tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4204766504372635892024-03-05T23:22:23.291-05:00immanent occasionsMental excursions into poetics and cultural anthropology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger80125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-37234236554867253572020-10-10T09:26:00.000-04:002020-10-10T09:26:09.535-04:00Mayröcker and Glück, An Exercise in Nobel Prize Poetics<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><b><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: large;">Mayröcker and Glück, An Exercise in Nobel Prize Poetics</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;">Some
poems embody perception in the act of discovery. Consider the poetry of Charles
Olson. I find that quality in these lines by Fredericka Mayröcker:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Tränenzeile für Wendelin Niedlich</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Biscotten Schnee, weiszgraues Gewölk<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">dahinter das Blitzen des blauen Himmels<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Notizen auf eiem Kamel / bei Flaubert /<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">die schwimmenden Augen des Freunds<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Cryingpage for Happy Wanderer</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Cookie
powder, grayish white cloud<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">behind
the lightning of blue heaven<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Notices
of a camel / by Flaubert /<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">the friends‘ swimming eyes <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 351.0pt;"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 18.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">zu Füszen zu Traumen des Bergs<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>für Gerda Marko<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">GELB! auf dem Schreibplatz plötzlich, früher Morgen<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">wie Aufruf schreiendes Segel<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">gehörnt geklemmt : drei gelbe Plastik Wäscheklammmern fest –<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">gebissen in Kartonpapier / dahinter rötlichblonder<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Frauenschopf und grünes Auge.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">Auf linker Wange während eines langen Nachmittags<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;">als abgelöste Wimper schwarze Träne.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: DE;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE"><o:p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">On foot dreams of Mountains</span></i></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">YELLOW!
on the writing place suddenly, early morning<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">at
the summons of a screaming sail<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">horned
clamped : three yellow plastic wash pegs – firmly<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">fixed
into brown paper / behind reddish blond<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">lady’s
wig and a green eye.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On
the left cheek during a long afternoon<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">like
a detached eyelash black tears.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Where
do the emotions then lie? In the private chambers of a body that celebrates
death and life. In a struggle for distinction that is curse or joy of the
individual soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span>In
these lines by Louise Glück, quoted in the <i>New York Times </i>upon her
winning the Nobel Prize for literature, there is no perception There is cliché
with hardly a twist or a “see here.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I
take my basket to the brazen market,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">to
the gathering place,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I
ask you, how much beauty<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">can
a person bear?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">After
a circumspect review, it would seem then that Glück writes tearstained pages.
With such sentiments are we to govern ourselves. Or might it not be best to
engage the other and see the world differently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span>Dealing
with a language that may be strange to us one struggles with the inventive
qualities of a lange that appears to invent itself. Mayröcker is comfortable
with the forms of her expression. You might not be. To be attentive to the
language itself is my goal. Olson’s words:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Polis
is this<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;">Bluntly,
rephrased, “perception is the city”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in;"><i>Don Wellman,</i> 10/08/2020</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-69376038821958099302020-04-27T11:50:00.001-04:002020-04-27T11:50:20.225-04:00ContagiousMy reading at the New Orleans Poetry Festival, 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.nolapoetry.com/2020-videos?combine=Wellman" target="_blank">https://www.nolapoetry.com/2020-videos?combine=Wellman</a><br />
<br />
The first verse is a mock version of a famous poem about a contagious hospital. The last refers to a recent massacre in Nigeria.<br />
<br />
Don Wellman<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-69031585007008820682020-03-31T10:18:00.002-04:002020-03-31T16:27:52.644-04:00English-language bibliography for Antonio Gamoneda, Donald Wellman, translator.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">English Language Bibliography
for Antonio Gamoneda, Donald Wellman, translator<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">Books in
translation from Spanish to English<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">Antonio Gamoneda.
<i>Description of the Lie: a translation of </i>Descripción de la mentira.<i> </i>Talisman
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">House Editions: Greenfield MA, 2014. </span><a href="http://www.talismanhousepublishers.com/gamoneda-description-of-the-lie.html"><span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">http://www.talismanhousepublishers.com/gamoneda-description-of-the-lie.html</span></a><span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">Antonio Gamoneda.
</span><i>Gravestones </i>[A translation of <i>Lápidas</i>], New Orleans:
University of New <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Orleans
Press, 2009. <a href="http://www.unopress.org/store/fictionandpoetry/Gravestones.aspx">http://www.unopress.org/store/fictionandpoetry/Gravestones.aspx</a>.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 391.5pt;">
Periodicals </div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Antonio Gamoneda. </span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">"[I KNOW the gallows bird...]" and "[I SAW
golden flames...]." <span class="gmail-il"><i>New</i></span><i> Poetry
in Translation </i>(Forthcoming 1917). </span></li>
<li>Antonio
Gamoneda. Eight poems from <i>Losses
Burn [Arden las pérdidas].</i>”IN attics inhabited by pigeons whose wings,”
“IN churches and clinics,” “I SAW my face in the depths of copper,” “I
HEAR the rain of another time, it soaks,” “I SAW TREES clamoring, wounded
animals,” “MEMORY is mortal. Some afternoons, Billy,” “A COLD passion
hardens my tears,” “OVER my flesh, bruised with love, passes.” <i> Seedlings</i> 2 (Fall 2016). <a href="http://durationpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/seedings-2.pdf">http://durationpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/seedings-2.pdf</a>.</li>
<li>Antonio
Gamoneda, "The Watchman of the Snow" <i>Libro del frío, T</i><i>he
Bitter Oleander</i> 21:2 2015): 80-85</li>
<li>Antonio
Gamoneda, “I Saw Lavender” translation from <i>Losses Burn</i> in <i>International
Poetry Review </i>XLI:2 (Fall 2014) 22-23.Antonio
Gamoneda. Translations of "Light simmers under my eyelids,"
"I feel cold beneath," "There's a splinter of light,"
and "I have thrown the bone of compassion," (from <i>Arden
las pérdidas</i>) in <i>Sakura Review, 5 (2014).</i></li>
<li>Antonio
Gamoneda. Translation of "I observed the acidic moisture," (from<i> Arden las pérdidas</i>)<i> </i>in <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/poetry/i-observed-the-acidic-moisture/"><i>Guernica:
a magazine of arts and politics</i></a><i> </i>(April 1, 2014).</li>
<li>Antonio
Gamoneda. "Cold of limits," a translation of "Frio de
limites" from <i>Libro del frio.</i> <a href="http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/spanish/cold-of-limits"><i>Brooklyn
Rail, In Translation</i></a><i>, </i>July 30, 2013. </li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">Antonio
Gamoneda. Selected Poems: “THE INFECTION is larger than sadness,” “THERE’S
a wall in front of my eyes,” “THE SOUND of dawn never enters,” “IT SWIMS
in your spirit,” “YOU HEAR the destruction of wood,” “DAWN approaches,”
“BLUE oil on your tongue,” “IS IT light this substance that birds
traverse?” “IT ENTERS your body and,” “I LOVED the disappearances.”<a href="http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/17183/Antonio-Gamoneda.">Poetry
International Web: Antonio Gamoneda</a>, 2010.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">“Georgics”
from Antonio Gamoneda's <i>Libro del frío </i>in<i> </i><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sirena_poesia_arte_y_critica/summary/v2008/2008.1gamoneda.html"><i>Sirena</i></a> (Dickinson
College, 2008).<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">“The
Widows’ Dining Room” from Antonio Gamoneda’s <i>Lápidas </i>in <i>Circumference </i>(Fall
2008).<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">“<a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/antonio-gamoneda/">Still</a>”
from Antonio Gamoneda's <i>Libro del frío </i>in <i>Words
Without Borders</i>, December 2007.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">“<a href="http://calquezine.blogspot.com/2007/10/antonio-gamoneda-saturday.html">Saturday</a>”
from Antonio Gamoneda's <i>Libro del frío </i>in <i>Calque</i>,
October, 2007.<o:p></o:p></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
Criticism</div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in;">José-Luis
Moctezuma, “Antonio Gamoneda and the Ontology of Disappearance,” <i>Jacket2
</i>1.28.2015. <a href="https://jacket2.org/reviews/antonio-gamoneda-and-ontology-disappearance">https://jacket2.org/reviews/antonio-gamoneda-and-ontology-disappearance</a><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">Daniel Aguirre Oteiza, El canto de la
desaparición: memoria, historia y testimonio en la poesía de Antonio
Gamoneda. </span>Madrid: Devenir, 2015. ttps://rll.fas.harvard.edu/news/new-publication-daniel-aguirre-oteiza. <o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span lang="ES" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 26.6667px; text-indent: -0.25in;">Fernando Perez. "Antonio Gamoneda: Lapidas," translated by Donald Wellman. </span><i style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 26.6667px;">Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Lettrs and Life </span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 26.6667px; text-indent: -0.25in;">1,11, 2009. </span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in;">Donald Wellman. "<a href="http://eu-topias.org/en/the-fractured-surface-of-poetry-and-the-translators-task/">The fractured surface of poetry and the translator’s task</a>," Eu-topias: a journal of interculturality, communication and European studies, 5 (Valencia 2013). </li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in;">Donald Wellman. "Surface [truncated] on Gamoneda."in Donald Wellman, <i>Albiach / Celan </i>Ann Arbor Annex 2016.</li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-76804284898596376472020-02-06T13:53:00.000-05:002020-02-06T14:41:43.612-05:00On Music and the effects of Censorship: Antonio Gamoneda, Paul Celan, Cesar Vallejo, and Néstor Perlongher <div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_Hlk2084676"><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt;">The overlay of
music and meaning in the translation of poetry: a close reading of poetry by
Antonio Gamoneda, Paul Celan, Cesar Vallejo, and Néstor Perlongher <o:p></o:p></span></i></a></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk2084676;"></span>
<br />
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Donald Wellman, proposed10/7/2018, revised
2/13/2019<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">I have remained true to the pulse of the
poems as they unfold. Following Gamoneda’s advice, I have translated, not
interpreted the various meanings that the language puts in play. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Gamoneda’s poetry is a form of witness to
fascist oppression. The work is conceived and should be read as poetry marked
by distinctive compositional values of a musical order, both in terms of its
rhythms and interlaced imagery. The same can also be said about the German poet
Paul Celan, who raised the important point that beyond the horrors experienced
by the witness there is the further question of who is to witness for the
witness, or indeed who is to corroborate testimony without simplifying
meanings. </span></i><i><span style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">Inventive
language of a musical or compositional order provides access to emotions that
resist paraphrase or interpretation. </span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">This dynamic in which language escapes meaning through listening
to “an intensified soundscape” (Charles Bernstein’s phrase), allows as yet
unresolved meanings or feelings to emerge. The poets mentioned above: Gamoneda,
Celan, Vallejo and Perlongher, activate this ability to listen, each in
distinctive ways. This dynamic of listening is an especial challenge for
translators who must learn to listen to the original instead of attempting
simply to carry meanings from one language to another, as if translation were a
vocabulary exercise. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">In our “</span></i><i><span style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">listening</span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">” project today we will consider four
structural or “musical” aspects typical of free verse:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Short, enjambed lines used for dramatic
effect in Vallejo.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Terse, halting line fragments, intensely
abstract, Celan.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Extended paragraph-like highly rhythmical verses,
Gamoneda.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Long lines or verses with qualities of
constructed spontaneity, chanting or refrain, Perlongher<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Vallejo</span></i></b><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Yo nací un
día / que Dios estuvo enfermo. </span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">(“Espergesia”) (I was born on a day / when God was sick).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: #a6a6a6; font-size: 11.0pt;">The pun in this title is similar to concretions employed by Celan.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Celan</span></i></b><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">,
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Tief / in der Zeitnschrunde / beim /
Wabeneis (Deep / in the time-fissure / near honey-comb ice … )<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Gamoneda</span></i></b><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Mi cuerpo
pesa en la serenidad y mi fortaleza está en recordar; en <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">recordar y despreciar la luz que hubo y descendía y mi
amistad <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">con los suicidas,
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">(My body sorrow in serentity and my
strength is in remembering; in <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">remembering and
spurning the light that was and dimi-<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">nished and my
friendship with the suicides. (Description of the Lie, 22-23)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: #a6a6a6; font-size: 11.0pt;">Note the free movement of the right-hand margin; note vowel rhyming of /a/.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Perlongher</span></i></b><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Ya no se
puede sostener: el mango / de la pala que clava en la tierra su rosario de
musgos<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">It can no longer be </span></i><i><span style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">uphold</span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">: the handle / of the shovel that nails into the earth its
rosary of moss. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">(Cadavers 14-15)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: #a6a6a6; font-size: 11.0pt;">Note running, jazz-like rhythm and visual integrity.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">In
several senses, Vallejo is a forerunner to Gamoneda, although conditions
informing acts of witnessing or testifying differ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gamoneda, as a child and a young man,
witnessed atrocities including the hanging of resistance fighters and the
betrayal and incarceration of friends who opposed the police practices of the
Franco regime. As he writes in Description of the Lie, censorship and fear of
prosecution kept him silent for 500 weeks after his first publications as a
young poet. </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Responding to censorship, his body suffered an anxious
constriction, “Durante quinientas semanas he estado ausente de mis “designios,
depositado en nódulos y silencioso hasta la maldición” (90). Fear of torture
conspired with silence, “Mientras tanto la tortura ha pactado con las
palabras.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Durante quinientas semanas he estado ausente de mis
designios,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>depositado en nódulos y silencioso
hasta la maldición. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mientras tanto la tortura ha
pactado con las palabras.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">For five
hundred weeks I have been absent from my intentions, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>interred
in nodules and silent under the curse. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All
the while torture has made a pact with words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(8-9)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .2pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">The phrase
“depositado en nodulos” requires commentary. The word “depositado” evokes the
deposition of a body in the grave and that is the sense evoked on the very first
page of Decription, “la rendición de mis huesos depositándose en el descanso.”
Hearing this biblical and funereal music, I chose to use interred” in the text
above (8-9). In “nodulos” a medical term, I hear the hardening of the lymph
nodes, associated with the cancer that lead to the early death of the poet’s
father at a time when the boy was only three. Similar clinical images recur throughout
Description. Life and death, preconscious currents within the human organism activate
these words and their echoes. These currents are one source of the </span></i><i><span style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">rhizomatic binding </span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">which is the underlying structure of Gamoneda’s
book.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">In
Lápidas, Gamoneda’s next book, acts of witnessing occupy many pages:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Algunos </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">tenían </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">las mejillas
labradas por el grisú. dibujadas con terrible tramas azules; otros cantaban
acunando una orfandad oculta. Eran hombres lentos, exasperados por la
prohibición y el olor de la muerte.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Some
had faces gouged by fire damp, etched with terrible blue threads; others sang
to lull a hidden orphanity. They were slow men, exasperated by prohibition and
the odor of death. (64-65)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Like
Gamoneda, Vallejo witnessed a socially constructed orphanity, but unlike
Gamoneda Vallejo suffered in prison in ways that directedly impacted his
physical body during a period when he had no immediate prospect of release. His
poetry bears witness to that suffering. </span>pronouncing himself a “nuevo
impar / potente de orfandad! (a new odd number / potent with orphanhood!) (Trilce
XXXVI). He abstracts himself from his situation and becomes a number. Paradoxically
being thrown upon his own individual resources he <span style="color: red;">finds
</span>strength. Vallejo is a poet of <span style="color: red;">imbricated
contraries</span>, like “las islas que van quedando” (T I), discussed below. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>For both poets, the act of witnessing is an
act of anguish as memories surface, clinging as it were, to words whose meaning
hovers, almost like an aura, but is never exact. Isolation, associated with the
absence of family members, especially the mother is heard in both poets. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>For Gamoneda, in the following versicle,
the second strophe of the versicle just read:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">(Mi madre, con los ojos muy abiertos, temerosa del crujido de las tarimas
bajo sus pies, se acercó a mi espalda y, con violencia silenciosa, me retrajo
hasta el interior de las habitaciones. Puso el dedo índice de la mano derecha
sobre sus labios y cerró las hojas del <span style="color: red;">balcón </span>lentamente.)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>(My mother, with her eyes very open,
fearful of the creaking of the wooden tiles under her feet, approached my
shoulder and, with stealthy violence, pulled me back into the interior of the
rooms. She placed the index finger of her right hand over her lips and slowly
closed the shutters of the balcony.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>The mother is associated with safety, darkness,
silence, and lessons in paranoia. And also the phrase, “violencia silensiosa”
that silence that echoes throughout Description, from grave imagery to
references to censorship. In the fourth stanza of Vallejo’s Trilce XXIII, the
mother, now deceased, is associated with a “crumb,” the memory of her sweet
cakes, caught in the poet’s throat.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">¡Madre, y ahora! Ahora, en qual alvéolo<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">quedaría, en que retoño capilar,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">cierta migaja que hoy se me ata el cuello<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>y no quiere pasar.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Mother, and now! Now, in what
aveolus<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>would remain, in what capillary
bud,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>a certain crumb that now sticks
in my throat<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>and doesn’t want to pass.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>An <span style="color: red;">alveolus
</span>is an air sack found in the lungs, essential for breathing. The term is
also used for the socket at the root of a tooth. Such clinical precision is
common to both poets. This verse concludes with references to the eruption of a
tooth on a child’s mouth. Like Gamoneda Vallejo medicalizes the body, scanning
memories of the “crumb” that is the physical cause of choking. Listening to
poetry can involve two voices that transmit on similar frequencies. According
to Michael Foucault the medicalized human body is an aspect of the modern
condition. I would oppose the medicalized body to raw emotions as both poets
do. <span style="color: red;">Stripped of their aura the language for raw
emotions now fails us, </span>as perhaps it always did. It is on this frontier
that avant-garde poets struggle.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>(See supplement for full text of
T XXIII.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>Paul Celan raises the question concerning
who bears witness for the witness, for the experiences of the suffering
subject. It is a question of haunting immediacy. Who can speak to the agony
associated with death, choking, nervous constriction. The poet knows that no
paraphrase is adequate to meaning.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Niemand <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>zeugt für den <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Zeugen. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>No one <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>testifies for the<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>witness,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i>The question relates to the underlying
expressivity of the text, its composition and the domain of affect which the
poem inhabits. Jacques Derrida probes the concept of bearing witness in Celan’s
“Aschenglorie”: “What matters most in the strange limit between what can and cannot
be determined or decided in this poem’s bearing witness to bearing witness. For
this poem says something about bearing witness. It bears witness to it.”
