[Wgcp-whc] Delville books available; also, schedule for the semester

[Richard Deming]

Comrades,

As  I promised in my recent email, I am sending along the tentative dates for the WGCP sessions of this semester. These sessions are always on a Friday and they run from 3-5 PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  All are welcome to attend.


*9/14--visit from Michel Delville and discussion of prose poetry. 

10/12--Discussion of the work of Jan Wagner 
Jan Wagner was born in 1971 in Hamburg. He is a poet, translator and literary critic. He has published four published poetry collections, including Achtzehn Pasteten (Eighteen Pies, 2007) and Australien (2010), both from Berlin Verlag, and co-edited the comprehensive anthology of young German language poetry, Lyrik von Jetzt (Poetry of Now, 2003). He has also published a selection of essays, Die Sandale des Propheten (The Prophet’s Sandal, 2011). His poetry has been translated into 30 languages and he has received many scholarships, most recently at the German Academy in Rome. His awards include the Anna-Seghers-Award (2004), the Ernst-Meister-Award (2005), the Wilhelm-Lehmann-Award (2009), Tübingen’s Friedrich-Hölderlin-Award (2011) and the Kranichstein Award (2011). He lives in Berlin.

*10/26--visit from Jan Wagner


*11/9--discussion of the work of John Koethe
John Koethe was born in San Diego in 1945. He graduated from Princeton in 1967, received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1973, and then taught in the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, retiring as Distinguished Professor in 2010. He was also the Elliston Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati in 2008 and the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton in 2010.  Koethe's poetry books include Blue Vents (1968), Domes (1973), which received the Frank O’Hara Award, The Late Wisconsin Spring (1984), Falling Water (1997), which received the Kinsgley Tufts Award, The Constructor (1999), which was nominated for The New Yorker Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize; North Point North (2002), which was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sally's Hair (2006), and Ninety-Fifth Street, which received the Lenore Marshall Prize. He also wrote The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (1996), Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (2005), and Poetry at One Remove: Essays (2000). Koethe has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, where he lives, in 2000.

*12/7--Visit from John Koethe


Also, I will mention three events happening on campus related to the WGCP:
Ariana Reines, Poetry Reading
Thursday, September 20, 7:00pm
Room 317, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street
Grad Poets Reading Series
Contacts: justin.sider at yale.edu, sarah.stone at yale.edu

Peter Cole, Poetry Reading: The Poetry of Kabbalah, the Kabbalah of Poetry
Thursday, October 11th, 5:15pm
Marquand Chapel
The Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture in Religion and Literature
Contact: Yale Institute of Sacred Music


Devin Johnston & Anna Moschovakis, Poetry Reading
Monday, November 5, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl at yale.edu



All of these can be seen at our blog: http://wgcp.wordpress.com/

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In my last email, I sent along via attachment the readings that will be a foundation for that first session. In addition, we have purchased copies of Delville's Third Body, a collection of his poems translated by Gian Lombardo.  These copies are free and can be found on a shelf in the bookcase in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. These copies are free and I would strongly recommend people go sooner rather than later to get a copy as they can disappear quickly. We only ask that people take a copy only if they are reasonably share they will make the session with Delville.

Here is the publisher's blurb and an excerpt.

In Third Body, Michel Delville continues in the tradition of Belgian prose poetry exemplified by such prose poets as Henri Michaux, Géo Norge, and Eugene Savitzkaya. These writers honorably and admirably extend the francophone tradition of the prose poem as started in nineteenth century France by Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. Like these forbears and contemporaries, Delville utilizes the prose poem as a way to access profound poetic sentiments and provide trenchant social commentary through prosaic means—“To convert our ideas into material things.” This conversion requires an understanding not simply of the material conditions Delville wishes to elucidate but also the ways in which political shifts play out on an intimate human scale, and vice versa. Throughout Third Body, Delville’s lush, fervent prose poems masterfully articulate his philosophical concerns, while demonstrating a profound pleasure in using this literary form to express them. He is our interpreter, our navigator, our scribe across the terrain he sets out, and we need him here to guide us. We need literature like Delville’s to help us make sense of human events because, on its own, “The eye doesn’t see beyond sky.”


Violence to Meat (from Third Body)

Masked bloodstained withered skin, tongue reddened by an impudent Parisian accent, chomping words and splitting them into even layers between two rows of teeth drunk with the repeated issuance of a promiscuous word, empty and vain, something borrowed from someone else, torso stiffly bent toward the dark ceiling, neck twisted into a rutting swan reeking of its own magnetic emanations, sniffing the bottom of his glass in search of the ultimate hostility, licking fingers, a face with the serenity of a bed of farmed oysters, left hand tracing semi-circles and broken loops in the air, unpreoccupied by the gangly grimaces of an audience already in the throes of whispering cursed tomorrows and then choking them back on their own saliva.



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Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator 

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