Claudia Rankine Visit
Claudia Rankine will visit the WGCP to discuss her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely on Friday, November 11th.
Rankine will be reading in the Graduate Poets’ Reading Series at 7:00pm on Thursday, November 10th,in room 317, Linsley-Chittenden, 63 High Street.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University.
Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. Noting that “hers is an art neither of epiphany nor story,” critic Calvin Bedient observed that “Rankine’s style is the sanity, but just barely, of the insanity, the grace, but just barely, of the grotesqueness.” Discussing the borrowed and fragmentary sources for her work in an interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine stated, “I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth.”
With Juliana Spahr, Rankine co-edited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) and, with Lisa Sewell, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater.
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She has taught at the University of Houston, Barnard College, and Pomona College. For more information: http://claudiarankine.com/
A terrific interview with Rankine is available here: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.php
Susan Stewart Visit 4-29
Poet and critic Susan Stewart will visit the WGCP at WHC from 3-5pm on April 29 to discuss her recent collection Red Rover.
About Susan Stewart: Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator. Her five books of poetry include The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; Columbarium (2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and, most recently Red Rover (2008), soon to be published in Italian translation by Jaca Book in Milan.
Her song cycle, “Songs for Adam,” commissioned by the Chicago Symphony as a collaboration with the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with the baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO in October 2009.
Stewart’s collected essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, were published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Her collaborations with visual artists include most recently work with Ann Hamilton and Sandro Chia.
Her other books of criticism include the forthcoming The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism; Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991); On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), and Nonsense (1979).
Stewart published her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, with Princeton University Press in 2009. She also translated Euripides’ Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Currently she is completing a translation of the selected poems of Milo De Angelis with Patrizio Ceccagnoli and a translation of Laudomia Bonanni’s novel La Rappresaglia with her Princeton colleague Sara Teardo.
A 1997 MacArthur Fellow, Stewart has received fellowships as well from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Pew Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Foundation. In 2010 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Stewart currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Jorie Graham to Visit WGCP
Jorie Graham will join the WGCP to discuss her most recent collection, Sea Change, on February 18 from 3-5 PM in 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: “For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption — intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems.”
Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Recordings of Graham reading form her work can be found online:
“Embodies” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20169
“Just Before” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20164
“Nearing Dawn” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20165
David Shapiro–New and Selected Poems
Copies of David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems are available at the Whitney Humanities Center. Our next session will be Dec 3 and the poet will join us for a discussion of his work on Dec 10.
Shapiro is one of the most prolific and important figures of the second generation of the New York School (having published more than 20 books of poetry and criticism). He was accepted into Columbia at age 16 and worked closely with Kenneth Koch. he published his first book of poems at age 18 and went on to write the first monograph on John Ashbery. He was a finalist for the National Book Award at 24. He is also a talented art writer and an accomplished violinist (an actual child prodigy). He covers the waterfront, as they say. Below, I’ll append two short pieces about Shapiro–one is a blog post from Ron Silliman and the other is a piece by Thomas Fink. And here is a link to an MP3 of Shapiro reading in 2008 http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Shapiro/Shapiro-David_Segue-Series_BPC_3-22-08.mp3
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from Silliman’s blog
Monday, March 19, 2007
Nothing is harder or more tricky than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed the poet’s work centering around the poems that confront language most directly – focusing on Words and Pieces more than on the earlier “popular” For Love – not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that Mauberly represents the pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the Quartets. It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John Ashberys we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some poets, including both Auden & Moore, actively revised their own pasts through cautious, if injudicious, editing.
So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro who emerges from New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) captures what is unique about this most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all New York School poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be to import Zukofsky’s musical notion of the integral & to suggest that for Shapiro, the upper limit is Joe Ceravolo, the lower one Kenneth Koch. That’s a range with a discernible path, but an enormous reach from one to the other: Here is a poem that has elements of both:
A Problem
There are two ways of living on the earth
Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,
Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse
If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.
One arrives in England, and the train station is a dirty toad.
Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.
