[Wgcp-whc] report on Wagner/Koethe books available/ reading tomorrow night

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed Oct 31 11:44:43 EDT 2012


Dear Friends,

 

Before a give an account of our last session of the WGCP, I wanted to say that copies of the latest poetry collection by our next visitor, John Koethe, are now available at the Whitney Humanities Center.  The book is ROTC Kills and can be found on the bookshelves opposite the door.  His book of essays on poetics should arrive any day—though obviously delayed now by the recent storm.  Get your copy—free for any member of the WGCP—soon, as they tend to disappear quickly. We will next meet on Nov. 9th at 3-5 PM in our new room—B04—in the basement of the Whitney Humanities Center.

 

Here is Koethe’s official bio: John Koethe was born in San Diego on December 25, 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton in 1967 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1973. Since then, he has taught in the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which he will retire as Distinguished Professor in January 2010. 

His writings include eight books of poetry: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, Falling Water, The Constructor, North Point North: New and Selected Poems, Sally's Hair, and Ninety-fifth Street; two books on philosophy: The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought and Scepticism, Knowledge and Forms of Reasoning; and a book of literary essays: Poetry at One Remove. 

Koethe has received the Frank O'Hara Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and the national Endowment for the Arts, and was the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. He was the 2008 Elliston Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati and will be the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton in the spring semester of 2010.

 

Here is an interview with Koethe:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21926

 

And here is a filmic version of his poem “Chester.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qld5fAtcmQ



  

+++

 

We met last Friday, October 26th, to discuss the work of the highly lauded German poet Jan Wagner.  The poet joined us for this conversation.  We began by discussing his influences.  Early on, he seemed to be working with a German as well as a British tradition.  The latter came in large part from a high school teacher who was particularly passionate about Shakespeare. His German influences were Georg Heym (especially his Ophelia poems http://hor.de/gedichte/georg_heym/ophelia.htm), Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Huchel (editor of the important journal Sinn und Form) with German expressionism being a particularly strong force shaping his poetics. He also mentioned what he feels is an underappreciated poem, “Weltende” by Joakob von Hoddis (and this can be read here http://german.berkeley.edu/news-events/german-after-class/poetry-corner/jakob-von-hoddis-weltende/)

 

Amongst the Anglo-American poets that he was being exposed to, Wagner found himself drawn to Dylan Thomas, and then Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Ted Hughes. Later Charles Simic and James Tate would become important as well.

 

Interestingly, Wagner seemed to indicate that his influences maintain a hold on him.  He had no indication that early influences were burned away as he got older, but folded into an increasing set of forces that could come from any direction—the past, his contemporaries, conversations, and so forth.  He indicated that he felt no anxiety when it came to influences, but that these were elements that all interacted in his work, sometimes more evidently than others. This was reflected in his sense of the situation of contemporary poetry and poetics in Berlin.  He indicated that the community there has trebled in size and scope over the last 10-15 years and that will it is very heterogeneous in its make-up, there doesn’t exist a strong sense of competition of antipathies among schools or camps, since there isn’t the same nodes of activity defined by ideology or aesthetics. The various poets in Berlin draw from a wide range of sources and traditions, but these all exist sympathetically in that city. He acknowledged that there are been a time where there had a been not exactly a void of poetry in German, but that there had been a period in the 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s, when poetry in that country was finding its new possibilities and so was diffuse and underdetermined.  Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein appeared in the 1990s and raised the profile of German poetry at home and abroad.  These two (along with a few others, of course) helped create new energy for the art, which resulted in a new generation of poets realizing that there were models at hand to draw from and other poets around them to whom they could turn for conversation.

 

Wagner said that from the Anglo-American strain of influence, he was able to find a focus on the everyday and the at-hand that was important to him.  The scale was more specific and in that way was a useful alternative to the weight of the German expressionists. There sense of traditional forms was also useful to him.  Wagner suggested that while some of his peers feel that traditional forms prevent freedom, he feels that the conscious avoidance of forms would be a far worse loss of freedom.  He discussed the fact that he doesn’t set out to write in a traditional form, but that during the process of drafting that form starts to insert itself as a way of framing the poem.  The fact that he begins to draw on such conventions after he begins illustrates why for him to be able to use any form—whether open or traditional—is a measure of freedom he wants available at all times. He also discussed the fact that for him the image and scenic particulars in a poem are his first priorities and that the music coalesces around that.  The music becomes the way that he can undergird the images in order to emphasize given aspects and elements. This was surprising given the intense lyric elements of his poems—one might think that he composed primarily by ear.

 

We discussed the reasons why he eschews capital letters.  As most people know, in German the nouns are capitalized, but Wagner never employs them.  He explains that while this might be a nod to some older forms of experimental writing, that practice also allows him to avoid giving any single word emphasis in a way that comes from a grammatical form imposed beyond or outside the form he himself is composing in a given poem. It also allows him the doubling of meanings that can be activated because of the momentary slippage in wondering if a word is being used as a noun or a verb. Again, his hope is for an openness that allows for various possibilities.

 

Again and again, it seemed that Wagner was interested in maintaining an openness to forms, influences, topics, and ideas and that poetry becomes a means for maintaining this receptivity to a wealth of possibilities. It was a fascinating discussion about his work as well as his sense of what it means to be a poet writing in present-day Berlin.  It was a terrific, open and opening conversation, and we all join in thanking Jan Wagner for meeting with us to engage his work.

 

I will write again next week to give a fuller sense of our next visitor and to let you know when his book of essays arrives.  In the meantime I will paste below word of a reading that is occurring tomorrow night.

 

Onward,

Richard Deming, Group Coordinator

 

 

+++++++++++++++++

 

Poetry Reading with Anthony Madrid

 

Thursday, November 1st at 7:00 pm in Linsly-Chittenden 317 (63 High St)

 

The next reading in the Grad Poets Reading Series will feature poet Anthony Madrid, author of the chapbook The 580 Strophes (2009) and the full-length collection I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (2012). He has written in forms such as the ghazal and rhyming quatrain, bringing a contemporary, associative, and surreal sensibility to received forms. A PhD student in the University of Chicago graduate program in English language and literature, Madrid’s study of poetics and American poetry resulted in his dissertation “The Warrant for Rhyme.”

 

Books will be available for purchase ($15 cash/check only). More information: http://www.facebook.com/events/496334843719439/ or email Justin Sider (justin.sider at yale.edu).
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