[Wgcp-whc] next session with Alice Notley April 19th at 3 PM

[Richard Deming]

On Friday April 5, the WGCP met to discuss the work of Alice Notley, specifically one of her latest collections, Culture of One.  We will meet again next Friday, April 19th to continue our discussion.  At that session Notley will join us herself.  That will be at our regular time and location: 3 PM-5PM in room B04 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  Notley will be giving a reading at the Beinecke the day before, Thursday the 18th at 4 PM.

 Below I will paste a series of questions that are drawn from our recent conversation about Culture of One. These questions will be sent to the poet herself and thus will serve as a kind of framework for our next session.  They will also serve to give people a general sense of the discussion. I will attach to this email an essay entitled “The Feminine Epic,” which is taken from Notley’s book of essays Coming After. I will also attach an essay that was referred to in our last session, “The Poet as Fool and Priest” by Sigurd Burckhardt.  Our thanks to Sharif Elmusa for bringing this to our attention.

 

 And I want to let people know that one of New York correspondents, the gifted poet Meena Alexander will be on campus on April 23 to give a talk at 7.30. Here is the info:

 “Resolved: That Poets Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World” with Meena Alexander, writer and professor of English.

 

Professor Alexander is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York. She has written award-winning poetry, essays, and novels, including The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, Illiterate Heart, and her autobiography Fault Lines. Previously, she has been Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne, Frances Wayland Collegium Lecturer at Brown University, Writer in Residence at the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University, and Writer in Residence at the National University of Singapore. In 2009, she received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature from the South Asian Literary Association.

 

 And lastly, I just want to let people know that Susan Howe will be giving an informal talk *roughly 15-20 minutes long) this Monday 4 PM in the lobby of the Beinecke.  Here is the info:

 Join the Beinecke for a gallery talk and tea with poet Susan Howe on Monday, April 15 at 4pm. Howe will speak briefly about the fragment of Sarah Pierpont Edwards’ wedding dress
 in the Jonathan Edwards Papers and about the role it played in the development of her awarding winning book That This; Howe's notebooks are also on display in the current exhibition, By Hand.

 

All best to all,

Richard Deming, Group Coordinator


___
 

Questions for Alice Notley from Yale Poetics Seminar to be held Friday April 19, from 3 PM-5PM

 

1).  In looking through Culture of One, a reader can trace a number of threads pulled from various cultures and belief systems.  For instance, not only are there allusions and gestures drawn from the Western Canon and Judeo-Christian beliefs, but also references to Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism.  Could you say something about your relationship to these Eastern belief systems?  What role do they play in your thinking about Culture of One?

 

2) Given that there is a sort of loose conception of narrative (one continually reshaped by an investment in lyric and song, would you say something about the compositional process of writing Culture of One.  For example, was there a structure in place before you began?  Were you continually ordering and reordering poems? Were the opening poems (before Marie actually appears) written first? Last?

 

3) How do you see your thoughts about epic—and specifically a feminine epic—having evolved over the years?  Is Culture of One a collection that addresses that mode? Is Culture of One consciously a response to Eliot’s “The Wasteland”? What wre other models you borrowed from?

 4) Do you have a sense of audience in mind when you write?  Given the depth of some of the allusions, do you imagine and audience that will get all these?  What is your thinking about a reader’s responsibility to a text?

 5) What do you see as the cultural role of poetry and the poet, specifically in our contemporary moment?

 6) What do you see as the tone of the collection?  How were you trying to establish this? Particularly there was discussion about the final poem and whether you yourself see this as a kind hopeful and redemptive moment, or whether it suggests that Marie is exiled to herself (rather than liberated).  This isn’t a question intending for to elicit and explanation.  Instead, it is directed towards your sense of what constitutes a culture of one and if you wanted to write towards that or bring its possibilities into question.
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