One calls up America at three-thirty, one’s fiancée is morally alone.
But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.
Thinking of America along psychoanalytic lines, and then
delicately engraving nipples
On each of two round skulls
You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions
And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.
Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.
This represents early love, which is now “total space.”
These are the ways of living on the earth,
Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice.
It took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in good part because, while I “got” Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what I’d read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have found myself loving certain lines & images (“the train station is a dirty toad” and that great final sentence, which has both image & tonal echoes of Grenier’s early work – I’m not sure that Shapiro even knew of Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very early 1970s), wishing they hadn’t been “stuck” in the midst everything else. Now, however, I can see all the ways in which “everything else” really is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision is, like when to use punctuation & when not. There’s a whole narrative here just in how periods are used & where: it’s no accident that they turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase, each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences. Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more profoundly different sense of sensuality – and the second makes the final sentence so much more powerful.
The poem is also both sad & serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the New York School – there are instances of wistful regret in Ashbery perhaps, but that’s about it. As if one of the registers of how difficult it is to live day-to-day in New York City is that, even as a poet, you never can let your guard down. In this way, Shapiro is completely different from Berrigan, O’Hara, Padgett & many later poets, precisely because he lets us see the jagged vulnerability that is such an important part of his psyche:
The snow is alive
But my son cries
The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!
But the snow is alive
And the tree is angry
This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from that first line, a part of the title series from After a Lost Original, written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to Ceravolo’s sense of a magical world, but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find this tone, which is both layered & complicated, with more than a little hurt.
If Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it’s not accidental that he’s also the most political – indeed, one might say he’s almost the only political presence, at least for his generation. Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles & after, this isn’t so rare, but before Shapiro – who was very visibly a presence during the Columbia student strike circa 1968 – it appears not to have been even an imagined possibility. Try to imagine Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery at an anti-war rally a la Ginsberg, Bly, Levertov or Rothenberg. Or Ted Berrigan organizing a rally to support his best friend Anselm Hollo back when the immigration service was trying to deport this partaker of cannabis. Political action is not only a fact of Shapiro’s biography, it’s in the work, in poems as diverse as “House (Blown Apart)” from the 1980s or the very recent “A Burning Interior,” one of whose sections is this “Song for Hannah Arendt”:
Out of being torn apart
comes art.
Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!
Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)
Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.
Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.
Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”
(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)
And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.
The very flatness of these lines almost echoes Levertov’s most political pieces, even if Shapiro’s source undoubtedly is (again) Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined. But it’s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections – and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line: it is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways is heart-breaking.
When Joe Ceravolo’s selected poems, The Green Lake is Awake, appeared, it had a huge impact on people’s sense of the New York School, gen. 3 and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to the people for whom he was really really important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the Collected Books). Shapiro’s selected won’t have the same impact – tho it should – in part because he’s never truly disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now for more than 40 years, doing important work as an art critic, visibly a presence around New York. Yet I’ve never been certain just how many poets actually know David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young – January was not only a book of poems published Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1965, a time when even Frank O’Hara couldn’t find a real publisher among the trades (Grove Press was a bottom feeder there), but was written for the most part by Shapiro when he was still in high school – it would have been easy (but wrong) to impose on him the narrative of the brilliant savant, and not to recognize the decades of discipline he’s subsequently added to what he brought to the blank page in the 1960s. He’s not Frank Stanford goes to New York. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art critic are daunting. And because he’s one of the more anxious souls around the poetry scene, I’m not sure just how many people really know him as the generous, loyal, brilliant friend to so many poets he’s been all these years. The person he reminds me of most in that regard is Bob Creeley.
So this volume is one of the great “must have” books of the year. If you have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems is required reading. It’s also a great, if complicated, joy.
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Thomas Fink
David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry
http://jacketmagazine.com/23/shap-fink.html
| During his nearly forty year poetic career, David Shapiro, born in 1947, has often been linked with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Joe Ceravolo, Frank Lima, and others associated with the New York School, itself a heterogeneous grouping of poets. It is a matter of historical record that ‘senior members’ of the New York School enabled Shapiro to get his early start and that he has, in turn, supported writers of the ‘school’ in his own editing and criticism. However, I believe that it is a disservice to the complexity of his poetry to confine him to this affiliative frame.
