[Wgcp-whc] next session, 10/26--visit by Jan Wagner

[Richard Deming]

Friends,


last Friday, we met for our first of two sessions devoted to the work of Jan Wagner. The conversation was wide ranging and touched on issues of translation, tradition, German history, and the strategic use of naivete as an ironic device.  Below I will paste a serious questions posed or extrapolated from that discussion.  These are being sent to Wagner, who will join us in person next Friday, October 26th from 3PM to 4.45 (we will end a bit early so as to make it possible for members to also make the talk by Joan Retallack about Gertrude Stein that will occur at 5 that same day. 

These questions are just prompts that will help provide an opening structure to our conversation with one of contemporary German poetry's foremost figures.

Before I give you those questions, I want to draw your attention to two events that are occurring this week that might be of interest.
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Dear All,

please join us for the next meeting of Yale's Working Group on Arabic Philosophy on Friday 19 October 2012 @ 2:00pm in Room B04 of the
Whiney Humanities Center(53 Wall Street).

Abdelkader Al Ghouz (Bonn International Graduate School, Oriental and Asian Studies) will present: "Reason in Contemporary Arabic Philosophy. Al-Jabiri's Epistemological Approach to Tradition".

For more information see the attached flyer or write to
matteo.digiovanni at yale.edu.

Best wishes,
Matteo Di Giovanni 

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Please join us at the Beinecke Library for a poetry reading by C. S. Giscombe, on Thursday, October 18th, 4:00pm.

C.S. Giscombe is the author of books including Prairie Style, Two Sections from Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large, Postcards, and Into and Out of Dislocation.Prairie Style was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation; Giscome Road won the Carl Sandburg Prize, given by the Chicago Public Library. In 2010, Giscombe received the Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry from the African American Literature and Culture Society; he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. He is a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

C. S. Giscombe, Poetry Reading
Thursday, October 18th, 4:00pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl at yale.edu




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And finally, it is with deep, deep sadness that we note the recent passing of Maria Rosa Menocal.  Maria was a longtime director of the Whitney Humanities Center and she was a tremendous, sustaining supporter of the WGCP.  She was a powerful force for the humanities in general and a bright light of the intellectual community at Yale and beyond its walls. This is a true loss and she will be profoundly missed.


Sincerely,
Richard Deming, Group Coordinator


Questions for Jan Wagner (Note: the "you" is , of course, directed to Wagner)

Who are the influences that you are drawing from and how do you imagine/conceive of your relationship to tradition?  What, for you, does tradition entail and what is the contemporary poet’s (or at least your) debt or resistance to it?

 

What does it mean to a contemporary German poet? What issues of history, contemporaneity, what notions of form and community does a contemporary German poet negotiate?

 

You have been translated many times and you yourself have translated.  Moreover, you work closely with at least one of your translators.  What do you see as your relationship to your poems once they have been translated? And what are you translating when you translate—form? Some “essence” of the work?

 

You have a deep affinity for British and American poetry?  Why is that?  What do you gain from this?  What perspectives do these offer you and how do you work them into your poems? How does that locate in terms of your contemporaries?

 

Who do you see as your most influential contemporaries? This can offer a shape of your understanding of contemporary German poetry as well as the idea of community and one’s present moment.

 

What is your sense of “voice” and/or perspective (and we might say a “fictive” point of view) within a poem?

 

What do you find you yourself cannot address in poetry?  This need not be more any “moral” reasons, but elements that you might find historically overdetermined—or even underdetermined.  For instance, your work seems generally apolitical.  Is there a reason for this?

 

To ask a very specific question (and this is tied perhaps to the previous), you refer to the Tyrant’s dream (or a tyrannical dream--tyrannentraum).  What are we to make of some of the implications that might have to classical Greek drama or German history?  And so is that poem, “Giersch” (“Spurge”) a covertly political poem?

 

Can you say more about your defense of “like”?  Just how is it you feel that it invites the reader’s participation? How do other tropes facilitate the reader’s participation or resist it? And could you say more about your decision not to capitalize? In what ways do the lexical marks on a page create hierarchies?  Do these power structures reveal themselves in other grammatical and syntactical conventions? 
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