Language Beyond Language

On February 12 at 3pm, the WGCP will meet in room 38 at Beinecke Library with Curator Tim Young to discuss Russian Zaum poetry and what Young has called the “pre- and quasi verbal” in books by poets and artists. Young will show an exhibition of rare Zaum books and related materials from the Beinecke Library’s Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection. Information about visiting the Beiencke Library: Beinecke Seminar Room Guidelines.

Examples of Zaum poetry, including Russian and English sound recordings, can be found online in the Getty Center’s outstanding exhibition, “Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917” curated by Nancy Perloff.

Additional readings:

From Jabberwocky to Lettrism, by Eugène Jolas

To Destroy Language by Craig Dworkin

Image: Cover of Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems (Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy) from the Getty exhibition online; PDF version of the book

Chinese Poetry, World Literature, and Dual Translation

February 3^rd at 5:30 in HGS 312, Lucas Klein be giving a talk  titled “Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil: A Look at Chinese Poetry, World Literature, and Dual Translation Then and Now.”

In this talk, Lucas will attempt to define World Literature, how it has shaped and been shaped by Chinese poetry in the 20^thcentury and in the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907), and what translation and translation studies can tell us about the economics and politics of literary production and consumption in a global perspective. Plus, Lucas will do it all through close-reading and contextualizing specific poems in an effort to encompass the argument of his dissertation in under 35 minutes.

Lucas Klein is a union organizer and editor of the online journal of creative translation, «www.CipherJournal.com». After living in Beijing and Paris, his current home is in Connecticut, where he slouches towards a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale. His translations, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at CipherJournal, Frank, Manoa, Composite Translations, Palimpsest, and Big Bridge, and he regularly reviews books for Rain Taxi and other venues.

Keith Waldrop Visit

Keith Waldrop (recent winner of the National Book Award for Poetry) will be joining the WGCP this Friday, January 29, from 3-5 in Rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  The conversation will consider questions raised by the WGCP’s December discussion of Waldrop’s work (linked here: WGCP Mailing List Archive).

Two interviews with Waldrop are linked below.

Keith Waldrop interviewed by Peter Gizzi:  http://www.sigliopress.com/library/waldrop/kw_petergizzi.htm

Close Listening Interview with Keith Waldrop: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldrop-K/Close-Listening/Waldrop-Keith_Close-Listening_conversation_11-05-09.mp3



Spring 2010 Schedule

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry spring 2010 meetings are as follows; unless otherwise noted, meetings take place in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at 3pm. Changes will be announced on this site and on the WGCP List.

WGCP Meeting, Keith Waldrop Visit
Friday, January 29, 3 p.m.
Readings: Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop

WGCP Meeting with Tim Young at Beinecke Library: Imaginary Languages
Friday, February 12, 3 p.m.
Readings: Eugene Jolas, “From Jabberwocky to Lettrism”; additional readings TBA
NOTE: this meeting will take place in room 38 at Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
please review the Library’s Guidelines for Visitors to Seminar Rooms

WGCP Meeting
Friday, March 26, 3 p.m.
Readings: TBA / Lyn Hejinian

Related Event: Lyn Hejinian Poetry Reading
Tuesday, April 13, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

WGCP Meeting, Lyn Hejinian Visit
Wednesday, April 14, TIME TBA
Readings: TBA / Lyn Hejinian

WGCP Meeting
Friday, April 30, 3 p.m.
Readings: Meteoric Flowers by Elizabeth Willis

WGCP Meeting, Elizabeth Willis Visit
Friday, May 7, 3 p.m.
Readings: Meteoric Flowers by Elizabeth Willis

December 4: Olivier Brossard on Keith Waldrop

The WGCP will meet this Friday, December 4, from 3-5 in room 116 in the Whitney Humanities Center; the focus of our discussion will be Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop, recent winner of the National Book Award.

Our discussion will be guided by Olivier Brossard, associate professor at the University of Paris Est (Marne-La-Vallée). Professor Brossard is an esteemed scholar of the New York School of Poetry, and a talented and accomplished translator of American poetry into French. He will provide a strong context for reading Waldrop’s work and will offer insights that he’s gained from being so deeply invested in Waldrop’s work as a translator and scholar.

For links and related resources related, visit: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/2009-November/000233.html ; for a sample of Waldrop reading from his work, visit: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/11/weekly-poems-keith-waldrop-2009-national-book-award-winner.html

This session will be our last of the semester, but when we resume again at the end of January our first session of the new semester will feature a visit from Waldrop himself.