Another diverse (and, these days, tremendously influential) ‘school,’ Language Poetry, has absorbed the influence of New York School innovations, along with those of Stein, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, and various others in ways that bear substantial comparison with Shapiro’s exploratory poetry and poetics. Among the Language Poets, perhaps only Michael Palmer has cited Shapiro as a fellow traveler, but in the crucial period of the seventies, it is clear that their cultural spheres were significantly overlapping: members of the Language School and Shapiro were grappling with the ‘defamiliarizing’ poetics of Russian Formalism, the language theory of late Wittgenstein, and Poststructuralist critical theory. In an article that acknowledges a certain degree of common ground between Shapiro and the Language Poets, Carl Whithaus asserts: ‘Shapiro’s poetry,’ unlike Language Writing, ‘is not about revelation or the production of meaning; rather it is about loss and memory, those fleeting traces of the past inscribed imperfectly in words.’ I must insist that issues involving ‘the production of meaning’ cannot take a back seat to any other component of Shapiro’s work, even as ‘loss and memory’ are also major concerns. Opening the title-section of the title-sequence of his most recent book, A Burning Interior (2002), Shapiro, as in various earlier poems, articulates compelling figures of ‘tracing’ as indicative of the problematic of representation, whether of the past or of immediate intensities: ‘Burning Interior// of a copy of nothing/ or more precisely a series/ of xerox sketches of/ burning interior-exteriors…’ (1). In diverse fashions, Shapiro’s work and Language Poetry both feature vigorous investigation of how arbitrary or logical placement of ‘interiors’/ ‘exteriors,’ distinctions between supposed ‘origins’ and ‘copies,’ and designations of ‘nothing’ and ‘substance’ arise and may be contested in the uses of language. At the outset, it is important to note that poets like Palmer, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, and Bruce Andrews have strongly contextualized their poetic theory and praxis as Marxist. David Shapiro, whose politics come through in the poetry as distinctly left liberal, has never done so. An oft-cited passage in Ron Silliman’s essay, ‘Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World’ (first published in 1977) suggests why he and other Language Poets consider the destabilization of referentiality a crucial Marxist gesture. Silliman reads the ‘passing’ of ‘language… into a capitalist stage of development’ as ‘an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism”, the illusion of reality in capitalist thought’ (The New Sentence 10). For him, ‘capitalism’ ‘narrows’ ‘the function of reference in language… into referentiality.’ Whether or not he would agree with Silliman’s specific historical analysis of cause and effect, Shapiro in his John Ashbery An Introduction to the Poetry (1979), demonstrates massive suspicion of ‘realist’ narration and the presumption of referential solidity, and he also frequently insists upon the importance of ‘the tangibility of the word’: ‘One of the central functions of an “abstract” poetry’ like Ashbery’s ‘is to be aware of itself as non-discursive palpability. Such poetry is involved in particularity without a stable ground’ (175). These remarks are uncannily pertinent to prose-poems of the late seventies like Ron Silliman’s Tjanting and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, whose sentences feature a tremendous amount of precise, ‘worldly’ description without pointing to a narrative or discursive center. (Of course, many Language poets have acknowledged the influence of Ashbery’s most syntactical disjunctive, experimental poetry on their own work.) When Rae Armantrout validates ‘language-oriented writing’ as ‘work’ that ‘sees itself and sees the world,’ thus behaving in an ‘ambi-centric’ way, she praises writers like Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, and Hejinian who ‘bring the underlying structures of language/ thought into consciousness’ (546). Many—perhaps most—of Shapiro’s poems illustrate these kinds of focus. In ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ a poem published in 1983, the reiterated term ‘nothing’ marks the negative scrutiny of referentiality’s assertions of stable ground: |
