty. Primarily, I wanted to involve myself with how every phrase was an attempt to give voice to suffering, a condition of truth which could not be avoided for the reason that I simply was there, in attendance, and listening in the act of chanting. The unity of a poem was secondary to the unity of the line first read and the line chanted back; that a poem was a whole unit was knowable because the person standing on the steps a few yards away from you was the same person. This is to say, the reading became a joint project. The passion of an individual was unsustainable because the lines could not be held together, and no prosodic or tonal intensity could be worked up into music because the chants were near-monotone, the prosody necessarily slow and simple. The passion of the collective of reader-chanters-auditors was predicated on a (vague) political commitment. I don’t think it was a poet’s job, here, to provide passion in language to a political organization, with an individual’s language chanted out as emblematic of the spirit of an occasion. Instead, the reading became implicitly a religious-service-esque expression of conviction with respect to two things. First, that a repeated phrase belonged to the whole group (or language community) and must be known, without hesitation, as a voice for suffering. Second, that this language community was in fact speaking and thinking in a very precise language, so that words and phrases from various poems were immediately processed from English into smaller signifiers, with reference only to the geographical and historical context (even the Arab Spring was being reprocessed in my brain).
                  A man called Joseph went up second and read Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius”, the last poem of The White Stones. The first sentence of this poem reads:
                  
                  Leave it with the slender distraction, again this
                  is the city shaken down to its weakness.
 
Potentially, these are two parallel statements either side of a comma and consciously either side of the verse turn, with the second line conditioned as a reiteration of the first: say “this”, what has just been said, “again”. At OWS, though, this sentence progressed logically. You leave the city into the minute exile of the occupation, away from the slender distraction which I heard as dollar bills, and the result is the city being shaken down to its weakness. The mutilation of life which distraction is suggested to be meets its counter force in the occupation, which shakes down the city, replacing the con-artist with the activist collective, bringing power down to its knees. Untrue. But longed for. The corrupt version of an ideal city does not imply backwards a moral imperative to “Leave”; the city is an actual city, New York, which has been left behind in the act of resisting business as usual. Contemporary praxis is no problem, but is instead a solution to real humans owning all the money. That is to say, no city nostalgia was even thinkable for me when these phrases were being chanted. The later lines “O how farre | art thou gone from thy Country, not being | driven away, but wandering of thine owne accord” (see Reitha Pattison’s commentary on this poem in Glossator on this quotation from Boethius’ Consolation) were interpreted (by me) in the context of the nationalism of the occupation (with people shouting things like “This country was built on liberty! Where’s the liberty? You’ve replaced it with slavery!” – when this great country was of course built on slavery). You (our political society and especially you, the bankers) have strayed far from the ideals of the grand USA, not because you have been forced to, but because proper regulations were never put in place. The city of New York becomes in transfigured in turn into an exile from the America of yore. I heard the lines as moving, delicate stuff, but the consciousness with which I received them wasn’t mine. The poem was a fracture of its form on the page. But the reading, for all its poverty, denounced the abyss, at the entrance to which is an instruction to words to abandon all feeling and experience of physical sounds. The liquid matter discovered is being worked into pebbles, not the hard rock of meanings which would compel us to make capitalism yield. If that should ever come, when that comes, it will be a very different event from OWS, but the discovery of these fractured rocks within the array of available political responses (Banks are bad! Stop the bailouts! Money shouldn’t rule, so just separate money from the state! The banks are the new John Bull!) is a prologue toward possibilities.
                  I feel compelled to stand with the badness of the poetry as much as I feel I ought to be disgusted by the bad interpretations of poems forced on me by the context. Attending to the feeling and sound of every utterance was the virtue of the occasion. The wrong way I heard poems, in the fragmented whole of the evening, is something that perhaps may be correctable by a poetry that learns from this. If the poetry readings continue and continue to be amplified by chanting, this may happen; if so, the interpretive consciousness produced in that corner of Liberty Plaza may do some good for the whole occupation. As it is, I think the fragmented-feel-good thinking of OWS at the moment constitutes how poetry exists there too. This is not to say I do not admire what is being done.


Josh Stanley





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