(“Poetics and the Politics of Witnessing,” Albiach / Celan 54). The motif of
witnessing is recurrent in Celan’s work:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;">
<tbody>
<tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">
<td style="border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 233.75pt;" valign="top" width="312"><div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>WEGGEBEIZT vom<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Strahlenwind deiner Spräche<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>das bunte Gerede des An-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>erlebten –das hundert-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>zungige Mein-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>gedicht, das Genicht.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Aus <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>gewirbelt,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Frei<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>den Weg durch den menschen-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>gestaltigen Schnee,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>den Büserschnee, zu <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>den gastlichen<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Gletscherstuben und -tischen.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Tief<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>in der Zeitenschrunde,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>beim<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Wabeneis<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>wartet, ein Atemkristall,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>dein Unumstössliches<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Zeugnis.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 233.75pt;" valign="top" width="312"><div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>EATEN AWAY by<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>radioactive wind from your
speech<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>the confused talk of worn-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>out experience –the hundred-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>tongued my-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>poem, the denial.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Whirled<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>out,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>free<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>the path through human-<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>faced snow,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>penitents’ snow, to<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>the cozy<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>glacier room and -dishes.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Deep<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>in the time-fissure,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>near the<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>honeycomb ice<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>awaits, a breath-crystal,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="color: red;">your
unshakeable<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpLast">
<i><span style="color: red;">witness.</span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: white; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">This translation is an improvement over </span>my earlier efforts.
No poet divides short lines with breath pauses like these. The number of
invented words compounding unexpected compound nouns is another index of the
hidden difficulties always to be associated with poetic language. Vallejo has a
similar inventive ability in the realm of images, personalized images.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Trilce
opens on the theme of testimony and compromise, a matter that is common to the
three poets that I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have discussed so far.
The difficulty of bearing witness for different witnesses who are also
identified as the subject of oppression is a constant that affects the
translators art. It is not only empathy that is required but words that engage
the unspeakable. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Quién hace tanta bulla, y ni deja<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">testar las islas que van quedando.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Who’s making all that racquet, and not even letting<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">the islands that linger make a will. (T I)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">I quote Clayton Eshleman’s translation. His
language raises several issues for me. The concept of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“van quedando” suggests a spinning in place
as much as a literal “lingering.” And “testar” is also consonant with the
subject of “witnessing,” a common overlay of meanings found in English too. </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Testimony is
thematic to my understanding of Gamoneda’s Description, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Huelo los testimonios
de cuanto es sucio sobre la tierra y no me reconcilio<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">I smell the testimonies of all that is
filthy on earth and I do not reconcile myself … (12-13)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">To my understanding Trilce serves as
testimony about the anguish and loss of personhood that are aspects of
imprisonment. The opening lines are thematic. Much has been made also of the
concept of “islas.” It is picked up in the next stanza.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Un poco más de consideración<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">en tanto será
tarde, temprano,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">ye se
aquilatará mejor<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">el guano, la
simple calabrina tesórea<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">que brindar
en querer,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">en el insular
corazón,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">solobre
alcatraz, a cada hialóidea<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">grupada.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">A little more consideration<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">as soon it will be late, soon,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">and it’s easier to assay<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">the guano, the simple fecapital ponk<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">that a brackish gannet <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">unintentionally toasts<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">in the insular heart, to each hyaloid<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>squall.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Eshleman’s invention “fecapital ponk”
serves notice that the guano market is crucial for capitalist revenue production.
Bird manure is exported to England for enriching country gardens, if you didn’t
know. Dry it is easier to assess than when wet. I’m still stuck on “insular”
and “islands.” Islands could be symbolic people, isolated poets, that’s the
general consensus. And it is the gannets that scream as the flyover the guano
operations. It seems to me that the islands, men or not, are never allowed to
rest. There is no consideration for human needs as will be evident later on in Trilce.
After all this work, skittering over meanings, I am stopped by “hialóidea.” The
English word “hyaloid” means glassy or transparent, and Eshleman has decided
not to translate it as. although obscure, it is serviceable English. Often
Eshleman will do this, use almost forgotten English expressions, archaic though
serviceable. Vallejo seems to have exercised a similar determination. “Grupada”?
It is a Mexican word for a fierce and sudden squall. It is also used when
horses rear on their hind legs. The image of exhausted horse recurs in Trilce
LVIII, where loneliness is sexualized. (Clayton Eshleman, Complete Poetry of
César Vallejo, Berkely: UCal P, 2007).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Apéome del
caballo jadeante, bufando<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">líneas de
bofetadas y de horizontes;<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">espumoso pie
contra tres cascos.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Y le ayudo: ¡Anda
animal!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">I dismount the panting horse, snorting<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">lines of slaps and horizons;<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">lathered foot against three hoofs.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">And I help him: Move, animal!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The walls of the prison, although he only stayed there for 120
days, close around him, always four no matter how often he scans them. They
reflect the way the body huddles, a gesture often associated with deep
psychological need to return to the womb, clasping the knees to the chest.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Trilce LVIII<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">En la celda,
en lo </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: red; font-size: 11.0pt;">sólido</span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">, también<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">se acurrucan los rincones.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">In
the cell, in what’s solid, even<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">the
corners are huddling.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">These words reflect his understanding of
how his humanity is being stripped away. </span></i><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">It <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20190306T1355; mso-comment-reference: DW_1;">is</a></span></i><span class="MsoCommentReference"><i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 8.0pt;"><!--[if !supportAnnotations]--><a class="msocomanchor" href="https://d.docs.live.net/856dc326e2709323/V/The%20overlay%20of%20music%20and%20meaning%20in%20the%20translation%20of%20poetry.docx#_msocom_1" id="_anchor_1" language="JavaScript" name="_msoanchor_1">[DW1]</a><!--[endif]--><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></i></span><i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;"> a figure of
dissolution.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">…<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Se tomaría
menos, siempre menos, de lo<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">que me tocase
erogar,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">en la celda,
en lo liquido<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Less could be taken, always less,
of that which<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I am responsible for distributing,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">in the cell, in the liquid.<span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Michelle Clayton has
written, “</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Vallejo’s contemporary commentators
insistently proclaimed that Trilce offered <span style="color: red;">a new set of
origins for both lyric and political discourse </span>in Peru. But what is
particularly curious about Trilce’s investment in fertile origins is that it
tends to pull its power not from the given but from what is lost or rejected,
deriving presence and promise from absence and degradation, placing waste at
the center of a reflection on value and shifting aesthetics away from
considerations of both beauty and utility to focus on what it normally and
normatively excludes. That waste is located both inside and outside bodies and
landscapes, comprising both their substance and their context, and the
significance that is accorded in this poetry shifts the discourse on both local
politics and lyric matters as each one enters a new place of modernization.
Value here is time and again extracted from depleted or degenerated stocks
(guano, worn out language, an exhausted lyric tradition), as well as s from
what is conventionally cast as negative or valueless (by-products, popular
language, difficult poetry), orienting them toward productivity …” (</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces:
César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, U Cal P: Berkeley, 2011) </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">109-110).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">To make poetry, words with their own beauty,
while protesting prison conditions and the depredations of the Peruvian
economy, both are central to the feeling that I have for Vallejo’s work.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ox-d5f6dff7d4-msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt;">Gamoneda has the curious ability to evoke
prison walls in their absence, the tumbled down stones now mark the landscape
outside Léon where he lives.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coronado
de yemas negras, como el fresno en sus días de clamor, ves las murias señaladas
con las ventanas del presidio, ves los márgenes de la extinción <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">y
la pureza del error se dibuja con lentitud de alas más transparentes que su
propio impulso, con lentitud más líquida que las sustancias transmitidas en
generaciones: sabor de cobre bajo la lengua de los recién nacidos, sabor a
fuego bajo la lengua de los hombres más tristes. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Crowned with black buds,
like the ash tree in its clamoring days, you see rubble barriers and the
windows of the prison, you see the edges of dying <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and the purity of the
mistake is outlined with a languor of wings more transparent than personal
impulse, with a languor more livid than the substances transmitted over
generations: taste of copper under the tongue of the newborn, taste of fire
under the tongue of the saddest men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Description
96-97)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The phrase “las murias
señaladas” indicates the Stone rubble that marks the deges of different
properties. In that sense these walls are famous to the stone walls of New </span></i><i><span style="color: red; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hampshire </span></i><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">where I live. Among our
fields arfe also prehistoric remains, stone altars. The prison in its absence,
its absent windows, testifies to the very nature of symbols which often are
images of that which is absent. Tastes are central to the language of both
poets.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I will conclude with a brief discussion of the work of
Néstor Perlongher, his hospital bed his prison as he lay dying of AIDS.
Perlongher was an activist in the cause of gay liberation during the period of
Argentina’s “dirty war.” The lines of his with which I began are from his Cadavers
which I translated with the help of Francisca González-Arias and Robert
Echavarren. They are a reconstruction of the experience of flight to the
relative safety of Brazil where he earned a sociology degree and became active
in the Sainto Daime, consuming a psychoactive ayahuasca tea for curative
purposes (above first paragraph). The lines below are from “Canción de la
muerte en bicicleta” (Song of Death on a Bicycle) from Chorreo de las
iluminaciones, reprinted in Rivales Dorados, ed. Roberto Echavarren (Varasek
eds. 2018)..<o:p></o:p></i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ahora,
ahora, en este instante digo. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">En
lo inconstante, en lo inconsciente, en lo fugaz me disemino. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Disperso
y fugo. En lo fangial del fango. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imágenes
ateridas bajo la lluvia de película. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Palermas,
pelmazos en el ascensor hacia el reloj.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Grave
como una piedra, cierta hiedra traviesa<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">juguetea
en la tierra mojada del pulmón<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">urdimbre
gusanesca en lo borroso del retrato. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nos
alejamos (gracias) al olvido.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Júbilo
de las calas, unión juvenil de las violetas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Leve
la marcha hacia la extinción, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">la
marca del humo en las cornetas pálidas. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Y
las patillas, pura pelusa.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Un
algodón rocía las narinas de amianto.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Uno
reza, no yo, sin ser no créese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Descréese
del ser en la fatal crecida. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Abajo
los pitos, huevos chirles. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Demasiado
agujereado el antebrazo. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Del
dolor sus efluvios terminales. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Una
reseca perfección, aunque apenas marmórea.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Now,
now in this instant I say.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">In
the inconstant, in the unconscious, in fleeting I disseminate myself.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
disperse and flee. In the muddiness of mud.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Frozen
images under cinematic rain.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Drudges,
bores ride the elevator to the clock.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Heavy
like a stone, a certain ivy penetrates<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">toys
in the moist earth of the lungs<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">wormy
weaves in the blurry photograph.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=420476650437263589" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The paired terms, “inconstante,
en lo inconsciente” are typical of Perlongher’s art. Some of that can be kept
in the rhyming of cognate syllables: “</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">the inconstant, in the unconscious,” a language-based
discovery. “</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">disemino” is from
diseminar”. scatter, is the force of the imagery lost by using the French
cognate made popular by Jaques Derrida? Is it a this register suitable or not
for the passionate imagery of the poem. We know that Perlongher’s studies were
steeped in postmodern thought. This line bristles with the raw contact of
bandage to skin: “Un algodón rocía las narinas de amianto.” An image that
resonates with “needle marks” and “a parched perfection,” constructing a realm
of affect so raw in its communicative efficacy. For all this mixing of
registers, language breaks down the the reduplicative, “lo fangial del fango.”
Roberto Echavarren identifies Perlongher, along with Lezama Lima, as one of the
first voices in the style of the neobarroco. The line, “urdimbre gusanesca en
lo borroso del retrato” can be taken as indicative of the very nature of
neobarroco composition, a weaving like worms sliding over one another, in
substance both shiny and muddy, “borroso” being in the minds of several poets
cognate with barroco.” I suggest that there is more to Perlongher’s verbal
density than the drama of images might at first lead one to suspect.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Donald Wellman</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Text presented at the University of Valencia, March 2019</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-87709847334096049562019-11-18T11:38:00.000-05:002019-11-28T10:57:22.944-05:00Meditation on Judith Butler, 2019<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Or I'm unable to outgrow the 1980s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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In my just published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crossing
Mexico,</i> I articulate multiple perspectives: Mayan, mixed race and others,
not least of all my own as an Anglo-American from the north. I write with what
I hope to be a telling delicacy of precision and understanding. Multiplicities
are and have been at the heart of my poetry. I am many and my different selves
neither harmonize nor jar. The object is neither to blend nor to shock but
allow differences their scope. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From such contemplation I ask, can a political poetry emerge?
Or is it best to allow observation to accrete such force as it can? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“When anti-intellectualism becomes the counter to
anti-censorship,” writes Judith Butler, “and academic language seeks to
dissolve itself in an effort to approximate the ordinary, the bodily, and the
intimate, then the rituals of codification at work in such renderings become
more insidious and less legibility.” (144)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAXsixsqOTgHcoWASxTsN3JqxA_cD0rjbMHpRiQmv69B2_RtjGrvSGpaXg1M4H4LHlT7mIonuwAvJ-CEHDjjV4lKu-49YBn_kqavIw4CHjQMhBoKKgMcAMo67hflyhVd-0qBaXCRxchDI/s1600/0415915880.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAXsixsqOTgHcoWASxTsN3JqxA_cD0rjbMHpRiQmv69B2_RtjGrvSGpaXg1M4H4LHlT7mIonuwAvJ-CEHDjjV4lKu-49YBn_kqavIw4CHjQMhBoKKgMcAMo67hflyhVd-0qBaXCRxchDI/s320/0415915880.jpg" width="213" /></a>In my quest for a sensitized accuracy, does my poetry fall
hostage to self-censorship as Butler suggests? I do not seek either ordinary
language or naturalized language. I am seeking to incite meditation in response
to the intricacies that poetry, specifically prosody, by which I mean rhythm
and accentuation, can incite. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Although my expertise lies at some distance from philosophy,
I dare, nonetheless, to assert that something felt compels discourse, a physical
need to enunciate. My stance may not be that distant from the ordinary language
philosophy that Butler cites. My mentors have followed Austin and Cavell as
well as both the early and late Wittgenstein, all of whom have contributed to
ordinary language theory. My instinct however leads me away from
logical-positivism with its dogmatic insistence that words should mean what
they mean. Natural language, ordinary language, what power gives me the license
to address others in my passion for expressivity? Unfiltered spontaneity is not
my goal, nor is babbling ecstasis. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I recognize that censorship shapes my impulses every bit as
much does the desire to be understood, especially now that poets have become
intellectuals under the aegis of language-centered writing. I take some caution
from Butler’s words in so far as she address self-censorship.. She continues: “The
substitution of a notion of ordinary language, often romanticized and
hypostasized, for an apparently evasive intellectual language becomes the
alternative to censorship, fails to take account of the formative power of
censorship, as well as its subversive effects. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sue Curry Jansen makes a similar point in her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and
Knowledge, </i>a point made by Foucault. Vide: “The break with ordinary
discourse that intellectual language performs does not have to be complete for
a certain decontextualization and denaturalization of discourse to take place,
one with potentially salutary consequences. The play between the ordinary and
the non-ordinary is crucial to the process of reelaborating and reworking the
constraints that maintain the limits of speakability and, consequently, the
viability of the subject.” Butler would seem to have found the trigger for
analysis buried among the folds of languages inconsistencies. An assertion that
bring her closer to the immanentism of Gilles Deleuze that her comfort allows. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The language use that is consistent with her views can also
be likened to the jump cut familiar from “new wave” film composition. This way of
torqueing introduces jarring<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>effects
into skewed discourse, as means of liberating thought.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Poetry is surely about the viability of the subject. And
skewing the text allows this degree of provocation and even unsuspected
precision. It seems I am unable to outgrow the 1980s.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meditation on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Excitable
Speech: A Politics of the Performative, </i>Routledge 1987.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-41159340595086980112019-09-26T10:07:00.001-04:002020-02-07T03:12:49.744-05:00Expressivity<br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span>
<br />
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 200%;"></span></div>
<o:p></o:p>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHbkkVvPLXFKBh4LNovhza8lrbC0ZLecreWgJ2pX9wr_q9vDDAlRf1z9X-WLnl3Amr7XQHovIm3TLX66UBgUU7pP5q5vUpQhQBkVaE_msLDTl0m14xCBkKloTVzBuDd2R-xjJnfVvV7_5h/s1600/goldfish-1911.jpg%2521Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="377" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHbkkVvPLXFKBh4LNovhza8lrbC0ZLecreWgJ2pX9wr_q9vDDAlRf1z9X-WLnl3Amr7XQHovIm3TLX66UBgUU7pP5q5vUpQhQBkVaE_msLDTl0m14xCBkKloTVzBuDd2R-xjJnfVvV7_5h/s320/goldfish-1911.jpg%2521Large.jpg" width="201" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">From the Conclusion to </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">Expressivity
in Modern Poetry</i></div>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->My work presents an exposition of the ways
in which transgressive, postmodern art and literature, in questioning pictorial
space, associates itself with the baroque. This questioning contests assumptions
about aesthetic form that had been fundamental to modernism. Transgression at
the borders of stable categories flips or folds subjective and objective
positions into a series of undetermined and undermined states. Virtual images
recede into one another as in a mirror. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Swimming in traces of orange and yellow
paint, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s goldfish, are profoundly baroque—but so is
the disruption that alters the flatness of surface, challenging the ontological
status of both object and form, for that is what the postmodern baroque does.
Its expressivity is found in complementary vectors or planes. Indeed,
complementarity is its ontology. Immanence is not a beyond but is instead
attached to inseparable expressivist planes of content. This is the lesson of
Charles Olson’s projective method: Poetry must follow the law of the line,
syllable, and breath, and hew to that vector in discovering its form, the
duration, and inflection of its line.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Are Leibniz’s goldfish, those of Henri Matisse? On the first
page of this book I wrote, “Within the interior spaces of a trans-historical
baroque, goldfish swim in a reflecting pond.” So much reflection within
translucency. A necessary immanence and expressivity are found in the interface
of adjoining or superposed realities. The sources of the postmodern baroque are
transhistorical. Its art is woven from allusions, fusing different periods and
languages. With respect to the materialization of form within a human body,
that is at the molecular level, a multilayered presence functions in both
haptic and virtual modes. Sensations of this order adumbrate the forms of
expressivity that find their home in poetry, both the poetry of the neo-baroque
and other poetries, such as language-centered writing, respond to and are
informed by postmodern realities, not as active agents for comprehension.