| I’ve built nothing; you are the architect. You are near me like the sound of an archaic car. I know that I love the verb not to know. Do you love it? The distance is like a Chinese garden. I pluck pomegranates out of the Halloween stores. Then I keep looking at this phrase like summer hills. The mountain represents nothing, the mountain air Represents nothing, but two birds seem bad enough. In these things there is an immense exile like a surface: And when we try to stop expressing it, words are successful. (To an Idea 76) In an essay entitled ‘Migratory Meaning,’which stresses that readers are trained and thus seek to bring all the parts of a literary text into relation, and to do so as ‘parsimoniously’ (115) as possible, Ron Silliman lists aesthetic devices in a poem by Joseph Ceravolo that strenuously resist this effort and, thus, in Armantrout’s terms, cause readers to be conscious of ‘underlying’ linguistic ‘structures’: ‘key terms which resist specificity’; ‘evidence that the title does not “name” the poem as a whole, but functions instead as a caption’; ‘a seeming rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ (The New Sentence 119). Certainly, Shapiro’s title, ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ provides no awareness of the poem’s totality. The only seasonal reference is to Halloween, and, if this is supposed to be a diary entry, it grants no access to the ‘inner life’ of a diarist. As a ‘caption,’ the poem could refer to the day it was written, and the date may have some private resonance to the poet, or it could ‘represent nothing.’ As in much of John Ashbery’s work, identification of speaker and addressee and their placement in a dramatic context in Shapiro’s poem above are unavailable. The indeterminacy of the pronouns ‘infects’ and is further ‘infected’ by other undefined ‘key terms.’ What is it that ‘the architect’ has ‘built,’ literally or metaphorically, and why is the speaker unable to ‘build’ anything? Is the ‘mountain’ an architectural or linguistic structure or natural ‘thing’? And how and why is it, along with the surrounding ‘air’ (atmosphere or song?) and ‘birds’ (real birds or odd people?), not a source of representation? How can ‘exile’ inhere in the solid presence of ‘a mountain,’ unless that mountain is but a word? On the one hand, at least in the first six of the poem’s ten lines, ‘rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ is apparent in the strange shifts from image to image. For example, how does the ‘Chinese garden’ relate to the ‘Halloween stores,’ as if any store is confined to the sale of items for one holiday (other than Christmas)? And yet, there is a tenuous ‘narrative’ push/ pull involving a ‘you’ and an ‘I,’ and one may impose a scenic quasi-continuity in the movement from ‘hills,’ to ‘mountain air,’ to ‘birds,’ and finally to the ‘we’ (you and I?) asked to refrain from ‘expression’ to allow language to ‘succeed’ when its users do not presume to make it represent more than it can. The concluding sentence does seem to indicate that the poem can be read as a performance of Armantrout’s ‘ambi-centric’ gesture: poetry attending to its own materials and representative possibilities and, in some mediated way, to the ‘world’ of unstable selves, ‘mountains,’ and ‘birds.’ Perhaps the ‘I’ is the poet who does not ‘construct’ language (the ‘you’), since the ‘architecture’ of linguistic possibilities precedes him/ her. In writing a poem, the poet expresses ‘love’ for (and perhaps frustration about) his own inability to know and experiences the intense pleasure and/ or pain and, finally, acceptance of an ‘exile’ of phenomenological imagery from symbolism and meditative coherence, the severance of ‘surface’ (or what Shapiro in the Ashbery book calls ‘palpability’) from ‘depth.’ Given all of the disjunction and sounding of ‘nothing’ in ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ such a reading can be no more than plausible, if unverifiable speculation. In concert with the skepticism about narration and transparent ‘referentiality,’ both Shapiro and many of the Language poets are deeply committed to an expansion of poetic possibilities and a resistance to limitation of stylistic avenues. In ‘An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,’ Charles Bernstein observes ‘that the interconnection among the poetic styles attended to in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E has to do with the rejection of certain traditionally accepted techniques for poem-making and an openness to alternative techniques — together with a distrust of the experimental as an end to itself,’ as well as the refusal to valorize ‘any new style or technique or device’ as ‘the gold pot at the end of the rainbow’; for Bernstein, ‘a commitment to the need for a multiplicity of stylistic approaches among a multiplicity of poets, and even for one poet’ (My Way 64) is central. Admittedly, Shapiro’s forays into prose-poetry have been less sustained than those of many Language poets. However, sequences in his last three books juxtapose different strophic and stanzaic patterns, prose and verse, relatively coherent narrative elements, dream elements, and fragments of meditation. The elegiac opening of the sixteenth section of the sequence, ‘Voice’ (1994) entitled ‘A