[Wgcp-whc] minutes from Delville visit 9/14 and 2 readings of interest this Tuesday

[Richard Deming]

Dear Poeticians,

 

I am writing to give word about our first session of the semester, which took place on Friday September 14th from 3-5. I will also add at the end some information about two readings that are happening next week that are relevant to this group.  Sadly, they happen at roughly nearly overlapping moments.

 

We met on 9/14 to discuss the work of the scholar and poet Michel Delville.  Delville is one of the foremost authorities on the prose poem, and this was our focus for most of the afternoon.  Delville began by indicating that he has had occasion to revisit his earlier thinking on the prose poem because of a new book project that will  include a chapter on this same subject.  He indicated that some of his thinking has changed since he began thinking about looping as a trope that is helpful in describing some of Gertrude Stein’s strategies, particularly in Tender Buttons.  Delville is himself a working musician, specifically a guitarist, and looping as regards to an effect that is the repetition of segments of sound or music that are incorporated into a larger context of music.  These repetitions end up having to be seen not merely as neutral but as being part of a developing of structure.  While these loops initially sound the same, as the context changes, their effect changes as well.

 

This trope was something that Delville hears in Stein’s work as well, which means that each repetition keeps foregrounding the question of context and structure within a text. This for him changes his sense of Stein’s work, which he had initially read as drawing on a cubist method in which her prose poems, with their departure from the strictures of prose (in terms of argument on one hand and narrative on the other), were able to represent through the collage like effect of fragments, phrases, and repetitions an experience of simultaneity in viewing an object.  In thinking of looping, the fragments don’t suggest a kind of fractured cohesion, but a return that continually redetermines context.

 

The implications of this are that Delville has begun folding into his thinking the way that prose deals with the possibilities of abstraction.  Furthermore, he sees the prose poem as uniquely situated at the site where conventions of both (or either) prose and poetry can be troubled. The prose poem is not lineated (obviously) and it has no history of a regular meter.  As prose, it need not adhere to familiar rhetorical patterns nor present a story that does not push against the features of narrative that create a sense of wholeness or completion.

 

When pressed whether he could come up with a positive definition of the prose poem, Delville said that as he sees it the prose poem can only be classified in terms of what it is not. Length, for instance, was one such element that one cannot determine as being a “prose poem” length. In that way, it remains a subversive form because it cannot be classified under clear criteria that aren’t compared or contrasted with poetry or prose.

 

In many ways, the most compelling question was whether or not the prose poem is a form or a mode or a genre. Delville himself posited this question, saying it is the one that he most wrestles with.  Because the criteria of a prose poem is not standardized nor settled, its conventions cannot be repeated again and again and so genre seems inexact. There are no ur-examples of prose poems that are the defining models against which all other prose poems are judged, so it seems unlikely to be a form per se.  Indeed, each time, a text that is a prose poem begins the argument about whether or not it is a prose poem or whether it is some form of errant prose. The fact that this question is activated each time leads Delville to believe it is a mode.  This raises the productive question of what constitutes a mode—how is a mode distinct from a form? In classical terms, the mode distinguishes a manner of writing, and this fluidity does seem characteristic of the prose poem. It then seems clear why Stein is a recurring interest motivating Delville’s sense of the trajectory of the prose poem as a mode that is always exploring the possibilities of its overturning of conventions and expectations.

 

As is clear, this was an intense and provocative discussion that raised question not only about the prose poem and how one might chart its historical conytext, but how contemporary poetics still engages the ongoing parameters of the conversations it has with its various  branches.  We thank Professor Delville for his comprehensive and engaged discussion of his work and we will contnue to think about its implications.

 

Our next session isn’t until October 12.  We will be reading a selection of poems by Jan Wagner, one of the most important poets of his generation in Germany.  Within the week, I will circulate these poems (in translation) by email.  Wagner will joining us then on October 26th to discuss his work.  And it may be that his main translator will be able to come that day as well.

 

Here is Wagner’s official bio:

 

Jan Wagner was born in 1971 in Hamburg, Germany, and has been living in Berlin since 1995. He is a poet, a translator of English poetry (Charles Simic, James Tate, Matthew Sweeney, Simon Armitage, Robin Robertson), a literary critic, and was, until 2003, a co-editor of the international literature box, Die Aussenseite des Elementes. He published the poetry collections Probebohrung im Himmel (“A Trial Drill in the Sky“; Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2001), Guerickes Sperling (“Guericke’s Sparrow“, 2004), Achtzehn Pasteten (“Eighteen Pies”, 2007) and Australien (2010) and co-edited the comprehensive anthologies of young German language poetry, Lyrik von Jetzt. 74 Stimmen (“Poetry of Now. 74 voices“, 2003) and Lyrik von Jetzt zwei. 50 Stimmen (Berlin Verlag 2008). A selection of his essays, Die Sandale des Propheten. Beiläufige Prosa (“The Prophet’s Sandal. Incidental Prose”), was published in 2011. For his poetry, which has been translated into thirty languages, he received various scholarships and literary awards, among them the Anna-Seghers-Award (2004), the Ernst-Meister-Award for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm-Lehmann-Award (2009), the Villa Massimo residency of the German Academy in Rome (2011), the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis of the city of Tübingen (2011) and the Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis (2011).

 

 

And this Tuesday at 6 PM the writer and critic Lynne Tillman will be giving a reading by a sister group, the Working Group in Contemporary Culture.  The reading will be held in Linsley Chittenden 102.

 

Then at 7:00 Eileen Myles, Matvei Yankelevich, Darcie Dennigan, and DJ Shaki will be reading at the Yale Marsh Botanical Gardens 227 Mansfield St, New Haven at an event hosted by our very own Jason Labbe.

 

 

Until next time,

Richard Deming, Group Coordinator 
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