Before Gilles Deleuze, some argued that modernism began with the historical
Baroque in the seventeenth century: “the inner images of things are near to
reality, less opaque to the light, than are the things themselves in the outer
world.” So, Frances Yates describes the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, placing
him midway between medieval mysticism and Leibniz, a theme developed in the
last chapter of <i>The Art of Memory</i>. A point in case with reference to the
transhistorical baroque is a photograph in which Robert Rauschenberg poses
before his <i>Inside-Out</i> (1962). The “combine” or “composite” artist’s
self-presence in this photograph serves a purpose similar to the self-presence
of Diego Velasquez in <i>Las Meninas</i>. In both cases, as is true of painting
and visual art generally, the surface of the work folds virtual and material
worlds. As Mieke Bal argues, “Baroque vision vacillates between the subject and
object of that vision, changing the status of both.” Different viewers will
occupy the virtual spaces of the mirror, but a painting will always be haunted
by the presence of the artist.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert Rauschenberg, Self Portrait, 1962. Art © Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Compelling gestures toward the baroque in Rauschenberg’s
photograph include the wheel of a baby carriage (an homage in the direction of
Merz), operating cosmologically with reference to both the lens of the camera
illuminated by the flash of the instant (emission of light) and the boss of a
tile from a tin ceiling, almost planetary in appearance, decorated with
specifically baroque motifs, scalloped and folded vegetation. The image uses
collage and a decorative impulse to evoke a transhistorical play of references
that is also nonrepresentational. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The postmodern baroque is both intercultural and
transhistorical. Poets, musicians, and visual artists educated or associated
with Black Mountain College, including Rauschenberg, engaged a transcultural,
expressivist reality. Those poets associated with language writing and other
post-avant practices have been attracted to both the school of écriture in
France, and to the neobarroco, especially to the Brazilians who practice forms
of visual poetry, like Haroldo de Campos, who is the first to have used the
phrase transcreation to indicate the translingual and transcultural aspects of
compositional practice. Multiple associations between the neobarroco and
language writing may now be seen in the work of both North American poets and
Latin American poets. Nathaniel Tarn, in the introduction to his <i>A Nowhere
for Vallejo</i>, calls for a “new realism.” He writes of the death of Túpac
Amaru and the atrocities suffered by other members of his family whose tongues
were removed, the females being garroted, and the indigenous males drawn and
quartered at the hands of Spanish authorities in Cuzco, on May 18, 1781.
According to eyewitness reports, “A great crowd of people came on that day but
no one cried or spoke out.” Addressing the real of this order forces a split in
subjectivity between that which is exterior and that which is interior. Today,
as a result of a stupendous synchronicity that defines the very soul of
postmodern culture and its horizontal agglutinative posture, millions mourn the
death of African American rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur. Tupac’s embrace of gang
violence and the failure of police protection following threats against his life
are factors that persist in the drama of “black lives matter.” Racism spawns
pathological afterlives. Nonetheless, the location of violence, like the
location of history, is finally interior to perception, whether it takes the
form of words or trauma. Beauty lurks in these same precincts. So does the self
beyond the self. The self is an “other” within subjectivity as Dan Smith would
have it. </div>
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Part IX of Tarn’s <i>A Nowhere for Vallejo</i> depicts the flooding of
a mass grave.</div>
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Graves by the sea</div>
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tunneled in sand </div>
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mummies wrapped in
rich cloth</div>
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hands raised to cheeks</div>
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in gestures of horror</div>
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undressed by rain</div>
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ropes slipping from them</div>
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the food pots filing with water.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The transcendent is linked to horrors of perception that are
immanent. The poem is an example of the ethnographic way, pioneered by Olson,
among others, and followed by poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.
Enacted in these lines is the recovery of the archaic postmodern. A split that
Paul Celan identifies with the Medusa glance turning witnesses into stone. The
image has the power to shake the individual from his or her subjectivity. Art
erases ego involvement as Celan put it in his “Meridian” speech where he
addresses the absurd in the face of cynicism about the practice of poetry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-53836841924184364512019-06-14T16:58:00.003-04:002019-06-14T16:58:35.125-04:00Figuration [retrieved after aimless browsing. Does it still sing?]<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2_sDz8odsZ71Le9gVoLXwDNhxKTPzDaD2QKzSEt1z1Qh3GQpfTP-iHydh1pIIoE9aE4igrEByukAsF1Igj8bzd44H0Ma9cXXFgbsR6yIyWxhsNYMW46midZbqCAePsLEcccFFqSXul9F/s1600/Back++Logiue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1116" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2_sDz8odsZ71Le9gVoLXwDNhxKTPzDaD2QKzSEt1z1Qh3GQpfTP-iHydh1pIIoE9aE4igrEByukAsF1Igj8bzd44H0Ma9cXXFgbsR6yIyWxhsNYMW46midZbqCAePsLEcccFFqSXul9F/s320/Back++Logiue.jpg" width="223" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Back Cover. <i>Logique de la Sensation..</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">Figuration
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At some point in the present<o:p></o:p></div>
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I begin with matter of recent origin<o:p></o:p></div>
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and reach back to an elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Marginal jottings produce observations. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Small deposits left in the act<o:p></o:p></div>
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of going forward:<o:p></o:p></div>
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figurations that shape<o:p></o:p></div>
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present time,<o:p></o:p></div>
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not transforming<o:p></o:p></div>
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the present of the source, <o:p></o:p></div>
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but impelling a future still unfolding.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Block, stunt, twist, or torque<o:p></o:p></div>
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from the filaments of desiring production, <o:p></o:p></div>
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immanence inescapably<o:p></o:p></div>
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asserts itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In hop-scotch gear,<o:p></o:p></div>
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the present of any point<o:p></o:p></div>
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is never necessarily a recent point<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is instead a point that catches the eye <o:p></o:p></div>
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because a phosphorescence <o:p></o:p></div>
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once existed, then flares,<o:p></o:p></div>
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“blindspots” amid adjacencies,<o:p></o:p></div>
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vacancies where polyangular <o:p></o:p></div>
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perspectives merge, time in multiple<o:p></o:p></div>
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ordinary senses <o:p></o:p></div>
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transforming space<o:p></o:p></div>
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(inner, more within, outer).<o:p></o:p></div>
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from <i>Prolog Pages, </i>Ahadada 2009</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 9.0pt;">The
“figural” abstracts or isolates. “Always between two figures, history glides or
tends to glide, animating the illustrated ensemble. To isolate is then the
easiest way, necessary although not itself sufficient, to interrupt
representation, break to the story-line, impede illustration, liberate the
Figure: so it attains to its own reality.” </span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR;">(Giles
Deleuze, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation
</i>10)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-75422022442475976262019-05-27T14:31:00.001-04:002019-05-30T16:34:40.846-04:00Gerald Bruns, Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic of Modern Literature<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">One day, we will have some good conversation and meet in a little café in Bass Harbor. Here are some thoughts in advance of that date. Language that doesn’t congeal
squeals, I wrote in my notebook. So much starts there (in the notebook)! Or is it the other way
around? To prevent language from congealing squeal, slice or interrupt. Squeal
is a form of howl. The gambit is about protest, about words that don’t congeal
into the hierarchies of argument and disquisition. But such words may also
become slogans, as seems to have been the case with some of Ezra Pound’s
repetitions. I too mistrust the pull of language toward a rhetoric that sounds
logical and a reading that is inevitable (if partial) because of grammar’s
demands. Standard syntax with its hierarchies closes off perceptions from
outside or elsewhere Best welcome the subjectivity that takes the form of
interstellar radio reception to cite Jack Spicer or Sun Ra who appeared on my
newsfeed this morning. The problem of language testifies to the
alienation of language from meaning. This insight occupies your book. Purpose itself is betrays language. That’s Adorno. No longer can we trust purpose. A problem that engages me is to go beyond
having nothing to write, the position you ascribe to Maurice Blanchot (38).
Olson held that language is not about. It enacts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">One wonders about the impulse to action. One wonders about
embodiment. Is one reduced to privileging spontaneity? Spontaneity is perhaps
not understood by those who oppose howling. I begin there. The body and its instincts
exist. Hunger and sex exist outside social constructions. Existence obstructs analysis.
Feeding completes action. Those sere shapes who lament that there is “nothing
to express,” one of Samuel Beckett’s mantras, they live on the edge of existential despair. But the impulse “to write revolution
everywhere” also exists somewhere. It is the theme of Gustav Mahler’s second
symphony. To do <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-size: small;"><i>The subtext is my brother's death from agent orange poisoning</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">this and broadcast it requires communities and collaboration. Those energies created the radio broadcast that I heard last night as I was browsing through</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature</i> (Alabama 2018), </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">a stimulating rehearsal of ideas that continue to intrigue me and many other self-identified postmodernists or late modernists, the label that some prefer. I come at this matter with a question, is the motivation to fragmentation a recognition of the failure of language? </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">or is it a symptom of a pscycho-somatic shuttling, self-pleasure caught in a vortex of repetition. A game of fort-da? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have no idea how it is that an allusion to <i>The Good Soldier </i></span><span style="font-size: large;">infiltrated my text. Shuttle cock, shuttle cock! Poetry like paintings has been a sum of destructions (that’s Picasso), as you point out, since the
observations made by Schlegel and Hölderlin. Perhaps my squeal
is that of a poet pinned under academic wheels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I feel kinship with Jeremy Prynne. Any subject, including that
which intrigues you and also absorbs him, is a possible subject for poetic
rendering. The philosophical essay is a deep if obscure genre of poetry. And
the rendering or implementation of precepts and corollaries is itself the
subject too. Method is a subject and a means. I reached that plateau in my engagement with
the work of Charles Olson. As did Prynne. My <i>Essay Poems </i>intentionally engage a variety of philosophical
precepts in a helter-skelter way. There is no underlying argument though,
instead a chain of allusions serves purposes of construction and continued
serialization. Perhaps it is time to dispense with absorption by underlying
argument. This attitude may be an ethical shibboleth?[As I write I’m thinking of Celan’s
use of "shibboleth as presented, by Derrida that concept] I will follow your practice as I continue. I
will cite rather than explicate. My work intends itself to be an exponent of the aesthetics of the<i> Arcades Project.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So in my case now, as I write this, as in many other cases when I write, the
contents of the word-stream has been determined by the apparent sequence of
events on a specific evening in New Hampshire, their historicity. Events in series and events in overlay. A admit that I have now been
lead away from the rhythms which first engaged my attention. I resist the
scurrying impulse to make sense of where I find myself. Mahler’s strains expired
hours ago. The proposition, Mallarme’s, is to replace the poet’s voice with a
sort of “flaming out” generated by words in space, words on the space of the
page, as you observe. Never free of mimesis. Let’s think of Debussy instead of Ginsberg. Okay. It
appears that underlying my response so far is an ascription to what John
Wilkinson calls metastatic poetry. I want to use the word, “metastasis.” If I
were arguing with Wilkinson on Wieners, I’d cry “uncle! You win!” Although in
our agreement there could be no “uncle” for I agree with his understanding
completely. Once Wilkinson and I were on the same academic panel. Moved as I
was by his presentation of ideas, I tried to claw back and advocate for a
concept of redeemed subjectivity. I cited the ritual process as presented in
the anthropology of Victor Turner, employed by Nathaniel Mackey, so Mackey has
told me. John cited his casework with schizophrenic patients in order to
circumscribe my theoretical delusion with implacable fact. For clinical and
moral reasons he felt it incumbent to query the practical value of “communitarian
reaggregation” to a ritually purified social body. My immediacy was perhaps
hypnotical, having deeply engaged Turner’s thought. At this juncture, your
reading of the “binding and unbinding” effects of Wilkinson’s scurrying sadism
pleases me and my instincts. Victor Turner was my father-in-law.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the next chapter of your book, you cite, indeed
celebrate, Charles Bernstein’s comic gifts and his activation of philosophical
principles derived from Cavell and Wittgenstein. Charles is very entertaining and
he understands how to milk this aspect of his work. Casual phrases of his haunt
me, mere observations. I did not understand “Lift plow plates” until forty
years had passed since my review of his <i>Islets
Irritations. </i>Then I understood it was a literal warning “to lift plow
plates” emblazoned on cautionary signs to instruct drivers of snow plows how
to proceed in crossing the Queensboro Bridge. The found and comic combine as
discrete and accidental nodes of perception for and I believe for Charles. You cite the lines,<i> </i>“To make poetry almost / painfully /
clumsy clumpsy” (“Talk to Me” 2013:14). You note that his phrase, “the
linguisticality of perception” appears in “The Practice of Poetics” (1992:73).
That contention concerning the priority of language over perception has been
his tireless theme since my first reading of his work. We live inside language
and therefore inside all of the conundrums that are elaborated in your books or my books or his. Charles
has worn me out, worn me down. Perceptions live within language. Do our
impulses?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I’ve learned from the reading of <i>Finnegan’s Wake </i>in Chapter Seven of <i>Interruptions </i>that I am an unredeemed Husserlian in my erotic
attach,emt to layered immananeces. [Typos
left intentionally]. And that this univocal quest of the phenomenologists separates me from my
carnivalesque compeers who inhabit a public sphere in which all the languages
of the world are spoken all at once, pure heteroglossia. My delirium stands on
the very borderlines it would erase. I puzzle over bi-univocal as In find it in <i>A Thousand Plateaus.</i> This chapter of yours
deserves several rereading simply to parse the history of readings that it encapsulates.
I have rarely written Lacan’s <i>lalang</i>.
I invented the word memmemorialize this morning, Memorial Day..<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Chapter Eight makes an argument that “Joyce’s fiction shows
how experience is multiple, heterogeneous, overdetermined and fraught with
layers and fractures that overlap and interrupt one another.” Perspective
depends on context or who is observing the viewer. For Gertrude Stein, to whom
the conclusion of your book is dedicated, context is endless as paragraphs
are except for the ways in which everyone is repeating and never stops
repeating. The mechanics of my immanentism feel restored. My rhizomatics are multilayred. Maybe Deleuze and Guattari appear to get short shrift in your articulation of “The
Fragmentary Aesthetic of Modern Literature” to cite the subtitle. I admit that
I learned my mechanics from Joyce’s <i>Ulysses.
</i>Different ways of looking render the subject non identical to itself upon
exposure. At a certain point an interruption is an ending. One might wonder
about the underlying mechanics of your study as it traces the history of
fragmented discourse from a beginning to an acme possibly located in Beckett
then returns to Joyce and Stein. I often must ask myself, do history and the practice of modern poetry remain relevant to the writing of poetry at all
anymore. For me that history and practice is essential. Your book <i>Interruptions</i> is a deeply personal study and therefore
invaluable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Donald Wellman</div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-34327470166069094592018-12-08T12:37:00.000-05:002019-04-28T10:25:28.165-04:00Lyn Hejinian, The Unfollowing<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Fourteen lines on each page, that’s sonnet length.
Little rhyme or syllogism employed. No tidy conclusions. Each line as long as
it needs to be. Most discontinuous with one another but not necessarily so. There is no logic other than method in the construction of Lyn
Hejinian’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Unfollowing </i>(Omnidawn
2016). Nothing follows, no conclusions, the title says it all. Still it takes
an act of will to write as Hejinian does. Each line is inventive in its own quirky
way. “A woodpecker of wood fastened to a piece of wood by a wire and string
pecks when the string is pulled” (24). Documentary perception and
constructivist method, still I find it a surrealist image. Perhaps pecking is
an aspect of method. The image also reminds me of wooden lumberjacks
that bounce and dance on a flat board. The dance rhythms delight children.
Hejinian’s lines also dance, sometimes a jig, “I thought I saw an earthworm
stirring in the dirt, then I saw it was a sadist, wielding a quirt” (19).
Unexpected cruelties flash across the screen of my mind, “Once it was enough to
be melodious, when every song was like a nail in the jaw” (62). The matter of
what is at stake in poetry is never broached or resolved. At this moment I
happen to be listening to motets by Josquin DezPrez (Hilliard Ensemble).