Note and a Poem by Joe Ceravolo in a Dream,’ provides a cogent lyric explanation, not only of Ceravolo’s approach, but of the drive of Shapiro’s own poetics to expand possibilities: He was a poet of grammar Rather than being ‘anti-grammar,’ Shapiro often pushes for ‘Utopian alternative grammar’ that abandons unitary utterance for multiplicity. The fragmentation within (or following) the second sentence in the passage above is a good example. Two infinitives are followed by a noun (‘universe’) that can either be interpreted as the object of the infinitives, banging against the most obvious object following the last question mark, or as a new verb coinage. Shapiro’s question hinges on the subtle shift of the second to last letter in two verbs (‘r’ to ‘n’). According to the first reading, the poet asks whether Ceravolo desires through syntactical innovation to shuffle the ‘universe’s’ existing elements or to make new ones, and ‘the possibilities of love’ stand in an apposite, hence equivalent, relation to ‘universe.’ According to the second reading, Shapiro seeks to know whether his late friend and colleague attempts to ‘invert’ and/or ‘reinvent’ and/or bring a ‘universe’ into being out of the materials of love’s ‘possibilities.’ (The verb ‘universe’ is not merely a synonym for ‘universalize about’; it is something more actively generative.) There is no compulsion to choose between the two alternatives, but their co-presence tells us that multiplicity exists in the uncertainty of grammatical and syntactic relations, as well as Shapiro’s heterogeneous imagery and frequently surreal tropes. Of course, those who have scorned Language Poetry tend to confuse multiplicity of these kinds—the insistent cultivation of possibility that can be characterized as ‘possibilism’—with total randomness and utter unreadability. The second example of ‘perturbed syntax’ in Shapiro’s passage involves the lack of punctuation separating the weird enjambment of ‘poet’ and ‘entrances,’ the unsure identification of ‘entrances’ as plural noun or third-person singular verb, and the jarring use of the pronomial adjective ‘its.’ An ordinary sentence might read: ‘He is a possibilist poet whose/ work entrances with its naïve/ or Utopian anti-grammar’ or ‘…poet who/ entrances with his naïve/….’ or ‘He is a possibilist poet./ He provides entrances with its [the poetry’s] naïve/….’ None of my versions have the compression, lyric charge, or range of what Shapiro wrote, and that distinction indicates that commentary can only chase after the poetry without catching it. Could the Marxist contexts of Language Poetry significantly negate my attempt to sketch common ground between the ‘possibilist’ practices of Language writers and those of David Shapiro? Leaving this question to other readers and other critical occasions, I maintain that it is important for Shapiro’s work to be part of the general conversation about contemporary poetry that, in Silliman’s terms, advocates for ‘the tangibility of the word’ over ‘the illusion(s) of reality.’ |
Works CitedArmantrout, Rae. ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ In the American Tree. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. 544-546. Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Shapiro, David. A Burning Interior. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2002. ———. After a Lost Original. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1994. ———. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. ———. To an Idea. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1983. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York, New York: Roof Books, 1995. Whithaus, Carl. ‘Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate) Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro.’ Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. (1997) |
C. D. Wright Visit this Friday
C. D. Wright will join the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry to discuss her book Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon 2008) this Friday, November 5, from 3-5 pm in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Bill Berkson at Yale
WGCP related event:
Bill Berkson
Divine Conversation:
Art, Poetry, & the Death of the Addressee
Yale School of Art
36 Edgewood Avenue, Room 204
Monday, October 25
6 pm
Bill Berkson is the author of more than sixteen poetry collections, including Serenade, Fugue State, and his 1960s collaborations with Frank O’Hara, Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings. A selection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2003, appeared from Qua Books in 2004. He was the Distinguished Mellon Lecturer for 2006 at the Skowhegan School of Art. His most recent publication is Gloria, a set of new poems accompanied by etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press).