Keith Waldrop Wins NBA

Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy has been awarded the National Book Award for Poetry.

Of Waldrop’s work, the judges write “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

The WGCP will discuss Transcendental Studies with visiting scholar Olivier Brossard on December 4th at 3pm in room 116 at WHC. Keith Waldrop will join the WGCP for a discussion of his work in January.

Meeting Time Change

Please note, the WGCP will meet to discuss Peter Gizzi’s The Outernational at 3:30pm Friday, October 23 in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall Street (the corner of Church and Wall). Suggested additional readings include the following: https://wgcp.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/gizzi-outernational/. Future meetings and readings can be found here: https://wgcp.wordpress.com/meetings-readings/.

Marjorie Welish: Additional Readings

 

The following additional readings for Marjorie Welish’s upcoming visit have been posted online here: Welish Readings. Requests for permission to reprint should be made to author and editors.

Marjorie Welish, “A Test of: Spacing,” in Denver Quarterly, 42:1, 2008

Marjorie Welish, “Isle of the Signatories” and “In Situ,” in War and Peace #4: Vision and Text, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Eds. (O Books, 2009)

Marjorie Welish and Judieth Goldman, Interview in War and Peace #4: Vision and Text, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Eds. (O Books, 2009)

Marjorie Welish Readings

This fall’s first two sessions are dedicated to the work of poet, artist, and critic Marjorie Welish. A discussion of her recent book Isle of the Signatories (2008), as well as several essays (to be announced) will take place on Friday, September 18, 3 p.m. at WHC; Welish will join the WGCP for a conversation about her work on Friday, October 9, 3 p.m. at WHC.

Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought, 2003) consists of papers given at a conference on her writing and art at the University of Pennsylvania. A Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellow in 2007, she taught seminars in art criticism at the University of Frankfurt, where she also worked to complete Oaths? Questions?, done in collaboration with James Siena. Other art grants and fellowships awarded her: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Fifth Floor Foundation, International Studio Program, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Marjorie Welish lives in New York City where she regularly teaches at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Her paintings are represented by Bjorn Ressle Fine Art in New York and are in the following public collections: Collection Werner Kramarsky, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; New York Public Library, New York; Rutgers (University) Archive for Printmaking Studios, New Brunswick, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge
University Press, 1999).

Isle of the Signatories (2008) is her most recent book of poems; others are Word Group (2004), and The Annotated ‘Here’ and Selected Poems (2000), this last a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. All are published by Coffee House Press. Welish has received poetry grants and fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University in 2005.

Sound files of Welish reading at UPenn and elsewhere:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/linking-page/Welish.html

Recent art criticism by Welish:
http://www.observer.com/2009/style/whatsits-and-thingamabobs

Images of some of Welish’s paintings:
http://slought.org/images/2002.Welish/

Photo: Marjorie Welish reading in the Belladonna Series; photo by Erica Kaufman.

About the WGCP

The Whitney Humanities Center / Beinecke Library Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (WGCP).

Interested members of the Yale University community are invited to join the Whitney Humanities Center / Beinecke Library Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (WGCP). The Group meets every other Friday at 3:00pm in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University (the corner of Church and Wall) to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international alternative and / or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry.

The WGCP regularly invites visiting scholars and poets to join the group discussion; guests have included Susan Howe, Jacques Jouet, John Yau, and Charles Bernstein. WGCP discussions take the work of modernist masters in the European and American traditions and a variety of more recent poetries and poetic theories from around the world as their primary subject. The group’s conversations consistently assess the shifting relationship between poetry and other forms of discourse (including criticism, philosophy, politics, mathematics, medicine, history, and art history), as well as the way poetry engages innovative thinking in other arts (cinema, music, painting, architecture). Consequently, the concerns that animate our biweekly discussions vary greatly (see an archive of our minutes at: WGCP Minutes Archive).

The WGCP readings have recenlty included E Pound/Fenellosa, C. Olson, L. Niedecker, G. Stein, U. Dydo, E. Hocquard, M. Deguy, A. Schwerner, A. Lauterbach, J-M Gleize and F.T. Marinetti. Guests included Michael Deguy, Emmanuel Hocquard, Cole Swensen, Jean-Marie Gleize, Ulla Dydo, Paolo Valesio and Ann Lauterbach. To receive announcements about the WGCP’s meetings and events via e-mail, subscribe to the group’s list-serv at WGCP List-serv.