Overlaid resonances of different voices in the high registers has the effect of thrilling deep regions of my inner ear. Enough for nails! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My observations are not meant to suggest that
Hejinian’s art lacks purpose or meaning. In the middle of the collection I find
the deeply allegorical poem, “The Eye of the Storm.” The only poem in the
collection with a title and a stated purpose, “For Susan Bee. In memory of Emma
Bee Bernstein.” She writes, in one breathy line, “Let us take our surrogate
selves out and leave them like guinea pigs to sniff and browse on swirls while
we sit cross-legged in a sun swept amphitheater” (Poem 35, p. 47). I did this once
upon a time, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if I remember correctly,
with my son, long ago in the forests of Oregon. Unlike many other poems in this
collection, this poem concludes in sonnet fashion with a message, “O child, be
contemporary, your soul an ornament of consciousness.” The next poem is equally
brilliant and perhaps closer moralizing than is Hejinian’s purpose, “All
prancing proud horses sweat milk, and are mothered by low-lying clouds” (48). This
surreal and maternal image carries layers to my mind of deepest preconscious
meaning, encapsulated, not quite unfollowing upon neighboring lines, where a daughter
confesses to her mother, “Mother, mother, I got married and I kept God entirely
out of the game.” It may have been unfair of me to choose passages that appeal
to my own whimsy and melancholy. You should read this book for yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-16177149244404005412018-11-30T10:27:00.000-05:002018-11-30T10:29:19.978-05:00Kate Colby, The Arrangements<div class="MsoNormal">
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Few poems rely so entirely on perception as those of Kate
Colby. Her “Shaker /caked with salt” (12) requires no explanation. Colby avoids
a generalizing gestures, “humidity” in the next line suggests a cause, but observation
for Colby is always momentary. What about her silences? “I can’t speak for /
thinking of you” – that from the first lines of the first poem in the new book,
<i>Arrangements </i>(Four Way Books 2018). Absence
haunts the book. For this poet “matter matters” which was the by-word of Eva
Hess. “Sea grapes draped / on split-rail fence” (13). There is a pastoral
ambience to that line. The poem “Green Blind” concludes “stone thrown into //
otherwise intact / algal mat. In addition to observed matter in dialog with
absence, New England melancholy may be the second pole of Colby’s art. In
general observations cancel one another out. “My vision excludes me,” she
writes in “The Beholder” (18). The
premises that underlie a philosophy of observation are soulless. Thoreau noted
the same problem when he admitted, his vision as he stood on a mountaintop
excluded his presence even as he attempted to record what he saw, a trenchant
version of the frailty of the individual moment. Observation is a species of
entrapment. There is no turning away and then it is gone. The effort of
remembering is continuous with the experience of the present. No release. “I
was once in a room so hot // and crowded that our sweat condense on / the
ceiling and rained back down. // I think of this every time / I walk beneath a
dripping // window unit.” (“The-wife” 20-21). She finds many watery and humid
images with which to surround her sorrows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Her line breaks are acute and painful. Therein lies the
poetry. These lines from “Burial” are
consonant with those U have already cited: <o:p></o:p></div>
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Never to be out done by woods,<o:p></o:p></div>
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where you heard the rain before<o:p></o:p></div>
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feeling it – now is the time<o:p></o:p></div>
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to weaves wreathes from waves<o:p></o:p></div>
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graven matts of marsh weed. (80)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The next line contains the word “pall. The feelings are
funereal. A dear one has been lost. It is also cataclysmic. Colby’s
“Annunciation,” very unlike the work of Ewa Chrusciel that I recently reviewed
holds no space for hope:<o:p></o:p></div>
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See, at the beginning of <o:p></o:p></div>
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the painting she cradles<o:p></o:p></div>
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her viscera, a small window<o:p></o:p></div>
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hovering in front of her<o:p></o:p></div>
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head. By the end, this<o:p></o:p></div>
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tentative angle has taken<o:p></o:p></div>
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from her the purpose of<o:p></o:p></div>
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history … (85)<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is difficult to quote from or truncate this poem. Coby’s
apotheosis, in the midst of such loss is to become eyes “turn myself, into
eyes.” perception itself, as steady as the effort to see may be, is after all
perception, often sadly so. I now have no doubt as to what arrangements are
cited in the tittle, “Arrangement.” This is a funereal book.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Donald Wellman </span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-90049515478192956732018-11-12T16:58:00.001-05:002018-11-13T09:16:34.532-05:00OF ANNUNCIATIONS<br />
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As I read this book of poems, I am moved by a delicate
surrealism that records fleeting moments of birdsong and lost
souls that flounder in the wakes of inflatable boats. These transitory
phenomena are associated with the presence of the dybbuk, a dislocated soul
that possesses its host body with malicious effect. In the body’s transit
between worlds, the dybbuk clings to its host, conflating the life after death
and the earthly life of anticipation and hope. A figure from Jewish folklore, it
haunts immigrants and exiles, whose experiences are the subject of Ewa
Chrusciel’ s <i>Of</i> <i>Annunciations </i>(Omnidawn 2017). Glimmers of transcendence, experiences
of annunciation, are found in natural substances, the grain of wood, incisions
and ghost rays, so the poem “Of Annunciations” would have it. In healing the blind,
the newly sighted see men walking like trees (Mark 8:24). To my mind armies
mass on the hills of Dunsinane. Shakespeare’s figure is an omen, a confusion of
armies on a frontier For Chrusciel, the most compelling manifestations of the
dybbuk are water-born apparitions, “The sea keeps its apparitions, spits out /
migrants, walking trees. Branches / conceal seeds without shore or limit.” (25)
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Chrusciel is sensitive to the presences of angel-born but
fleeting, , annunciations, moments discovered in highly original perceptions of
the meanings behind words, whether those in manuals or those from holy tracts.
Currents transect, “Inside the sea the river.” The river carries the detritus
of the of the lost souls of contemporary immigrants, “valises, simcards,
photos, coats.” (27). Her images possess her and have the power to possess the engaged reader, <o:p></o:p></div>
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In
need to be inside you<o:p></o:p></div>
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in
order to live.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In
me, you hear whimpering<o:p></o:p></div>
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of drowned
children,<o:p></o:p></div>
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they walk in
circles. (74)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The archetype of dawning perception within the womb is Mary.
The poet is unable to offer us the hope that the Archangel offered her. “What
could we offer in exchange for one child?” (74). One note of salvation
survives, “”There is an immigrant in our soul.” We discover, facing atrocity,
“In each of us the feet of an archangel.”(93). Chrusciel is sensitive to the
presence of angel-born annunciation, moments discovered in the meanings behind words.
It is a book that tests faith in human goodness, engaging its subject with
profound seriousness. Her art examines interconnected threads; she has created
a book of apocryphal intent. Ewa Chrusciel lives between two worlds, one
Polish, Catholic, and traditional, the other the domain of endless exile and
the tragic fates that populate daily news. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In this context, I am lead to remember poetry associated
with the haggadah and exile. In his <i>Passing
Over </i>(Marsh Hawk 2007),<i> </i> Norman Finkelstein addresses Jewish mysticism
and its polysemic production of rabbinic commentary. It seem that “the shape of
an absence” haunts Finkelstein’s commentary (“Mara” 49). Who is Mara, I believe
she is a holocaust survivor that Finkelstein met one day in Ohio. Tellingly, in
his <i>Inside the Ghost Factory</i> (Marsh
Hawk 2010), I find these lines “This is neither from // the ghosts nor about
them. Covering / cherubs, archons.
Filthy birds, hovering / above us. Where are the air traffic // controllers?” (61) Finkelstein’s irony and
crafty drollness are very different Chrusciel’ s engaged emotions, but she too
is often droll, indeed wry as if squinting, “I watch wild turkeys / feeding on
tiny seeds / of my nouns.” Her words are those of the witness. Finkelstein’s
are those of a raconteur who understands how devices call attention to
themselves.. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One more question for both poets: are each of us,
in some sense, displaced “jews” as <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jean<span style="color: #666666;"> </span>François </span>Lyotard argued in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heidegger and the jews”</i>? I am thinking
now about Paul Celan’s “No one / testifies for the / witness.” A survivor must
invent language in order to engage prepossessing truths. Of Chrusciel’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Contraband of Hoopoe </i>(Omnidawn 2014) I
wrote of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%;">“a
hoopoe nestled in the chest that is the poet’s immigrant heart,” and I cited this
line, ‘The hoopoe is the dybbuk messenger chattering under my bra’” (13). Her
humor and her seriousness remain constant.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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What if dybbuks were subject to production (an
idea that I take from Finkelstein’s recent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From
the Files of the Immanence Foundation </i>(Dos Madres 2018)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>. Would they have proliferated more easily in an earlier age than
this. And yes the drowning of immigrants in transit might well cause a renewal
of their unsettled wanderings as Chrusciel intimates.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
CODA<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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Immanence is often my true theme. Both poets touch
on that realm. “The Abyss awakes and smiles. / Endless depth. Endless
extension. / … Ghosts jam the frequencies. “ (“License,” <i>From the Files of the Immanence Foundation</i> 66). This may cast some
doubt on Kant’s “immanent sublime,” as it should, but for Finkelstein as for Chrusciel
thare are uncalled of presences whose substance is felt..<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Donald Wellman</div>
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Nov. 12, 2018</div>
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-51476012276121316112018-04-21T13:04:00.000-04:002018-06-16T19:46:09.088-04:00Manhattan Journal: A Lost Text Recovered<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Manhattan Journal: A
Lost Text Recovered<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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I am engrossed by the scaly yellow-brick,
art-deco facades of midtown and contemplate the numerous wooden rooftop water
tanks. These pages will review two performances at Lincoln Center and engage my
visit to the renovated Museum of Modern Art. It is Saturday, July 23, 2005. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Shen Wei Dance Arts will perform at
the New York State Theater. In 2008, this group will choreograph the Opening
Ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. The setting of tonight’s
performance promises to be luminous. The night before, I attended Patrick
Ferneyhough and Charles Bernstein's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowtime</i>
at the Rose Theater. The review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowtime</i>
in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> of July 23 is
hostile, that of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philadelphia Inquirer</i>
"curious." My review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowtime</i>
is mixed. The production testifies to one of the kernel truths of the age,
America's fatal self-immolation: overproduction, magnificent overproduction in
glass, steel, and multi-story aluminum, crystal, chandelier-hung, seven and
eight story foyers. Frank Gehry comes to mind as well as ribbons of interlaced
eight lane freeways. Some irony attaches to the venue of the production, the
Rose Theater in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle. The designers of
this tower have been commissioned to reimagine what has been lost at the World
Trade Center site. My reprise of postmodern architectural clichés is not an
incidental aside. The building is a catalog of jargon employing redoubled, reflective
surfaces. My response, composed at a Starbucks in Columbus Circle. It is
thematic to this book.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I had already suspected that an operatic,
as well as a cinematic ambition, was implicit to the activities of some members
of the current avant-garde, including language-centered poets who are my
friends. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gesamtkunstwerk</i> is a
vision shared by many modern artists: Wagner, the Dada circle, Russian
futurists, or Jean Cocteau, even Blaise Cendrars who gave us a libretto for Darius
Milhaud’a<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> La Creation du Monde</i>. Ezra
Pound wrote three operas. My suspicions of how spectacle might deride spectacle
have been confirmed. “Deriding” while “enacting” catches the appropriate ethos.
My appreciation cannot detach itself from the grandiosity and grandiloquence of
the production values in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowtime</i>.
A subversive prospectus for a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gesamtkunstwerk
</i>is in play.<br />
<br />
The staging by Frédéric Fisbach and set design by Emmanuel Clolus provide a highly-amplified
range of sensory experiences. Ferneyhough's music too has a supersaturated
quality, oracular and specular. The twelve voices of the chorus appear in their
various dramatic functions, robed in a workman-like blue. Stagecraft includes
the turning bed or chair, pulled by silent ropes, on which a figure of Walter
Benjamin or one of his avatars, has collapsed under the weight of history. A
stone, in a final moment of commemoration, becomes a transcendent object, the
Angel of History. The production values bring up the crucial issue of vision
and its realistic or phenomenal components. To what degree can such
transcendent matter be attributed in any sense to the historical Walter
Benjamin? Would he allow fact to be subsumed by aura? The production a display
of the fantasies of the composer and author. <br />
<br />
The intelligence of the libretto by Charles Bernstein, with its at times
insouciant irreverence, provides an element of refreshment over against what
might be thought of as a sententious approach to the death of Walter Benjamin.
To my ears Ferneyhough's music displays a witty deployment of too many
avant-garde clichés, sometimes brilliant in the fact of performance, but also
too much exactly that, a score ridden with glee and showmanship and wit. The
music flirted and bubbled with ethereal woodwind notes, dissonant and muzzy
images that seemed to have very little to do with the trenchant realism of the
author of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arcades</i>.
"Shadows" suggests auras and ghosts as well as a child's game of hand
puppets on the wall. Folk material of this later sort informs aspects of the
libretto, but I reject the notion that Benjamin sought to retrieve some form of
substitute for the aura associated with religious medievalism, Jewish or
Christian. For him the lack of the aura was a healthy fact of modern
technological society, a freedom. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A reader familiar with Bernstein's
personal iconography will note the intelligence and deep resonance with which
it is deployed here, freely, in its own right (rite), clever in itself but
puzzling as to the relevance of the wit displayed to Benjamin's thought or
life. Bernstein’s well known invocation of the Marx brothers (Groucho, Karl, ...)
is here, bathed in a red glow. Also are catches from childhood, mangled in a
Wittgensteinian language-game that provides the texts for some of the choral
moments in the production. For all my mixed mutterings, I want to identify two
musical high points, the pivotal piano/recitative identified as a shadow play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Opus contra naturam</i>, and the
epilog, a chorale (assigned to the Angel of History) with raspy bass notes
attaining a funereal and pensive somberness, providing a felt connection to
Benjamin's suicide. At moments like these, the collaboration between composer
and poet reaches it's highest degree of concordance, as words and music seemed
independently powerful, yet correspondingly reinforcing. The theme of suicide
as a form of waste is supplement by the necessary theme of bearing witness in
some form to suicide. Is there a gain or profit in the willful termination of
life? Desperation is an unyielding nurse to the wounds we bear. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On the following day, I explored
the spaces of the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art. My notebook is full of
observations about the different presences within different galleries, the
conjunctions of these presences eliciting another form of work with shadows.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
One of the first images on view,
after darting past the surrealistic illusions of Rene Magritte, was Diego
Rivera’s Zapata, with a noble white horse, a prancing mount after a Renaissance
canvas by Paolo Uccello, the hero’s eyes not focused on the present moment as
are the eyes of his companions. Gift of Abigail Rockefeller. In patriarchal
atonement for the removal of Rivera’s mural from Radio City Center? I favor
surrealistic steeds over surrealism itself. Breton recognized and critiqued the
market value of the surrealistic style. Like him I value it most when it
emerges in the corners of an expanding modern world. In defiance this
perception, the Museum of Modern Art is, hands down, because of wealth and
publicity, the center of modernism. The purpose the new hanging is to display
that fact. And yet I could not turn my glance aside.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
Rivera’s Zapata hangs opposite Otto Dix’s expressionistic doctor.
The obesely round doctor with his head lamp, a large reflective mirror frames a
head that embodies unjustified smugness. <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78331"><i>Dr.
Mayer-Hermann</i></a>, represents a dispassionate but well-fed genocide. If
chance turns the viewer around, back to the Rivera, there is a disturbing image
to its left of a head giving birth to a head by David Siqueiros. These
juxtapositions suggest the curator’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>unsettling
understanding of the combinations and permutations in service of both display
and appreciation. The market value of sensationalism has animated these choice.
A turn of the head leads from freak gynecology to screaming parthenogenesis.
Other than the series by Jacob Lawrence, no other paintings by
African-Americans were on offer in the tenth gallery with the exception of the
necessary gesture, a collage by Romaire Beardon which has since been put in
storage.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
On the fifth floor are the riches
of MOMA’s European collection, on the fourth are Americans of the New York
School. Ferdinand Léger and Wilfredo Lam gained a new power to draw my
attention: Léger because of his association with Blaise Cendrars on whom I am
currently writing and Lam because his invention of a pictorial tropical forest that
rhymes with other forms of the birth of négritude in the Caribbean. Lam
illustrated some of Aimé Césaire’s work. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
The conceptual relation between
artists and books is well documented, both on the fifth floor and in the
graphics gallery: the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">zaum </i>poet Aleksi
Kruchenykh’s suprematist books, like photo albums on blue construction paper
with odd bits, squares and filaments, breaking the boundary of the page, as well
as an actual copy of Rodchenko’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>design for
Mayakofsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pro Eto</i>. I often wish my
hand could work in my notebooks in a way that approaches the freshness of
design on pages like these. Futurist books like that of Tullio d’Albisola display
a raw typography. Similar to my current notebook projects, providing models for
possible approaches, are examples of the integration of text with the deconstruction
of the visual field in works by Cy Twombley or Joseph Beuys. In Beuy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eurasian-Siberian Symphony </i>(1963), a
dead rabbit is bound, cruelly to a spear, by multiple coils on the legs. The
rabbit’s carcass forms the north of this cosmic-terrestrial map. Of Kosuth’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One and Three Chairs</i>, the third is text,
the second is a photograph of the actual chair on display, conceptual art
manifest. An important <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>discovery in this
vein is the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
My numerous mental excursions today
have included a visit to Matisse’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Red Room, </i>the tonality,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>a blood
burgundy, not a luminescent red. Cézanne’s swatch like brush strokes become
Mondrian’s flakes of dried tidal mud from parched and eroded riverbeds. The art
of the fragment adjusted for shades of illumination descends from the use of
tesserae by Greek muralists. In a similar vein, some of Klee’s work has a
quality of rough shingled squares adjacent to other similar squares, for
instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fire in the Evening </i>(1929).
This art of scaling forms with rough textures is my private idiom for
nightmares. Joaquin Torres-Garcia from Uruguay uses a similar language. Jesus
Rafael-Soto (1923-2005), more stark than any of those mentioned, aesthetically
disturbing rather than balanced and proportioned, is his construction of chicken
wire, rusted, looped freely like numerous broken musical strings, attached to
the rightmost of two vertically disposed beams of aged and worn wood, raspy,
unyielding surfaces, all wobbly on little bent nail legs. Balance in overlay
here yields to the ephemeral support for an extremely disproportioned super
structure. <i>Untitled</i>. 1959-60. Wood, painted wood, metal and nails.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
At lunch in the museum, I wrote:
“To continue with the theme of overproduction in the USA, the answer I often
assume relates to the outsized wealth of the country, a reverential showiness.
A museum like MoMA is largely a means for displaying wealth on a suitably outsized,
aggrandizing scale. The walls, an unending hit parade, establish market value
in the process of selection and rejection. MoMA is thorough in its identification
of the state of legal arrangements relative to items of suspect provenance,
those involving confiscation by Nazis, for instance. The place of Malevich’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suprematist Composition </i>is secured by
such an evidentiary notice. One can neither censure nor avoid the richness of
these acquisition. These riches are more than a supplement to artistic achievement.