Elizabeth Willis WGCP Visit
This Friday, May 7, from 3-5 in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center the poet Elizabeth Willis will be joining us to discuss her poetry and poetics. The following questions, culled from the WGCP’s recent of Willis’s collection Meteoric Flowers, will serve as prompts for this Friday’s discussion. The session will be a free flowing conversation with our visitor. Our sessions are open to any and all guests, so be sure to spread the word to anyone who might be interested. This will be our last session of the academic year, so it is especially celebratory.
As a coda to last week’s discussion (and as an epigraph to this week’s), these lines from Willis’s essay “Art against the State; Or What I Lived for.” She writes:
“At times, another’s words seem to gather the energy one is unable to gather for oneself. ‘We gather our energies in order to make this intolerable world endurable.’ Such a sentence signals the relief in understanding that the battles we fight individually may be nonetheless shared. ”
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ELIZABETH WILLIS is the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. She is the author of four books of poetry, Second Law, The Human Abstract, Turneresque, and Meteoric Flowers. Her work has been selected for the National Poetry Series and her awards include the Boston Review Prize, an award from the Howard Foundation, a Walter N. Thayer Fellowship for the Arts, and a grant from the California Arts Council. As a critic, she has written on 19th– and 20th– century poetry, and she has edited a collection of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Politics of Place.
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Questions for Elizabeth Willis
When we discussed the work of Lorine Niedecker a few years ago, we noted the emphasis in her poems on the domestic as a countervoice to the monumentalism and even hypermasculine tendencies of modernism. While one wouldn’t see your poems as domestic, is there a way that you conceive of the feminine within poetry—or specifically your own work. To further contextualize this, your discussion of identity with Charles Bernstein could be made to speak directly in part to your being a woman—how does that aspect inform (rather than explain) your sense of poetics or the perspective of your poems? Or, to quote one of your poems, “What form do women take?”
At our recent session, the fact that the majority of the poems in Meteoric Flowers are prose poems raised the question of why prose is becoming more and more present in contemporary poetry. Do you see this a kind of acquiescing to prose as the more dominant mode (culturally and commercially within our present moment)? Is it a way of employing a mode that disrupts the categories of prose and poetry? What might such a disruption offer?
In terms of the structure of Meteoric Flowers, do the poems interrupt the prose poems, or do they set up the prose that follows (with the poems acting as “proems”)?
In what ways did the tropes of flowers and botany provide principles of organization for you in the writing of the poems and in thinking about the collection as a whole?
In Turneresque you found a correlation between the painter J.W. Tuner and Ted Turner’s Turner Class Movies channel. Is there a contemporary analogue to Erasmus Darwin. In other words, is there a way that the Enlightenment thinker is re-inscribed culturally in the present? This would speak to how the collection of poems escapes nostalgia or sentimentality.
One question that came up often had to do with the role of intentionality in your work. How do you think of intentionality within readings of poems in general? To what extent does the author’s intent guide readings of the poems? Since your poems disrupt linearity within and between sentences, it would seem that intention is a hard thing to determine—yet does that end up suggesting that meaning has no place within your act of writing.
How does one decide the measure of allusions? Do you imagine your reader ought to go read Erasmus Darwin to understand your work? Do readers who catch the allusions throughout your work read a different and perhaps “more authentic” poem than those who do not catch those allusions. Is it the reader’s responsibilities to track these down?
We discussed very intensely the question of lyric subjectivity. Is it voice or style that creates a field of expressivity within and between the poems? What is the difference between voce and style in terms of what lyric poems express?
