[Wgcp-whc] Report on Geoffrey G O'Brien visit--also next meeting 10/11

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

 

On Friday, September 20th, the WGCP met to discuss the work of the poet Geoffrey G O’Brien—specifically his newest book, People on Sunday. The poet himself joined us for this discussion, and provided valuable insight into his process and his poetics. 

 

Given the references to the Occupy movement and certain contemporary and economic and political realities that are woven throughout the book, a recurring focus of the discussion was the interface of politics and poetry and the attempt to balance the two modes of discourse.  O’Brien mentioned that two powerful early influences on his work were John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens.  For him, Stevens’s poems described a kind of private and consistent language in which private and personal reality and circumstances were only touched upon in very sidelong or hidden ways, although there was a kind of peerless intellectual reach of the poems.  In his earlier apprenticeship years, O’Brien then moved to Ashbery, whose work allowed room for concrete, specific objects and even specific references to a personal world.

 

O’Brien described the tension between “aesthetic poems” and “the political” as being tied to the sense that poems which concentrate on form and aesthetic experience are perceived as lacking the possibility of urgency so necessary to political engagement.  Attention to complex form can be seen as creating a tie between “mastery” and form, thereby suggesting a kind of solipsism that offers no room for response to the daily lives of political subjects. In addition, O’Brien wanted to find a way to write a “city poems” that allowed for the disarticulation of subjectivity within the economic, technological, and institutional structures of the City.

 

People on Sunday became a useful reference (both as an ekphrastic poem within the collection and then as a title for the collection as a whole) in that this silent film from Germany in 1930 depicts a Sunday afternoon picnic occurring on the outskirts of Berlin. O’Brien noted a fraught distance that rises between the film and how we might look back upon that moment decades later. The ease and idyllic sentiment of the film depicting a group of young people enjoying a respite from the demands of the workweek is contrasted with our knowledge of just how the political realities of Germany were just then changing in devastating ways. O’Brien felt that attention to that historical, dramatic irony was able to put into perspective any sentimental idealism that might arise up around considering the Occupy movement a truly important moment in American history. O’Brien wanted to find a mode of acknowledging the anger at social injustice that motivated the movement, while not settling for an easy consolation regarding its actual efficacy. 

 

In terms of his poems, O’Brien wants to find a form that is receptive to the anger in the face of social realities, while being able to channel it by way of a complexity of form that requires participatory readings in order to determine meaning.   The lines of People on Sunday accrue context, revising it as the poem unfolds.  O’Brien strives to offer an openness of syntax so that each line as it appears in the page recontextualizes what came before it.  Thus, the line has its own integrity and yet also bears a place within the poem’s larger economy.  The lines have multiple identities, in a sense, and of course also allow for an openness to interpretation that allows that multiplicity to flow out into readers and back into the poem by way of readers’ varied and varying interpretations. If there is a resolution, then, it also a contingent reading and so cannot banish the problems of syntactical richness. The tension between a fullness of meaning and a doubt in the face of any perceived d answer to problems of address, meaning, and value allows for conversation to continue.

 

As one can tell, the conversation that day was rich, open, and with a clear sense of stakes regarding how poetry does have room with considerations of politics through the way it poses questions, rather than how it makes claims and provides answers. We all gratefully acknowledge Geoffrey G O’Brien’s thoughtful and generative answers to our questions that afternoon.  And a special thanks to our own David Gorin for helping bring him to campus once again.

 

Our next meeting is slated for Friday October 11th from 3PM-5PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  That day we will begin our first of two discussions focused on C. K. Williams and his latest collection of poems, Writers Writing Dying. The poet will join us on October 25th for our second discussion of that book.

 

Here is the official bio of our next guest, one of America’s most lauded poets:

C. K. Williams is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012); Wait (2010); and Collected Poems (FSG, 2007), which shows the long arc of Williams' career, from the morbid sanguinities of his apprentice work to the careful, moving, stanzaic focus evident in twenty one new poems. The Singing won the National Book Award in 2003; and his previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His collection Flesh and Blood received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams has also published a memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, in 2000, and has published translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. A prose book entitled Williams, On Whitman, was released in 2010 from Princeton University Press. He is also the author of two books of essays: Poetry and Consciousness (1998) and In Time (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

 

Here is a review from NPR: http://www.npr.org/2012/11/15/165233725/book-review-writers-writing-dying

 

And here’s a review from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/books/poems-on-mortality-by-c-k-williams-and-cynthia-cruz.html?_r=0

 

And here is a brief interview with Williams:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQn2Y1Z9XHA

 

Copies of Writers Writing Dying are forthcoming.  I will send a note when they arrive.

 

By the way, here is a link to an essay about poetry and medicine published in Poetry by our very own Laura Manuelidis. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246082#article

 

 

 

Ever and on,

Richard Deming, Group Coordinator

 
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