Apart from individual expressivity these images are all of art that I know. They
function as my vocabulary. I learn through engagement all the while suspicious
of the road map. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
After lunch I choose to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>return to view Picasso’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ma Jolie. </i>I had forgotten that it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>is housed at MoMA, surely his
most private and most abstract image. It’s scale is far more modest than
digitalized projections of its mysteries might suggest. That reassured me. The
scale almost homey, but also only a part of the generalized wash of spectacular
items on display. The open quadrants or cubes of this paining in their charcoal
grays and luminescent creams intersect with my primary nightmare or
preconscious imaginary, weathered shakes or shingles in endless, destabilizing
overlap.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Somewhere in the raw observations of
my notebook is a mediation on slices in a surface. Mieke Bal comments on the
baroque fold that is the slit representing the spear wound penetrating Christ’s
skin in Caravaggio’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Incredulity of
St. Thomas </i>(1601-1602). I had to wonder if the encrusted opening in Lucio
Fontana’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spatial Comment </i>1960 were
not an allusion to the way in which issues of flatness and abstraction fuse
throughout the history modern art. Donald Judd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Relief </i>1961 forms another wry commentary on the subject, an
ordinary bread pan embedded in a thick, rough black square.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Deleuze had commented that Lucio
Fontana’s. <i>Spatial Concept: Expectations</i>. 1959 makes space visible by
magnifying the very topography of the slit. How space flows through the slices
in the canvas. Picasso had sensed even this potentiality. There is a dart of
blue that I never before noticed outlining the right thigh and crotch of the
woman, second from, the left in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Demoiselles
d’Avignon. </i>The boy who leads the horse of 1906 has had his penis brushed
out. I had assumed there was a loincloth there. The breasts of the pregnant
Francois Gilot in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Woman Looking in a
Mirror</i>, actually seem to swell. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Seated Bather</i>, so skeleton-like, castrating mother image that she is, also
has a bit of seashell carapace on the upper part of her spine. It never fails,
in the case of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Picasso, that a new
observation sets my mind to a skewed spinning. Impossible to order the still
persistent impressions, conflated, dissonant. Some reviewers have found the new
MOMA to be dully utilitarian. They miss the intimacy provided by niches in the
former layout. I found the large spaces elegant, and the contradictions
embraced in the passage from object to object to be revelatory.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
The sky tonight is the most
resplendent blue and the air crisp but also baking hot, a surreal desert air in
the city. The performance by Shen Wei Dance Arts consisted of two unrelated
pieces. The first, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near the Terrace, Part
1</i> presents a remarkable series of visual tableaux, modeled on paintings by
Paul Delvaux, all dancers seeming to float in a chalky mesmerizing atmosphere
of coiled tensions. Only at moments is there a darting release when a body
flies, parallel to the floor into the outstretched arms of another. Otherwise
motion is extreme slow motion, as if underwater, requiring impossible to
imagine levels of athleticism for the dancers to maintain the required poise. The
human form, as often in Delvaux’s case is bare breasted, male or female, with
long skirts, creating an androgynous rather than an individualized identity. The
music was from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fur Alina </i>by Alvo
Pärt. Eight, ten, or twelve dancers, in different patterns, crossed the floor
or scaled a wall, imperceptible steps or leg-over-leg scuttles. Changing
patterns of support (Deleuzian machines) allowed a body to rest on or crawl
over or be carried by another, but there was no communication, other than
touch, no sense of looking at one another, no sense of a message or urgency,
only a trance of graceful forms, hallucinatory coordination in an atmosphere
both dense and translucent. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
The second piece, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Map (2005) </i>is very ambitious, breaking
down the choreographers unique vocabulary in six different parts before
re-assembling the whole in the seventh segment. Shen Wei is from China and has
worked in the USA for ten years now, presenting for each of the last three
years at the Lincoln Center Festival. The music for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Map (2005)</i> was Steve Reich’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Desert
Music, </i>a composition that in turn uses words from William Carlos Williams’
poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Desert Music. </i>The score in
its minimalist insistence on the relation between volume and repetition has
only an abstract relation to Williams’s lyrics, the poetry standing at a barely
perceptible third degree of correspondence to the choreography. Still, whether
Williams’s presence could be felt or not, there is a palpably American idiom in
play throughout <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Map (2005)</i>. To a
degree the setting and some of the gestures were reminiscent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Westside Story</i>, the felt presence of
Leonard Bernstein’s genius,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>further
adding to the impression of an American idiom. According to the programs notes,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Desert Music </i>is conceived in a
conscious relation to the choreographer’s signature bounces and unwinding
spiral forms. Two specific motions that seem distinctive of Shen Wei’s style
are a leg over scuttle of the figure prone on the floor, fast here as opposed
to ethereally slow in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near the Terrace,
Part 1. </i>A second movement makes the body into a very floppy coil. Figures
in some early street scenes by John Sloan have a similarly exaggerated plastic
feel. Still <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Map (2005)</i>is relatively
uninspired, possibly unoriginal in comparison to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near the Terrace, Part I. </i>Yet<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i>rewardingly, for all the opacity of the work, its bouncing and spiraling
parts come together in the seventh and final section, which is kaleidoscopic
and gritty.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
One lovely aspect of my experiences
this weekend were random conversations with people that started up when exiting
the theater and continued onto the streets, both nights. After <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowtime </i>I found myself exchanging
views with a male dancer from the Netherlands, remarkable the consensus of
feeling that we shared. After the performance by Shen Wei Dance Arts, I found
myself in conversation with a woman who works in one of the offices at Lincoln
Center. Even though she said that she was hard-pressed to get home and feed her
infant son, as she wheeled her bicycle with infant carrier down the sidewalks
past the garish Time-Warner complex, possibly the new heart of NYC, Trump Tower
being diagonally across Broadway, she could not stop expostulating with passion
on the subject of the skill of the Shen Wei Dance Arts dancers. My feelings
only partially match hers, remarkable though that she would share her passion
for this subject with me, a huge orange moon overhead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Preparing for bed, at home in New
Hampshire now, two memories come back from the museum: Rauschenberg’s brilliant
colors. Solid primary tones, baroque lighting, tracing the edges in the areas
of saturated color in the figurative areas while a more suffused light makes a
ghostly wash over the collaged posters. His overpainting transforms collage
into a way of painting, distinct from the tectonics of assembling found
materials (in Schwitters for instance, who comes closest to the same effect).
Each work is a studied and painterly composition. The second impression, detaching
itself from the visual wash in my forebrain: Creeley gazes from R. B. Kitaj’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ohio Gang </i>(1964), his eye like a
light source, follows his green arm and hand, falling on a man in a panama hat who
interviews a nude woman whom he holds on his lap as another weaves a yellow
ribbon, a second hint of color, into her hair. A red-eyed ghoul pushes a baby
carriage. The motion recursive to the matter most central to these pages: words
in transformation: Bernstein’s by Ferneyhough,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Williams’s by Reich’s music as interpreted by Shen Wei, and now, thanks
to Kitaj, an inscrutable novel, referencing Creeley, in comic, serio-scary
collage. The more the poet’s words are dissociated from the schemes that
animate the visual artist or choreographer with whom a form of correspondence
has come to be <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a collaboration, the more
then dissociation allows freedom in composition. A similar species of
connection between motion and music was the heart of the Cage-Cunningham
collaborations. Functioning like a motor at the heart of a crowded New York
City intersection, people surge together and filter away, a pursuit of values that
emerges in previously non-existent interspaces.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-24667021770985524102018-02-21T16:31:00.000-05:002018-02-26T04:20:10.239-05:00Opera Night: Street Scene<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0.26px;">
A NIGHT IN MADRID</div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0.26px;">
On a day in a February, shortly after the coincidence of
Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, the holy and the insane, I attended a
performance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Street Scene </i>with book
by Elmer Rice and music by Kurt Weil, Langton Hughes, lyrics. I sat under the baroque
garlands of the box seats in the Teatro Real, before me a stage setting that
represented a tenement on the lower East Side, shades of David Belasco, the set
both naturalistic and expressionistic. It resembled cages or cates piled on top
of one another. A tale is told of, Jews, Irish and Italians in depression era
New York City. I won’t rehearse the plot. What is the plural of immigrant
Irish, my native tribe? In this same historical period was I conceived. Destiny
dealt a desperate and hopeless hand then to mothers and fathers, adolescent children
and young children alike. In the denouement, Rose is unable to leave the scene
of the tragic murder of her mother and the arrest of her father, who had murdered
his wife in a jealous, alcoholic rage. The character of Frank Maurrant is a larger-than-life
sized bully, a suitable admonishment for bullish men today in an age like ours.
The choral finale spoke to his love for the woman he had murdered, inescapable
social realism of a Marxist bent, with incidental comic tableaus, where the
genius of Hughes takes on the rhythms of hop-scotch and other sidewalk games. All
philosophy is articulated at the level of the comic strips. Ignorance oppresses
those with generous hearts. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Street Scene </i><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>presents a social realism that feeds on the
failure of the American Dream. And yet one is compelled to cry. What can be
said about the grand choral offered near the conclusion? “He loved her.” The melodrama
brought tears to my eyes. I’m such a softy! For me an esthetic problem of
interest lay in teaching the different idioms of immigrant NYC around 1940 to a
cast whose English seemed largely attuned to the standards of the British Royal
Academy, but then stereotype is comical, possibly intentionally so, low relief
for those who identify with poverty and desperation. What an undertaking the
show was! A cast of hundreds and plot lines at cross purposes. “Heterogeneous” is
a relevant descriptor. It's time for a Broadway revival!</div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0.26px;">
18.2.2018</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Donald Wellman<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-62033021969369573472018-02-17T19:23:00.000-05:002018-02-20T08:23:24.469-05:00Editing Coherence<br />
<h1 style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">Editing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence </i>in 1981:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"></span></i></h1>
<br />
<h1 style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Desire in the shadow of
first-generation language-centered poetry. </span></h1>
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence
</i>was the first number of O.ARS, a self-described “gathering of experiments
in writing: toward a new poetics.” Two precursor roots are embedded in the
subtitle, honorific ancestor projects: “gathering” was meant in homage to the
anthologizing projects of Jerome Rothenberg, especially <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">America
a Prophecy </i>coedited with George Quasha; the other Donald Allen’s, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New American Poetics</i>. As the editor
of O.ARS (initially with the assistance of Cola Franzen, Richard Waring, and
Irene Turner), I saw the undertaking as an anthology in the dada vein,
unworried by contradictions, embracing the new with revolutionary fervor and
finding glimmers of spiritual transcendence under rubrics like “process,”
“perception,” and “method.” In the introduction “forword / forward” [stet], I
wrote sentences like “Allowed to run at seeming random, the imagination returns
to us the most convincing coherences.” That was my summation of David Antin’s
“Radical Coherency,” a talk given over the radio at my invitation to
participate in the launching of O.ARS and now the title of his recent book from
the University of Chicago Press. Of Ron Silliman’s projects, specifically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhizome </i>(also included in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence),</i> at the time described by Ron
as a series of combinations generated from a single set of 169 sentences, the
pleasure being in locating sentences that<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>“Chomsky would see as not possible,” I wrote that I had found, meanings
that don’t require explanation.” Then I continued: “A puzzle allows both
surprise and understanding. A riddle penetrates the inevitability of suffering.”
I think I have now sufficiently unburdened myself of my medievalist and
transcendentalist roots. I am suggesting that in 1981 I found “affect” to be
palpably present in the work of some figures associated with language poetry
although “affect,” “voice” and “expressivity” represent a highly suspicious set
of emotions from some language-centered points of view. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>“Strip off the protective gauze of
justification” was the watchword of O.ARS in its beginning. The virgule as well
as the “running horse: or “gimlet eye” were symbols to me of the poetic
process: to cut or slash and to assemble into a vortex of sustained energy.</span> </div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">What is O.ARS, what does it mean: it
is a going forward with the eyes on the past. It is an ironic cry, primal white
sound with a pun on “ars” and “arse.”</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1aZZ87EcmL8XL7rmX3ycD7s-x8nWE23Py0Esw2qtrjfn40gUpXMOSKVVQHnjiWhSajwn-va0ALE7nsexmgR8BVJ1WmrTiHWuitzpF8kpnIzcTjVkt4RdPZSSdD20sj3CCNOIZ3gZ56OdW/s1600/OARS+splash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1084" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1aZZ87EcmL8XL7rmX3ycD7s-x8nWE23Py0Esw2qtrjfn40gUpXMOSKVVQHnjiWhSajwn-va0ALE7nsexmgR8BVJ1WmrTiHWuitzpF8kpnIzcTjVkt4RdPZSSdD20sj3CCNOIZ3gZ56OdW/s320/OARS+splash.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence,
</i>the first number of O.ARS, gathered a variety of “other stream,” as they
are now called, poetic practices: the heart of the project lay with the
continuing vitality of poets in the Black Mountain College vein, in its total
purity, say Robert Creeley, and as inflected by dada, say Jerome Rothenberg. Michael
Andre’s at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unmuzzled Ox</i> was also
highly inspirational, in terms of contents and the care he took with
production. The projected highlighted the ethnographic thread common to both
surrealism and the Olson/Creeley tradition. That too was fundamental to my
editing posture and remains fundamental to my practice as a poet. It was as a
poet that I began to edit, not a scholar. I had ceased to care about the venues
that had once been receptive to my work and wanted instead to be associated
with work that I admired. I made statements of that sort when soliciting the
different voices represented in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence,
</i>the first number of O.ARS. I have copies of my correspondence with the
constellation of authors by which I set my course, from Antler and Armentrout
to<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Sorrentino and J. Rutherford Willems.
Where is he? </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Starting with the modernists for
whom the page had specific visual properties: Pound, Williams, Olson, it seems
logical that the agenda for O.ARS would include concrete or typewriter poetry (Karl
Kempton) or visual poetry, poesia visiva as Klaus Peter Dencker, Luciano Ori
and others would have it. I cannot reconstruct how it was that I was able to
locate and publish works by Bern Porter, maybe it was correspondence with Dick
Higgins. Surely I had already written to Mark Melnicove also. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_3" o:spid="_x0000_i1029" style="height: 279.75pt; mso-wrap-style: square; visibility: visible; width: 184.5pt;" type="#_x0000_t75">
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<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It was Dencker who introduced me to
the visual poet that I still find to be most stunning when I browse the full
set of O.ARS publication, the “Speech sheets” of Carlfriedrich Claus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The different experimental vectors
of which I was aware at the time included not only language-centered writing but
also <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>a spectrum of European and Latin
American avant-garde work, also what was then called sur-fiction. The later was
a gift from Raymond Federman and not a far leap in my mind to the work of Paul
Metcalf, another early contributor. </span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">O.ARS was in the vein, you see, of a
grand synthesis, a wedding of American pragmatism we will call it (as Don Byrd
does) with avant-garde abstraction. I sought a synthesis, instead of making a
partisan in support of a particular poetic stance as may have been the
editorial stances of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jimmy and Lucy’s
House of K </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vanishing Cab, </i>both
journals discussed in comparison with O.ARS, at a conference at the National
Poetry Foundation (Orono 2012).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My sympathy with language-centered
writing remains pronounced even though there might be an elements of parrying
and counterthrust in my presentation.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Many
poets identified with such language writing were included in the earliest
editions of O.ARS. My Bruce Andrews and my Bob Perlman and my Barrett Watten are
stunning poets. One of the most interesting letters in the O.ARS archives comes
from Charles Bernstein who a bit querulously asked me, to justify my interest
in language-writing, a challenge that represented exactly the kind of
give-and-take that I had hoped to find when undertaking O.ARS in the first
place. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">1981 the first year of O.ARS was
also the last year L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine. I treasure everything I have
shared with Charles and learned from him as if with a brother. He is the most
brilliant reader I have yet encountered. Soon he became instrumental in helping
to shape O.ARS (like Creeley, Federman, and Fanny Howe, contributing editors). Like
many poets at the time, <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I was scurrying
to catch up with Charles, for I had just begun to read Benjamin and Derrida and
Cavell. And these readings were the subject of our correspondence and
conversation and of my attempts to create editorial material for O.ARS.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Beyond the avant-garde and beyond
philosophy, for me there remained the matter of a poetic address to desire. In
many senses I am a one-eyed son of New England, that is haptically, my true
poetic angel-spirit is Robert Creeley. What distinguished O.ARS from similar
projects at the time was a sense of experiment designed to identify some form
of coherence at work in the production of poetry, a transcendence not necessarily
existing outside or beyond the poem but nonetheless satisfying in its
apprehension. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>A similar but not
identical goal had already been expressed in Charles Olson’s statement borrowed
from Robert Creeley: “form is only an extension of content.” You might in the
case of Creeley’s phrase, read “form” as the coefficient of an immanent
transcendence. From henceforth coherence would reside in method, but in 1980
such coherence was also expected to produce some glimmer of an uplifting change
of consciousness. Our mentors, as well as many of us who came to poetry in the
80s had experimented with the mushroom. In the years after Vietnam, I lived in
the forests of Oregon. Addressing the material of language with as much
analytical scrutiny as I could muster from that perspective, I sought the
visionary moment, almost as the promise that it was, that glimmer or flash was the
reward implicit in undertaking unstinting and uncompromising hard work. So
puritanical and so unoriginal in the final analysis , but a register of desire
in O.ARS that is uniquely palpable.</span></div>
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<br />
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">After <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coherence</i> came <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perception</i>, its twin, O.ARS 2. Leafing through its pages today what
strikes me most is a phrase in a statement of Charles Bernstein “the membrane
of consciousness is language.” (137). Here, in response to the irreducible
necessity of language for analysis or conceptualization, <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I may have been arguing for a form of direct
perception” as Pound would have phrased it. The light within the light that
Hildegard von Bingen associated with joy and child-like affection. As an aside,
I note, that part of the O.ARS formula was to assemble documents from the
historic literature related to each of its themes. If we are to talk about
perceptions of any order, direct or mystical (and I love the fact that it can
be both); nonetheless, it is by attending to the membrane of language, what
passes through its permeable surface or barrier as Charles would soon have it
in his poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artifice of Absorption. </i>Still,
in each volume of O.ARS (there were nine), there is a strong commitment to
perception as a form of cognition rooted in feelings and shaping a world. I
think especially a score by my close friend the composer William Goldberg, a
setting of a poem by Theodore Enslin, “A Little Night Music,” not an avant-garde
score but surely a visual rendering of feeling and perception that is more
graphically immediate than language raw and linear. </span></div>
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<br />
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
T<span style="font-family: "calibri";">he most
amazing editorial discovery of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perception</i>
is the poem “Lair” by Saúl Yurkievich, translated by my co-editor Cola Franzen.
Her attention to the Latin avant-garde was fundamental to the vision and
success of O.ARS.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">… scored speech to
the extreme perhaps.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The commitment to
translation as experiments in reading, a three-part series that followed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perception, </i>like the perception to
visual space in music and poetry is a commitment to sound as a perceptual and
communicative matrix, not filtered by language, or if it is language, it is
language “voiced.” I never intended to win every argument with which I engaged.
To do the twist or rumba, if I could was my hope.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">O.ARS <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>was looking to challenge boundaries or limits
of language while acknowledging how language inflected thought and was also
coterminous manner or method of expression. For instance, in calling for “a
speaking within hearing” in 1989 (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O.ARS
6: Voicing</i>), I was arguing against “a speaking without hearing.” Peter
Quartermain cites this phrase in his “Sound Reading” (Bernstein, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetry and the Performed Word, </i>1998: 224).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>My purpose in choosing “voicing” as a
theme clearly was not to prioritize individual voicing, cults of personality,
or American exceptionalism. I was seeking a crazy weave between voice and
vision and my reading of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaus. </i>My interest was
political and far from subtle, but also an interest in prosody as Quartermain
notes. Young poets, published in O.ARS, who had fine ears in this sense
included Craig Watson, Gill Ott, and Andrew Levy. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">On the political
front, the projective sense of “voicing” (O.ARS 6/7) may have been simplistic.