Lyn Hejinian Visits WGCP
Poet, essayist, and translator, Lyn Hejinian will visit the WGCP for a special session on Wednesday, April 14 from 3-5 pm in room 39 at the Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street (information about visiting the Beinecke Library: Beinecke Seminar Room Guidelines). The group will discuss Hejinian’s recent book, Saga/Circus (Omnidawn 2008).
Hejinian will give a public reading from her work in the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series at the Beinecke Library on Tuesday, April 13 at 4 pm. For details visit: Readings at Beinecke Library. This event is free and open to the public.
For more information about and examples of Lyn Hejinian’s work, visit the following sites:
Lyn Hejinian at the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC): http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/
Lyn Hejinian at the Academy of American Poets : http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/396
Lyn Hejinian on PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php
Saga / Circus
The next session of the Contemporary Poetics Group will be on March 26; we will be discussing the work of Lyn Hejinian, a poet whose work we have looked at on two different occasions in the past. Specifically her most recent book Saga/Circus (there are three copies left at our mailbox of the Whitney Humanities Center). Professor Hejinian will be reading at the Beinecke Library on April 13 at 4 PM. The next day (April 14) she will meet with us for a special session of the WGCP to her discuss her work. The time and place of that discussion will be announced shortly.
A useful review of Saga/Circus by the poet Joyelle McSweeney is available here:
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/mcsweeney.php
About Saga/Circus, McSweeney writes:
In Lyn Hejinian’s latest book, two long poems (but they hardly feel long) make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an alert and damaging wit. First comes “Circus” or “Lola.” This prose piece, with its attention to rings, battles, payers and players, moves characters through a tightening, finally dismaying cycle of events. Next comes “Saga,” also titled “The Distance,” which applies pressure to two figures of continuity: the first–person speaker and the sea voyage. Together, these texts form a contrast of cyclicality and stasis and test the limits of writing as vehicle and vessel of both violence and knowledge.
Recordings of Hejinian reading from her work are archived by PennSound:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php
A recent issue of Jacket includes a short essay by Hejinian on closure:
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html
About Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator; she was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Berkeley. Published collections of her writing include Writing is An Aid to Memory, My Life, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, Leningrad (written in collaboration with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten), The Cell, The Cold of Poetry, and A Border Comedy; the University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry. Translations of her work have been published in France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment for the Arts; she was awarded an Award for Independent Literature by the Soviet literary organization “Poetics Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has travelled and lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description and Xenia, two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press. From 1976 – 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets; Atelos was nominated as one of the best independent literary presses by the Firecracker Awards in 2001. Other collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996, a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian, a mixed media book entitled The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill created with the painter Emilie Clark (Granary Press, 1998), and the experimental film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs, for which Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko wrote the script. In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony
WGCP will meet on Friday, February 26, 3-5pm, in WHC 116, to discuss Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, The United States 1885-1890 (Recitative), published in 1934. All are welcome.
Photocopies will be available for pick-up by 2pm February 19 in the WGCP box near the reception desk at the WHC.
Charles Reznikoff is an important American Objectivist poet, one of the few we’ve not yet read together as a group. Testimony is a powerful, sometimes disturbing, rewriting of legal documents Reznikoff sifted through while working for a law book company; it is not light reading. Our conversation will take as its primary point of departure (and analysis) the first volume of Testimony; those poems present the facts in cases stretching from 1885 to 1890. We may wish to discuss Reznikoff’s work in relation to the questions of collage, editing, and serialization raised during our discussion with K. Waldrop (meeting minutes). Short interviews and articles about the context, reception, and influence of this work (and other books by Reznikoff) are linked below.
SHORT BIO, EXCERPTS OF INTERVIEWS, EXCERPTS OF DAVIDSON ESSAY (“On Testimony” by M. DAVIDSON from Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Berkeley: University of California, 1997)
http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/reznikoff/reznikoff.htm
NUMEROUS SOUND RECORDINGS
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Reznikoff.php
Yale Working Group in Contemporary Poetry 
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