[Wgcp-whc] Geoffrey G O'Brien on Friday

[Richard Deming]

Dear All,

As promised I am sending the questions that I have culled and interpolated from the various emails, phone calls, and hallway discussions I have had with people about People on Sunday and our visit from Geoffrey G O'Brien, the author of that collection, on this Friday (9/20) at the Whitney Humanities Center from 3PM- 5 PM.  These questions will be just a set of prompts for opening the discussion, but as is our way, the conversation will develop organically.  

By the way, for anyone interested, the entire film of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) from 1930, is available here on youtube.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhY-YjjQhK0  
It's relatively short: 73 minutes.

Here's a description: People on Sunday (German: Menschen am Sonntag) is a 1930 German silent drama film directed by Curt and Robert Siodmak from a screenplay by Billy Wilder. The film follows the lives of a group of residents of Berlin on a summer's day during the interwar period. Hailed as a work of genius, it is a pivotal film not only in the development of German cinema but also of Hollywood. In addition to the Siodmak brothers and Wilder, the film features the talents of Edgar G. Ulmer (producer), Fred Zinnemann (cinematography) and Eugen Schüfftan, who had developed the Schüfftan process for Metropolis three years earlier.


Anon,
Richard Deming, Group Coordinator

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Questions: Yale Poetics Seminar 9/20/2013 from 3 PM-5PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center

 

 

--There is a long-standing argument about the divisions intrinsic to political poetry.  That is, does intent and message overwhelm the aesthetic dimension of the text? Do you think of your work, specifically, the recent book as “political poetry”? What do you see as the tensions between politics and poetry?

 

--It’s a broad and grand concern to ask about, but given the political dimensions of your work, what do you see the cultural and social role of poetry to be?  How has your sense of that evolved? And what do you make of figures such as Stevens and Stein (both name checked in the new book)?  Where do they sit in your sense of what poetry and literature does/can do/should do?

 

--Perhaps arising in connection to your interests, could you give a sense of how you conceive of a tradition to which you might belong?  Who are figures that give the necessary models (or even a sense of permissions) to cross the various lines that you do.  Or even in aesthetic terms give you your sense of measure, image, line and even rhetorical positions.

 

--Could you discuss your interest in the film People on Sunday? Why is it that you settled on that particular film?  And why did you choose that as your title poem?  Also, does that poem serve as a kind of poetics for you? How are the particular issues of ekphrasis connected to your collection and what it focuses on?

 

-- What role or function does aesthetic response play in your sense of contemporary (and especially what has come to be called post-avant-garde) poetry?
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