And derivative, derivative of my reading of Deleuze. For instance, I wrote,
”voicing, to emphasize process (growth, use) rather than terminal nodes or
buds, is a double articulation between heterogeneous planes (different people,
values, in fact <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">voices</i>). Perhaps I
repeat myself monomaniacally (son of Olson that I appear to be): polis is eyes,
yes, and voices (ayes), and the articulation of polis is a matter of prosody.
Through studies in translation that I still pursue, as well as investigations
of the prosody that marks the lyric or serial poem in English, I have sought
and still seek words able to articulate a value for duration, for the desire
that can be perceived to shape utterance. That is the justification for this
essay’s subtitle, “</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Desire in the shadow of
first-generation language-centered poetry</span><span style="color: black; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 16px 0px 10.66px; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Donald Wellman, 18 Feb. 2018</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-81354345699553505532017-09-21T16:00:00.000-04:002017-09-21T16:00:54.631-04:00Joel Oppenheimer<div class="WordSection1">
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">MEANING AND METHOD<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Among
poets associated with Black Mountain College, Joel Oppenheimer is especially
plain-spoken. Judging from his attention to the details of ordinary life, he
seems to have learned more from Williams than from Olson; but like Creeley, he
has assiduously applied the law of the line to experience, moving from one
perception to the next, “instanter” (c.f. “Projective Verse”. Shortly before
his death, Oppenheimer composed a small book of poems, <i>Why Not. </i>In the
preface he writes, "i meant for these poems to mean things"—an
apparently straightforward request. I'll translate (with some irony). He wants
us to believe that the poem participates in a species of perception that
constitutes its occasion. At least he wants us to accept something of this sort
before embarking on further interpretations. Not much to ask you might think, but
for many, if not most readers, meaning follows upon perception and is not
simultaneous with it. Then there is also the likelihood that meaning will
complicate perception ..<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">1)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-break-type: section-break; page-break-before: auto;" />
</span>
<br />
<div class="WordSection2">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">For
meaning to operate as immediately as Oppenheimer would have it, the eyes must
be blinkered to linguistic or poetic analysis. Perception of language “bits” in
the stream of the line or the sentence, effectively blocks perception of the
flow. This is William James' vocabulary from his "The Stream of
Thought"—where he writes, "Consciousness does not appear to itself
chopped up in bits; it flows" (240)—and I use "flow" to refer to
large overarching or underlying currents that propel a reader through a reading
of a work. "Rhythm" or "tempo" might measure of
"flow." "Intention" or "meaning" might indicate
the direction of "flow." For instance when I look at a score, it's
difficult for me to get all those bits I see on the lines to fit a rhythm. I
don't have the training or the discipline. That language is not automatic for
me, and I do better "out loud" if I hear a song first. Reading an
unfamiliar language, one stumbles into similar uncertainties; and that may be
interesting in its own way. I take this to be the object of Pound's experiments
with Propertius, readings that question the concept of the natural phrase.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Usually when reading we pay little
attention to those delimited packets of information with which as children most
of us struggled. Here is one source for a nostalgia for orality in literature.
Nonetheless, an analysis of the oral bits that compose the verbal stream is
more difficult than a study of similar bits visually registered on a page.
Sounds travel in envelopes of continuously modulating sine waves, lacking
sharply demarcated boundaries. Perhaps poets were among the first to work out a
way to scan a language, filtering sound through a grid of distinctive features.
Nothing about language, it would appear is easy or natural in and of itself.
Children learn the ropes experientially; or the infant mind might be wired so
as to respond intuitively. In either case the form a language takes is a
difficult invention in its own right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: -1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Oppenheimer's strategy (or
discipline) exemplifies an effort to simplify. He minimizes references to
anything other than the "things" of his poem. Line breaks appear at
first glance to be simply an aid to breathing or speaking. There are few
arresting bits of information. As a result, the texts support a perception that
meaning informs each part, gathering force as the poem spreads out. Consider
this small poem: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-indent: 2.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">THE
LADY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">in
the dream<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">she
comes to me clothed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">and we talk<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">now
i remember<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-break-type: section-break; page-break-before: auto;" />
</span>
<br />
<div class="WordSection3">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">when
we met<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">her
nipples<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">at
the fabric<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">of
her blouse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">later
later<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">after
the dream<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">she
is smaller<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">plainer<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> the dream<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">is
still strong<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">One
of the "things" a poem does is to color perception variously, here
with a slightly exaggerated, but drowsy quality of arousal. The poem vitiates
any difference between the things of perception and mode or mood. As I look at
the devices used in the poem, I am tempted to conclude that it's made of stuff
too vague to have much meaning in and of itself —some talking, a blouse, a
woman. Meaning lies in the quality of perception, not in an inventory of
details. I also notice at least seven references to time in these thirteen
short lines. Apparently the "transitional bits" count for as much as
the "substantive" bits (another distinction made by William James).
So in one sense the poem is a highly determined structure. The discipline
reading requires might mean tuning in to the right channel; and the poet's job,
as Oppenheimer understands it, is to send a clear signal, free of noise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="WordSection4">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">In this poem, "now",
"later', and "still" are aspects of a more complicated
development than at first seemed evident. At the first reading, they seemed to
mark stages in the development of the poet's thought. Re-reading, I'm unsure.
Is "now" simultaneous with "still?" Does "now"
mean "later" in the sense of "after the dream" There is
only one shift in time marked by verb tenses. Perhaps these adverbs do not mark
stages at all, but degrees of intensity. The lines "later later / after
the dream" are particularly difficult for me to read aloud; and I have
chosen not to end stop the first line. That would give it a purely (impurely)
rhetorical force: "later! later!"—a peak before the deflation of
expectations. So I read: "later [that is "later on" or] / after
the dream"—as a clarification of the meaning. Finally, curiously, the
waking perception, "smaller / plainer" marks the poet's bemusement.
My reading varies not that much from the facts of the surface of the poem. I
also suppress some of my prejudices, my hang ups. To perceive is to see
through—a blouse or a dream. The overarching rhythm of the poem is physical,
similar to the transformation produced by detumescence. But for all this, the
poem isn't about perception. It is <u>a</u> perception of some quality that is
almost sweetly commonplace. It is a measured perception both in its semantic
and its prosodic structures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">2)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Now
I ask, does perception at the level of unmediated response constitute meaning?
Isn't "meaning" something that you take away from the poem, something
that it gives off? In a projective poetics or poetics of perception as
theorized by Charles Olson (the radical pragmatism of James serving as
precedent), the first premise is that consciousness is continuous with itself.
It flows, perhaps in fits and starts, but not even a thunderclap turns the mind
off. It's when you divert the flow of perception in order to draw a conclusion
that you separate yourself from the processes that produce meaning. Apparently,
there's a set of meanings that you carry with you, as in the case of Olson's
man who carried his house on his head, and a set of afterthoughts, abstract
digests, or talismans associated with the baggage of daily life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br />
<div class="WordSection5">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">In Oppenheimer's poem the adverbs
mark an expanding consciousness, as opposed to gaps in perception (such
"gaps" might serve alter the flow, introducing a tumbling, cascade
effect). If the flow of perception is to roll over the reader in the form of so
many advancing waves, howeverso gently, might that not impose a degree of
passivity, disabling the reader's ability to discriminate? In other words, the
physical presence of a speaker, either "in" or "behind" the
words may give a feeling of some security, especially if the voice is
friendly—it may disarm. Much depends on how presence is read, as a figure of
persuasive force or as a fact of the poem. Presence provides a measure of the
quality of perception—a projection that in Olson's insistence carries an
ethical or moral imperative to be identified with sincerity. The emotions,
moving forces that govern heart and lungs, inform the integrity of utterance.
The reader, if only intuitively, as in a conversation, assigns attributes such
as openness (or contrariwise a desire to intimidate or confuse) to the voice
heard in the work. Oppenheimer's short poem might then be asking the reader to
share his sense of a particular moment. An aggressive deconstruction might
characterize that moment as another instance of the man undressing a woman, a
phallocentric fantasy (and it is), but that would deprive the language of those
meanings related to its occasion. The poet has risked a gesture that is open to
both criticism and understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br />
<div class="WordSection6">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Nonetheless, as power often hides
its purpose, the "serious reader" may have cause for misgivings
concerning the intentions (the meanings or design) of any and all texts—a
spiritual crisis that might be called postmodern<i>-ism.</i> In this century,
poetic integrity has frequently required the deployment of alienation effects,
of strategies designed to "deautomatize" perception. In that
tradition, the "New Sentence," theorized by Ron Silliman, shifts from
level to level of "envisagement" or contextual framing, disjointing
grammatical expectations and compelling the reader to engage semantic elements
without mediation. The text becomes a matrix, supporting some readings and not
others. The operation of what Silliman calls the "Parsimony
Principle" assures a degree of coherence or "unitary
signification."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Whenever
it is possible to integrate two separate elements into a single larger element
by imagining them as sharing a single common participant, the mind will do so.
(<i>The New Sentence </i>120)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Silliman's
"Migratory Meaning," an essay republished in <i>The New Sentence,</i>
was written in the interest of addressing "the lack of a shared vocabulary
with which to speak and think of the poem as we find it, circa 1982"—an
urgency that persists circa 2007. Silliman attempts to demonstrate the futility
underlying such commonly heard appreciative comments as "beyond the
meaning of words." His purpose seems to rhyme with Oppenheimer's, who, in
the preface to <i>Why Not, </i>castigates the reader who "has been
educated to believe that 'it means whatever i want it to mean.'" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">A workable envisagement will prove
in some sense congruent with the author's conception of the work. Silliman
cites three readings made by his students of these lines from Rae Armentrout's
"Grace," a poem that violates normative expectations for clarity: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-indent: 2.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">a
spring there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: lines-together; text-indent: 2.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">where his entry must be made<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 2.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">signals
him on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
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<br />
<div class="WordSection7">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">The
students successfully created narrative scenarios, providing coherence, and one
paralleled Armentrout's "own authorial envisagement which was that of
vaginal lubrication" —according to Silliman (114). Access to this
information probably makes these lines more transparent than intended. In her
poem she now appears every bit as exposed as Oppenheimer does in his. Yet
Armentrout seems uninterested in perception in Oppenheimer's sense. She
objectifies her body, seeing it here from a male perspective, almost as though
not present to what is happening to her (and this suggestion in itself provides
another level of envisagement). Her language deconstructs presence; challenges
standard sensibilities. Estrangement demands envisagement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Reading closely <i>is </i>difficult,
more so when the material touches on subjects that are taboo to some
sensibilities. A highly determined structure of language jostles against the
constraints represented by that structure. Social and personal forces that
impinge upon the production of measure, situate the reader and poet in an
exposed, sometimes uncomfortable position; the reader copes by producing
meanings. Envisagement is crucial to the frame semantics of Charles Fillmore
(Silliman's source) and appears to be a fundamental linguistic principle. The
process is both cumulative and synthetic. In the case of the selection from
Armentrout's poem, the first two lines add up to a sum that will vary with each
reader. The third line produces a transformation of the reader's envisagement
and so forth. The result is not necessarily an unwavering progress in a single
direction. The engagement required is participatory. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">My examples represent related
extremes, one a projective poetics of perception, the founding document being
Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" (<i>Poetry New York,</i> 1950);
the other often called "language poetry." In Olson's poetics, the
poem is a screen or an integument upon which the senses play; form becomes a
rebus, reflecting intensities and qualities of emotion along a subjective axis
of "internal necessity" (similar to that theorized by Wassily
Kandinsky), but cleansed of "lyric interference." Reading produces a
feeling of corresponding intensities. In Silliman's poetics, language is prior
to individual sense perception in all its forms. Meaning is an effect of
language, not perception. The locus of correspondence occurs at the level of
envisagement, in an inter-space where both reader and text exist as articulated
presences, not in a transcendent elsewhere barely shadowed by the page. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br />
<div class="WordSection8">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">In Olson's case, his push to detect
an underlying order among a multiplicity of interacting forces, required him to
use increasingly fragmented forms of annotation. Language poetry (influenced in
this respect by the example of Gertrude Stein) invokes—one might almost say—
interrogates normative syntax, unmooring meaning from its fixed or conventional
forms. Here, language may be likened to an electronic pulse, and as with a
digital synthesizer, the bits define the measure. Sound or meaning becomes a
function of structure, not content (and not an extension of content). The
choice of instruments seems crucial: for Silliman, an electronic synthesizer,
for Oppenheimer a boogie played on an acoustic guitar, or even its analog, the
human throat. The field of action that is the poem is finally too rich, too
highly determined to accommodate this analogy. Semantic and acoustic overlays
collide, the dissonances carefully adjusted to one another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">3)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="WordSection9">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">In
<i>Total Syntax,</i> Barrett Watten interrogates "the emotive voice, the
'I' [that in Olson] is perceptible as a person behind the words" (123). A
saturation of narrative by an "excess of signification" results in a
break down of the sentence in favor of the phrase (129). Disruptions and
refusals of completion create "a <i>linguistic</i> present" of a
compelling order. "Olson's paternalistic psychology, and his manipulation
by means of physical presence and almost a wall of sound, is a matter of some
conflict in itself. Only later do the political consequences of the romantic
position appear, insisting on the advantage of its <i>defects </i>[my italics]
in the precedence of language over self. And from that point one can enter the
work." (129-130). By means of a complex double-move, Watten both censures
and praises Olson's excesses, finding finally a precedent for the therapeutic
value of a language-based poetics. In turn, I am tempted to psychologize
Watten's need to testify, but we have before us something more crucial than
reaction formations and a generational struggle. Presence is an aspect of
language that saturates the work. Olson in his understanding of "negative
capability" (cf. <i>Special View of History</i> 15-16 and <i>Selected
Writings</i> 46) perhaps anticipates Watten's difficulty. Uncertainties,
including "defects," are both source and subject, a nexus that is
productive of the work. In "Human Universe," Olson asks, "who
can extricate language from action?" (<i>Selected Writings </i>54). His
strategy is to submerge the ego in myth or history, sometimes allowing it to
penetrate the surface in a lumbering and unskilled urgency. There is an
objection in Watten to Olson's push, as if the reader might feel threatened by
the weight of that "wall of sound" and prefer a more neutral, less
compelling tone. Although he objects to Olson's psychology, Watten does not and
cannot proscribe the presence of the self in the text. This presence always
carries an emotional force. Irrational moments in Watten’s highly conceptual
poetry carry precisely such a presence. [I will provide an example or cut this
last sentence].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="WordSection10">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Ron Silliman's <i>Paradise </i>seems
an appropriate place to look for textual strategies with reference to this
problematic "I" or self, whether “lyrical” or simply intrusive. In <i>Paradise </i>I find observations rendered
with a keenness that matches my deepest personal memories, "Or that
washing machine with a wringer on it would spot oil on the linoleum floor"
(19). But the poem also cautions the reader: such perceptions (and there are
many of them), "These are not facts" (40). I also find comments on
the current state of affairs, "Freedom is access to two malls" (54).
A radical pragmatism with respect to language, "Language cannot tell the
truth" (50), informs perception: "Length of sentence. No need to wake
the block up. By adding a trim, painters reframe the house" (50). The
image creates an analogy of insubstantiality between syntax and paint; and it
seems to work after the fashion of an ideogram. The physical presence, the
"I" or observer behind the words, often takes a self-conscious form,
"No eyes more foreign than those in the mirror" (37). Sometimes the
language violates the reader's space, "What I wish to say, dear reader,
take off your blouse" (45). For Silliman, at least as I read <i>Paradise,</i>
the space between sentences is an analog of the space between the writer and
the reader. Entry into the poem erases boundaries (and maybe Watten's point is
that Olson can seem unforgiving of his readers’ boundaries).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Reading Silliman, ordinary language
seems on the verge of dematerializing, as though there were no longer a
subject. His language is insistently a form of address. Almost jabs, phrases
impinge upon the reader, pointing repeatedly, continually shifting direction,
calling forth a subject that must be understood ultimately as the reader.
Silliman's sense of language might serve to enable, but it also questions the
possibility of a language community such as Stanley Cavell proposes when he
describes the importance of "voice". <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">To
speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent
to associate, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them--not as a parent
speaks for you, i.e., instead of you, but as some one in mutuality speaks for
you, i.e., speaks your mind. ... To speak for yourself then means risking the
rebuff ... and it means risking having to rebuff ... . (27-28)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Watten
and Silliman, both in their poetry and in their theoretical writings, seek to
clarify our collective sense of what writing does. In choosing the multi-voiced
synthesizer as instrument for poetic composition, they situate risk at the
level of subverting generic expectations concerning language and meaning. Like
Cavell they site the source of community in language, but claim that for
practical purposes that the language is broke, indeed bankrupt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="WordSection11">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">In a sense Silliman's language
pushes action off on the reader, who as collaborator, is swept along as the
frames change, but feels at a distance from the "things" of the poem
or its occasion. References to body-building in <i>Paradise </i>reenforce my
reading. Individual exercise programs conform to generic expectations that like
language in its current forms, constrain rather than empower. Indeed, Silliman
seems to identify with body builders precisely because, after a self-reflexive
fashion, he recognizes the practical limitations of self-help regimens
including his own language exercises—as though pursuit of the figure
disfigured, desire to transform deformed. I quote again from <i>Paradise,</i>
"The small parade turned out to be some sort of Portuguese holiday
celebration, one high school band and four clusters of costumed marchers,
moving slowly up what had once been the mainstreet, its sidewalks empty"
(38). Here, Silliman deflects the reader's attention away from the content: a
token and politically pathetic resistance to the reality of social
homogenization in America. Instead he invokes the social fact that main street
lacks integrity with respect to the suburbs of apple pie and the American
dream. His focus falls on the structural inversion of function with respect to
street and sidewalk, finding in the literal facts of the situation a semantic
shift that has eroded metaphors for political empowerment like "taking to
the streets." As these streets may well be those of Gloucester, the
passage provides a telling instance of a difference. Silliman's desire to
empower the reader's imagination by means of providing a structural frame here
contrasts with Olson's expressed desire to move the reader to action by
presenting facts as meaningful and consequential with respect to historical
processes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">4)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Don
Byrd's "Language Poetry, 1971‑86" is an attempt to address what he
considers "a troubling theoretical confusion and rift in serious American
poetry at this time." Confusion does exist both as to differences of
method and the continuities that link projective poetics and language poetry.
Byrd's argument is cast as an opposition between "structural" and
"material" aspects of language. His thoughts, like Watten's or
Silliman's reflect a reading of Olson. The way Byrd puts it, some language
poetry is a "grammatical poetry" that focuses on method and
"draw[s] attention back from meaning to the mechanism of production."
A second poetry, adhering more closely to Olson's methods, needs to be
distinguished from the first. It "insists on the meaningful priority of
the concrete world." For this poetry the result of experiment is that
"the physicality of language as a measure of the concrete world is
restored." For the grammarians language, as has been noted, is prior to
and enables perception. I am tempted to ascribe to Byrd's analysis, but cannot
do so because it seems evident to me that questions of semantic force are
crucial for a grammatical poetry. Envisagement, for instance, is crucial to
Silliman's poetics, and his poetry is no less physical than Olson's. To suggest
that meaning is immanent in the concrete particulars of experience, as Byrd
does, is to ignore the facts of language that make it possible to write a
poetry in which the problematic "I" risks a claim with respect to
particular situations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br />
<div class="WordSection12">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">I have tried to suggest that the
"grammatical" and the "material" stances are not
antithetical. Instead in a truly "open" poetry, the measure arises as
a result of a fusion of language and perception. When Olson writes in "the
conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open," his
purpose is to enhance perception, "the acting on you of the line." As
to language, he continues, "But an analysis of how far a new poet can
stretch the very conventions on which communication by language rests, is too
big for these notes, which are meant, I hope it is obvious, merely to get
things started" (21). Silliman and Watten in turn have deliberated upon
those conventions, picking up the thread that Olson let drop here. Olson’s
prosody maps those affects that can be attributed to attention and duration.
Language poets, in different ways, add semantic shifts or toques to the complex
materiality of the text.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="WordSection13">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Too often, too much of modern
poetry serves to confirm a sense of powerlessness, recounting the bad bargains
made in the name of keeping up with appearances in the competition for
acknowledgement. The language agents <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="QuickMark"></a>that monitor the
marketplace have little truck with meaning. Their goal is to preserve market
share. A pragmatic response to such pathos is that language constructs reality.
My purpose has been to define a meeting ground where different strategies for
poetry can meet. For a poem to generate measured responses, a presence must be
tangible in the poem. Further, the poem must produce an answering presence in
the person of the reader. In the formula, "i meant for these poems to mean
things", the presence of an ego or "voice"—even the modest voice
represented by the small "i"—represents a claim of pertinence.
Likewise, near the end of <i>Paradise, </i>Silliman writes "A pen just to
chew on" (63). Both language and the desire for language invest the phrase
with meaning. Each poet seeks to share a perception with the reader, how it was
that the poet came to be aware of such and such. Like perception and language,
meaning and method appear to be linked, not separable agencies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-break-type: section-break; page-break-before: always;" />
</span></b>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Works
discussed:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Byrd, Don.
"Language Poetry, 1971-86." <i>Sulfur</i> 20: 1987.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Cavell,
Stanley. <i>The Claim of Reason.</i> NY: OUP, 1982.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">James,
William. <i>Principles of Psychology.</i> 2 vol. 1890. NY: Dover, 1950.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Olson,
Charles. <i>Selected Writings.</i> ed Robert Creeley. NY: New Directions, 1966.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">-----. <i>The
Special View of History.</i> Berkeley: Oyez, 1970.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Oppenheimer,
Joel. <i>Why Not. </i>Fredonia: White Pine, 1987.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Silliman,
Ron. <i>The New Sentence. </i>NY: Roof, 1987.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Silliman,
Ron. <i>Paradise. </i>Providence: Burning Deck, 1985.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Watten,
Barrett. <i>Total Syntax.</i> Carbondale: University of</span> Southern Illinois
Press, 1985.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-16524478182035726072017-07-18T14:55:00.000-04:002017-09-06T14:26:38.432-04:00Contradictory sentences <div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">CONTRADICTORY
SENTENCES form series <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of indeterminate
length. Energy <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">arises in bending the
line. Abrupt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">carriage returns.
Word substitutions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Staging motivates scaled
unfoldings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“When you look at /
the fieldwork, you see <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">the problem of
agency supported by <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">/ the
sophistication of upward mobility <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">… A contrapuntal /
structure moves among <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">several different
lives.” A cue to the method <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of writing. The
world order under capitalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The method generates
incongruities <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">in the field of
action. Meaning is in play, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“an abyss of
crop-duster dictums” writes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Andrew Levy, <i>Artifice in the Calm Damages, <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">the chapbook from
which I have been quoting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">He continues
“revolutionaries / via minor routes, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">filth, blood, and
noise.” His text, in the key of anarchy, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">no newly born
utopia looms on the far horizon <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of destruction.
Alice Notley, in turn, writes, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">in the key of
really pissed off. “Most of us <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">are slaves,
largely by consent. Or / you could say <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">we’re
brainwashed.” She’s sardonic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“I work / in a shelter for battered women. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">I submitted to / a
pharaonic circumcision.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Facing the abyss
of embodied affect, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">paralyzed, I see a
cat sprawled under the clothes tree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="ES" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: ES;">Juan Goytisolo muere en Marrakech, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">city of highlife
nightmare, </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">jùjú music, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Djemaa el fna, central square of dance parties <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">and all night food stalls, estranged from myself,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">grizzled old man in a brilliant Berber jacket.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Goytisolo sat with his back to the wall. Mint tea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">a notebook for recording phrases from an Arabic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">that has no alphabet, seeking to better understand <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">those with whom he shared his exile,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">three adopted children and their mother.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The tide that surrounds us grows impatient <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">with lame-foot measures. He chose <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">the Atlantic shore at Larache for his internment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">He eschewed literary prizes. From the need <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">to educate his children, he accepted the Cervantes,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">crippled as he was and unable to stand on his legs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Now he lies with Jean Genet as he had wanted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Exile is central to my own disposition. Abjection, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">docility and submissiveness, threaded as they are <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">with anger, inform the only poetry any of us write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Remember Alice’s magic! </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Is
it possible <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">to be an American in
an age of deception? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">That’s motive for
exile in hers, in my case. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">In Andrew’s? what
does he do? He is pushed <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">toward the book.
He begins with a conclusion, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“Nothing is in
here.” Title and first line <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of an earlier
composition. By that he means <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">all that once had
embodied joy is now absent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Such desolation!
Humor doesn’t help.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“The vile stench
makes sunbathing impossible <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">and swimming /
through the slime … the tiny <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">trapped sea
creatures living inside perish <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">/ when the algae
hit the beach, creating <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">a putrid sulfurous
stench.” Is there a resolution <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">to “The chaos of
Dreaming Life” where poetry<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"> is wed with pain? Alice writes, “I wish <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">you’d waterboard
me. Make my heart crash. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">We’re immortal. It
hurt my throat. What a bunch <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of liars they
are.” She has no interest “in being myself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">I just am.” She
forces the poet’s hand, “There’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">nothing here now,
there is only me.” She has <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">no answer to hovering
incompleteness, “It isn’t <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">a good price that
you pay for writing a poem.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Everyone I know
has money for their daily needs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Even more than
they know. To them, within the confines <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">of their reality,
there’s no imaginable alternative <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">to their security
and comfort. This insight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">came to me during
a heatwave. Even for my kids, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">there’s nothing to
be done but to call the installer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“I tried to learn
how to be a person,” Alice wrote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“In death we
speak, in dreams we speak, / and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">in the immaterial
past and future our vocal cords<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">are fast as
birds.” She clutches a grail of light<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">to her chest and
gives it to a child. So too thought<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">those in honor of
Goytisolo as his bark rode the waves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">He no longer had
words for his life. Andrew concludes,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“These are my words.
Nobody asked me to write them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">As to the riddle of
this essay-poem, he suggests, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“You could
identify with the poor.” That’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">the key of Juan’s
attempt to decode <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">the analphabetism
of the crowded square.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cited texts: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Andre Levy, <i>Artifice in the
Calm Damages </i>(Victoria TX: Chax, 2017).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Andrew Levy, <i>Nothing in Here
</i>(NY: Eoagh, 2011). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Alice Notley, <i>Certain
Magical Acts </i>(NY: Penguin, 2016).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
August 20, 2017<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-53266800033959857532017-04-09T15:27:00.001-04:002017-04-09T15:27:18.427-04:00Derek Walcott<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Derek Walcott, 1930- 2017</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of how many can it be said that he or she broke ground<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and what does it signify? A metaphor<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
drawn from the ceremonies of construction<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
or is something more subtle and enduring intended<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
as in breaking bread during the vernal equinox?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I mourn the death of a poet whose smile bespoke<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
generations of gentleness, reaching back through slavery<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to the shores of Africa. His smile wrinkled<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
with watching the waves merge with the sand<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and the horizon meld with the sea.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The soft gray hair of his face<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
signified warmth and love, not sarcasm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the roof of a church in the village where I lived,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the American flag was stretched like a target<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
for aerial bombardment in order to indict<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the colonialism of the Vietnam era.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Time is a bleached rag on the clothesline of history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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“That sail which leans on light,” six monosyllabic syllables register a world as percept and as gnomon in the tides of time.</div>
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Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-80041953937898764572017-03-20T09:18:00.000-04:002017-04-09T15:37:52.278-04:00What is Philosopy<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The expressed, it is claimed, resides solely in the expression – a
frightened face like that of a young girl who has heard a bunny rabbit scream.
Implied is a world and conceptual person who is an expression of that world.
Within the dusty spaces of the barn there is a cage made of slats and wire.
There is straw and feeding dishes. A bottle from which water may be siphoned.
The bunnies are Plato and Descartes. Melville tried this trick! For one there
is a time before time began; for the other time and the cogito are coterminous.
For him, there is no before. For the girl with the frightened face, there is
only a moment detached from time or history, a “meanwhile.” “The concept is
real without being actual” (<i>What Is Philosophy<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>22). The same is true of the scream,
be it hers or Edvard Munch’s. Like Munch art finds its source in a fascination
with a prepubescent girl who exists at a limit where the state of innocence can
no longer be said to exist, except as a concept or sensation. A plane of
immanence has intersected with a plane of composition. Both exist in a chaos of
intersections which is the always embryonic human brain. With old age I weary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #a6a6a6; font-size: 13.5pt;">See Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>What is Philosophy<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>(NY: Columbia, 1993), cited as WIP.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A “meanwhile” according to Deleuze and Guattari, is neither a part
of time nor as aspect of the eternal. It exists as a form of becoming. It may
be similar to liminality or a threshold experience. The virtual is actualized
during such meanwhiles. Is this a paradigm for the actualization of the sacred?
“All meanwhiles are superimposed on one another, whereas times succeed one
another” (158). A meanwhile is a concept that philosophers produce. In the
visual arts and poetry, planes, stacked on top of one another, with variations in
degree over overlap, construct the vertical dimensions of a poem that might
otherwise be understood as serial in nature, functioning as montage does but
without the depth wherein beauty often lies. Beauty is immanent to this concept
of the poem. Deleuze and Guattari define “beauty” as “sensation.” They conclude
this section of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>What is
Philosophy,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>subtitled,
“Philosophy, Science, Logic, and Art, with this remark,<span class="apple-converted-space"><i> </i></span>“Philosophy is always
meanwhile” (159). Visualize the interface between planes in the work of Pound
or Schendel as spatial approximations of the concept of “meanwhile.” Consider
what Luce Irigary meant when she wrote, “We need to proceed in such a way that
linear reading is no longer possible (80).<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: #a6a6a6; font-size: 13.5pt;">See “The Poverty of Psychoanalysis” in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Irigaray Reader,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>Margaret Whitford, ed. (Oxforf:
Basil Blackwell, 1991) 79-104.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In WIP, Deleuze and Guattari also write, “Sensation is not
realized in the material without the material passing completely into the
sensation, into the percept or affect. All the material becomes expressive”
(167).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">There’s a leaden feeling to the blue sky, arctic air aloft. The
trees have not yet imagined their leaves, “Conceptual becoming is heterogeneity
grasped in an absolute form; sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter
of expression” (177). My lines form planes on which otherness may locate itself
as if it were a creature, as if it were folds in brain matter. That materials
of different orders form the rooms of a house through which the cosmos is able
to articulate itself, is this not “conceptual becoming” or is my world never
void of sensation and the affects that perception generates? I am an empty jar
in which electrolytes swim. I am Matisse’s gold fish in a vase of blue water.
My memories of a poet whose hand I once held in mine are not memories of his
presence so much as percepts of his giftedness. I’ll continue reading.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Composition is where the horizontal or serial embrace, enclose, or
is penetrated by the vertical, like a puncture that inflates and conflates primordial
density. In some versions a hand like that of the ur-father, Urizen, with his
golden compass reaches down from the clouds; in other versions the roiling seas
are more black because of the moonlight than they otherwise would have been.
Pierre Boulez wrote (as if he were decoding desire, “to plot a transversal ,
irreducible to both the harmonic vertical and melodic horizontal, that involves
sonorous blocs of variable individuation but that also opens them up or splits
them in a space-time that determines their density and their course over the
plane” (WIP 191).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Art, science, and philosophy are the three daughters of chaos. Is
this sentence, implying as it does a radical difference between the chaotic and
the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>chaoid</i>, a concept? Has
his daughter taken Walcott to a plane of immanence?<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The three planes may interfere with one another in the brain and
form a shadow. The planes are the plane of immanence of philosophy, the plane
of composition of art, and the plane of reference or coordination of science.
“Nonphilosophy I found where the plane confronts chaos. … Planes are no longer
distinct in relation to the chaos into which the brain plunges.” A people to
come are extracted from such shadows. Didn’t I once edit a journal called<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>chaos.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-32134915416745241752017-03-11T14:33:00.000-05:002017-03-11T03:22:24.718-05:00Current Goals<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv08hLfRrsejRX-5v46mqUkEPKU4hAdoo50xVzhq4n8DQaqaKzKul-tsghhKdTY5abIL_uMzM2jTdGd8IE28oGV48eh6Nf19F_IEx005KO_vcZxjoqbIQS9nLsbrUmGp9-ep33dYb59ZKd/s1600/Dreaming+Bali.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv08hLfRrsejRX-5v46mqUkEPKU4hAdoo50xVzhq4n8DQaqaKzKul-tsghhKdTY5abIL_uMzM2jTdGd8IE28oGV48eh6Nf19F_IEx005KO_vcZxjoqbIQS9nLsbrUmGp9-ep33dYb59ZKd/s320/Dreaming+Bali.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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I am a poet who reads. I am now making the final edits of
my manuscript <i>Expressivity in Modern Poetry. </i>Central to this volume is a poetics in which normative notions of the real are challenged and virtual or immanent planes of experience are inscribed. For these purposes language has use value. Sometimes that value lies
solely in the domain of prosody, a musical scansion unique to each line and the
energies that pass through the poem. The condition of a sustained and
articulated flow is transcendent (not transcendental) and expressive of an immanence that enables
the perception of form or rhythm, fleeting though it maybe, if only for a
heartbeat. This is the poetics I learned from poets like Ezra Pound, Charles
Olson and Robert Creeley. Though that learning be but a ghost of their physical
presence or voice, it is a poetics that I continue to develop through the
translation of poetry from several languages and from writing on the topics
presented in these two volumes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first of three sections, is a discussion of the mechanics of modernism in the arts. Section two, <i>Jarring
Effects: Charles Olson and The Poetics of Incommensurable Realities, </i>engages
both the topic of interculturality and the topic of expressivity. My intention
is to situate Olson in the forefront of American poets who have engaged
multiple cultures, decentering the relationship between America and Europe, and
folding into the poetic fabric, archaic, indigenous, and philosophical
materials derived from the history of science, psychology, linguistics and metaphysics. My goal is to testify to the power of his method and its influence both on
the work of his peers and on the work of a large number contemporary poets.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The third section, <i>Baroque
Threads, </i>explores those forms of interculturality that are a distinctive
aspect of both North American and Latin American poetry. The underpinnings of
my explorations are necessarily multicultural. From this vantage point I
address the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes, as well as that of Aimé Césaire,
Nicolás Guillén, and Lezama Lima, as well as works by the visual artist Ana Mendieta, and contemporary poets
associated with both language-centered writing and the neobarocco style. To engage this matter, throughout my studies of expressivity and interculturality, I have engaged the philosophy
of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Paranoia is the engine that drives many texts,
including much of my own writing. The very concept of “interculturality,” which
I advance, depends on the possibility of a common substance spreading itself
through various otherwise distinctive cultural forms. Substance or energy? A
field sustained by the energy that generates the field. An energy to which I
attach the term, “expressivity.” Coherent syntax fails me. My notion of the
immanent relies on the certainty that desire and paranoia will inescapably
reveal themselves. Jacques Lacan suggests that there is a moment in which the
delusional structure of thought reveals itself. The subject becomes aware that
it is thinking what it is thinking and the effect is alienating. “Up to what
point can a discourse that seems personal bear, on the level of the signifier
alone, a sufficient number of traces of impersonalization for the subject not
to recognize it as his own?”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/BaroqueBook/Programmatic%20Notice%20Concerning%20my%20Current%20Goals.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> In
this sense the goal of art and of the commentaries which I have undertaken is
an impossible impersonalization in the name clarity and objectivity.</div>
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Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/BaroqueBook/Programmatic%20Notice%20Concerning%20my%20Current%20Goals.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
am indebted to Emily Apter for this discussion of paranoia and the mirror
effect of self-alienation in the work of Jaques Lacan. <i>Against World Literature</i> (NY: Verso, 2013):78-81.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-30734483732961891522016-09-25T13:36:00.000-04:002016-09-25T13:36:56.806-04:00Notes from the Center on Public Policy <div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBefhHfp3ILynMdVejNq7GZjUL1c4557B3Y3O7wpVb3xSLF99A8J6zoy0p45A4so4XDc8L0-1VlVWJpLveT4cvnUp4PhoXsIeML5bvpYG3T0k3YVyr5wjcxbBxMcXlFRMfn2tqIhR_1Axi/s1600/Notesphoto2medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBefhHfp3ILynMdVejNq7GZjUL1c4557B3Y3O7wpVb3xSLF99A8J6zoy0p45A4so4XDc8L0-1VlVWJpLveT4cvnUp4PhoXsIeML5bvpYG3T0k3YVyr5wjcxbBxMcXlFRMfn2tqIhR_1Axi/s320/Notesphoto2medium.jpg" width="239" /></a>My subject is
Mark Wallace’s <i>Notes from the Center on
Public Policy </i>(Altered Scale 2014), but I begin with some reflections of
Robert Duncan’s <i>The H.D. Book </i>(U.
Cal., 2011). I must also note with sadness due to the ephemerality of the
web, as Jeff Derkson noted on his blog. In any case, the fine works produced at Altered
Scale, even those that took paperback form, are now extremely difficult to find.</div>
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For Duncan, to simplify, the work of H.D., E.P., as well as
his own, is “making it new.” Make something old and missing again vital,
restoring ourselves to ourselves. Poetry is understood as a process of old forms,
old forces, and old faces surfacing through the palimpsests that are the
multiple surfaces of new work. The perception of immanence, that, by contrast to
Duncan, I sometimes seek to articulate, lies among multiple discrete parts,
associated by contiguities and discontinuities that reveal rifts and aporias.
These gaps may indeed be all or the only stuff of immanence, an articulation of
negative space. Otherwise the work product may more nearly resemble Brownian movement
in a perpetually transformative swirl, never patterned entelechies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Duncan writes, “the time of a poem is felt as a recognition
of a return in vowel tone and in consonant formations, of pattern in the sequence
of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meanings” (99).
Beauty of language aside, the factor of a return is crucial for Duncan, not Wallace.
Within the phrasing and semantic drift of Wallace’s unrelenting and convoluted
paragraphs, there is little attention to the prosodic features that so delight
Duncan and which many today, including myself, often build into poetry as
baroque ornamentation, if not evidence of soulfulness. Wallace evokes the anti-humanistic
ethos of our corporate and message-driven world of political and consumerist clichés,
offering page after page of sculpted but cumulatively directionless paragraphs.
For Wallace, it seems then, that there is now no poetry, at least of the
identifiable sort dear to Duncan. The book intends primarily, however, to mock
the accumulation of human capital that is central to the postmodernism of
Pierre Bourdieu. Swirling contradictory and inconclusive utterances test
received notions of the real at every turn (15). The role of communication supersedes
the value of the subject of communication. “Each official communication existed
primarily to cement its relations to the previous communication while doing
nothing about what it discussed” (18). Such abstract “cement” is the only
perceptible real in this text. “It was impossible not to react. Revenge, retaliation,
blame, sadness, seeking, seeking, analysis, cautious tentative balances,
organizing, protesting, trading information, looking below or on surfaces, moaning
lyricism, personal confessions …”(31). The list is endless, the commas do lend
the phrasing a noticeable rhythmic effect. The passage denigrates any lyric
value that might be attached to the ego (an expected effect). The long sentence
cited above ends “no one was listening.” Language has attained the despairing
depths familiar to Duncan’s sometime friend Jack Spicer. The language is not
rhapsodic, or seductive contra a Jean Baudrillard. It is the only production that
we have, but it has little meaning apart from its function as “cement,” little
substance; instead, claims become things (40). The philosophical aporia that
bedevils claims to immanence becomes “the brink of a rift” (53), but “drift”
supplies a rhyme a few lines down the page. Wallace’s phrasing is impeccable,
even at its most tedious. Accidentally, or as a result of dumb association, to
my mind, as I read the above passage, I heard the word ”riff,” understood as a
take on a melody, ceaselessly and purposefully mundane. With such stuff, poetry
may articulate its bare bones?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-32246395553159213792016-09-20T14:06:00.001-04:002016-09-23T21:40:22.919-04:00Cows nostrils are blue: an essay on practice with comments on Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Cows nostrils are blue,” the thought came out of nowhere or
maybe from a typo while translating a discrete phrase in a line from the poetry
of Roberto Echavarren. I claim authorship, however, and want to discuss both
the language and the image conveyed by the language. The context is remarks
made by Barrett Watten in his recent book, <i>Questions
of Poetics. </i>Watten has divided the world of postmodern American poetry into
two broad swathes. Poets have now become poet/critics, so the argument runs. Both
of these conjoined identities have their origin in William Carlos Williams,
specifically, the poetry/prose division or duality inscribed within the text of
<i>Spring and All. </i>The poet/critic, it
turns out, is a figure, circumscribed between a duality of lyric utterance that
is largely subjective and an objective critical persona who performs the duty
of declaring that the language and imagery of the poem have universal significance
(although Williams’s prose deliberately undercuts poetic seriousness). The
“turn toward language,” associated with the figures of Ron Silliman, Charles
Bernstein, Carla Harryman, Lynn Hejinian, among others including Watten
himself, is understood as transforming a precarious and untenable duality into
an embrace of socially-conditioned textuality. One could say that the critical
function, rather than being split off, has been absorbed within the empirical functioning
of the poet. The “expanded field” of the title comes to be when the poet welds
together essayistic critical thought with the bending of syntax at the lyrical
level of versification. And that critical function is not always about language,
although language is one aspect of the socially constructed world that engages
the critical intelligence of the poet; however, rather than being only
grammatical, the language also engages, is modified by and modifies, the
perception of social reality, its economics and politics. Of course the turn
toward language as grammar or etymology is also very present in the work of
both Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. These poets may or may not have excavated
a radical particularity that deconstructs implicit social facts. “Social facts”
is a term I borrow from Berthold Brecht. So the turn toward language in Olson
does not perhaps push very far into social implications although his work,
Watten acknowledges, also sets the course for the emergence of the postmodern
“poet/critic.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Let’s return to the image of “cows nostrils.” The object-image,
does not share the same level or mode of objectivity, as a statement about
rampant racism in the hiring practices of academia or about the homosocial
milieu of much Black Mountain poetry (that is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s
position). But to the “cow,” I have reason to believe it is a porcelain animal
with flared nostrils. Blue because of the glaze or alternatively blue, out
there in the pasture where it grazes, blue because of a nasal drip. I imagine a
fusty atmosphere whose bric-a-brac require dusting, or a pastoral scene where
pollen dust excites allergies. Meaning, if there is any here, would seem to
derive from opaque personal associations and fall into the category that Watten
associates with the “autonomous monad of lyrical poetry” (103). Reading requires “envisagement.” The promise
of universal meaning has been cut off by severe opacity, lost, betrayed. The
reader is unable to envisage meaning and so concocts an envisagement in a game
effort to appreciate the image. The concept of envisagement is central to Ron
Silliman’s “new sentence,” a sentence with unexpected torqueing of associations
that impel the reader to envisage meaning because of an in-built thirst for
coherence.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> One
might look at the phrase, “cows nostrils are blue,” as language instead of as
an example of a concrete particular. The statement is a fully declarative
utterance and also a universalizing utterance, admitting of no challenge to its
truth. Perhaps the reader can ingest the declaration and respond with speech
acts. The text remains amusingly opaque. A second way of mastering the
challenge of the concrete particular, as Watten understands it, would be to
ground the work within a social horizon. An example from Silliman’s “toner,”
for instance, employs references to the Vietnam War and the Manson murders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Le Duc Tho. In memory’s slomo,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">bullshit monk flickers smoldering,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">and goes out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Up against the all in-inclusive<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Fate of what?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Charlie
Manson look-alike<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">tried to thumb a ride.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Gears mock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> industrial
song<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">the way fear makes a long night.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here the referents exist in socio-historical space, not some
imagist nirvana like my cow. Allusion instead of image is primary for
establishing “radical” or analytical usage, and that usage is not necessarily
objective, although it is tested for what might be called its truth value. Watten
continues, “The monolog takes itself apart only to recombine again” (93). This
auto-analysis constitutes the turn toward language. Note, however, that unfolding
syntax of this order may be associated not only with language writing but also
with the American and Latin forms of the Neo-baroque that are central to my current
studies. The rhyme of ”gears” and “fears” used here by Silliman for an emphatic
closure is not very different from baroque ornamentation. Indeed my sample phrase
can be understood as multiply complex too, a palimpsest of folded forms. A blue
cow with blue nostrils is sacred to Krishna for instance. And then there is the
folkloric “babe” the blue ox.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The bifurcated allegiance of the expressivist poet who employs
objective reference and thereby hopes to register personal affect or
subjectivity, on the one hand, and the language poet, on the other hand, who
turns to language in order to engage the social constructedness of the text is
the subject of Chapter Six, “The Expanded Object in the Poetic Field.” This
essay reads as a summative clarification of the rules of the game,
hypothetically. The poet no longer suffers from the abyssal failure associated
with the particular/universal divide. Watten’s text offers a hypothetical
thought game. The example of Olson is used to examine a failure to incorporate
truths of a social order; for instance, Olson’s method is said to ignore the
relation of gender to production whereas language-centered work is produced in
a diversely gendered working group. Social history is referenced in order to
support claims of “radical immanence” on behalf of language-associated poets (213).
The articulation of a very different “radical immanence,” grounded in the work
of Giles Deleuze, is a central aim of my current studies. Olson’s engagement
with gender, contra Watten, is the subject of the essay, “Olson and
Subjectivity,” where I argue that deeply gendered perceptions of the role of
his father and his mother and the loss of his wife, Bette, constitute an
engagement with gender that is disturbing because of its effects in the social
field of the family and the poem.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Olson’s stance is identified by Watten as one of “antidualist
immanence” wherein the poet/critics internal splitting is not recognized by a
poetics that claims to engage knowledge through poetic inquiry. The contrast to
Olson’s projective method is a concept of “textuality” (214). Watten cites the
homosociality” of Olson and his close followers and contrasts it with the
multiple ways in which language writing engaged women as social equals within
the working group, an oft commented difference.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
What is the effect of this demographic divide on “textuality”? As an example of
“textuality,” Peter Seaton’s “An Example from the Literature” is cited: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is no text and its pleasures devolve<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Upon this tristesse. There’s always a logic <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">in which the security of the existence of the momentarily<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Unimaginable is ignored in the down to earth <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Construction of the perfect poem. (cited Watten 215)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Indeed “desire” and “melancholy” are presented here as
subjective and resistant to “textuality.” Gender itself is neither marked nor
unmarked. In general female language poets address gender-based controversies
factually. A delicious catalog of gendered perceptions is the subject of Lyn
Hejinian and Carla Harryman’s <i>The Wide Road.</i> One passage reads, “A
milky blue steam rises to the surface of the sky. / Everything overlaps. All
that is animate is abstract.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Gender
does inform perception. Always, but here the presentation of the image is
highly opaque and the entailed commentary is gnomic and universal. The example
presents both poles of the of the argument that Watten develops concerning the
poet/critic in <i>Questions of Poetics. </i>The
universalizing element is figured ironic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></o:p> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Watten’s perceptions will engage the reader
who is familiar with the territory cited. They may serve as an introduction to
the differences between the poetry of late modernism and the poetry associated
with the “turn toward language” in the 70s. He tends to argue from a position
that entertains hypothetical assertions whose truth value may be doubtful and
which take convoluted, densely packed form. He cites multiple and redundant
polarities in intriguing ways, productive for the reader of engaged reflection.
Nothing he says can be dismissed as irrelevant to the history of
language-centered writing and its potential future influence. The flux of the
intellectual force may seem stunted because the negative pole to textuality,
the pole associated with immanence, is a too strong attractor possessed of its
own uncanny energy. In any case, references to “immanence,” in one form or
another, are numerous. Indeterminacy of meaning, falling within different
registers, remains a characteristic of both late modernism/postmodernism (the
school of Olson) and the work associated with language writing. Abstractions
found in the “language-identified” poetry cited in these paragraphs offer no
particularly radical constructs…similarly so Olson’s concrete particulars, even
Williams’s were no guarantor of coherence. <i>Questions
of Poetics</i> nonetheless,<i> </i>offers an
occasion for engaging<i> </i>different registers
and overlays of the poetics of texturality.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See “The
New Sentence” in <i>The New Sentence </i>(NY:
Roof, 1985) 63-93.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ron
Silliman, <i>The Alphabet </i>(Alabama 2008)
486.<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> “Olson
and Subjectivity: 'Projective Verse' and The Uncertainties of Sex.” <i>Olson
Now: Documents. </i>Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo<i>. </i>Dec.
8, 2005.<a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/">http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/</a>.
A revised version appears in <i>Olson's Prose, </i>Gary
Grieve-Carlson editor (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) 47-61.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rachel
Blau DuPlessis, <i>Purple Passages </i>(Iowa
City : Iowa 2012) 129 and 215n14 where my “Olson and Subjectivity” is
discussed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Donald/Documents/Cows%20nostrils%20are%20blue.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> NY:
Belladonna, 2011<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-23349021364132067992016-08-27T19:10:00.001-04:002016-08-29T12:20:55.144-04:00Meditative verses, after reflecting on Lowell's stone: My Woods, my Forest, my Grove of Rib Bones<div class="MsoNormal">
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<b>My Woods, my Forest,
my Grove of Rib Bones</b><br />
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Now that I’ve reread again the funereal <i>Moby Dick, </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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and pondered its display of gallows’ humor, I ask<o:p></o:p></div>
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is it but a catalog of wry, unfounded observation?<i> </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Infectious its diction! “I am horror-struck at this
antemosaic,<o:p></o:p></div>
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unsourced existence of the unspeakable horrors<o:p></o:p></div>
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of the whale, which, having been before all time,<o:p></o:p></div>
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must needs exist after all human ages are over.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Or was he before me in distinguishing “the slice <o:p></o:p></div>
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of appearance” from “the being of appearance.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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All my children have loved the Metropolitan Museum<o:p></o:p></div>
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and played upon the steps of the temple of Dendron,<o:p></o:p></div>
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where scholars have discerned early forms of the whale:</div>
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like Herman, I measure affect with obscure reference. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Irony affects melancholic wit. American vitriol,<o:p></o:p></div>
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learned from a Hawthorne in the Massachusetts woods.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In my sunken wetlands, shadows replace leviathan <o:p></o:p></div>
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and serve as hooks from which depend the shrouds<o:p></o:p></div>
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or diapering clothes of the deceased and newly fledged<o:p></o:p></div>
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authors who have been cited in my monadologies<o:p></o:p></div>
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and in hymns to the God of Love. There’s Robert Lowell<o:p></o:p></div>
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under his faux puritan gravestone beside his parents<o:p></o:p></div>
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in the Stark cemetery, Dunbarton, but a woodland jog <o:p></o:p></div>
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from my home. Creeley at Mount Auburn displays <o:p></o:p></div>
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commemorative pebbles atop his slab. Poets’ words,<o:p></o:p></div>
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“at one with the peace that we knew in her presence,”<o:p></o:p></div>
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have memorialized deceased mothers, wives and children, <o:p></o:p></div>
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inscribed medallions for antique mementos mori. <o:p></o:p><br />
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Whispering “To Celia,” in his baroque,</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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old Ben Jonson found at Penshurst flattering words <o:p></o:p></div>
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for his <i>Forests</i>
and <i>Timbers</i>, epigrams that spice his <i>Woods, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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“Arts and Precepts availe nothing, except nature be <o:p></o:p></div>
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beneficiall, and ayding.” On a misty August night<o:p></o:p></div>
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with waning moon, antique trolls in buskin<o:p></o:p></div>
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and slouch hats, capotain with ostrich feather plume, <o:p></o:p></div>
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populate the star-torn wind, mad fellows, exiled dwarves<o:p></o:p></div>
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from a Spanish court in the time of Velasquez or Rubens.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These my woods, not so far from those of Robert Frost, <o:p></o:p></div>
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a stile separates the graveyard from flood-control lands.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For echo I choose Emily’s house that only wrinkles<o:p></o:p></div>
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an earthen brow, “the Cornice in the Ground.” <o:p></o:p><br />
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During the Vietnam Era, I sought to avoid the draft.<br />
I wrote a thesis on “Judgement” in <i>Volpone. </i><br />
The
duplicity of office holders confused<br />
meaning and truth. I desired the death of the symbol<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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in my personal melodrama of “Fort!” and Da!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Gardens within gardens, animals within animals,<o:p></o:p></div>
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each fulguration of the monad instantiates eternity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I prepare through feigned indifference for judgement day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nor god-ridden, nor bed ridden, I stand on the roof beam<o:p></o:p></div>
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and survey Cetus between Pisces and Eridanus,<o:p></o:p></div>
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that maps the passage to the South Pole Purgatorium<o:p></o:p></div>
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on whose shores I once encountered a healing vision<o:p></o:p></div>
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of a nurse who sat at a frozen window. A gnomon<o:p></o:p></div>
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divided time past from time to come, itself a sail<o:p></o:p></div>
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that approached the shore and scaled the glass wall of
heaven.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Countless numbers of the recently dead from Syria <o:p></o:p></div>
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and the flood plain of the Brahmaputra were stacked<o:p></o:p></div>
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in slabs upon the shore where funeral pyres shuddered<o:p></o:p></div>
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with skyward ascending sparks and the cracking of bones.<o:p></o:p></div>
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How dare the poet write of pastoral woodland tombs <o:p></o:p></div>
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amidst such slaughter? Has the poet all alone<o:p></o:p></div>
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in his house of shadows no children that require <o:p></o:p></div>
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succor and feeding? Ironic melancholy helps him<o:p></o:p></div>
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survive the titanic glare of fate-embossed night skies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Where does the vision begin or end, thoughts <o:p></o:p></div>
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inscribed upon the waves and echoed in the stars.<o:p></o:p></div>
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He smirks as he has found another tragic metaphor,<o:p></o:p></div>
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readily at hand, another posture to assume <o:p></o:p></div>
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as affected souls leave the room and its acrid air.<o:p></o:p></div>
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He shrugs, poetry never served locally as awakening,<o:p></o:p></div>
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nor universally, in the last two centuries since Edwards <o:p></o:p></div>
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at this pulpit harangued the fearful faithful with visions <o:p></o:p></div>
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of spiders suspended above the pit of hell, a sword
descending<o:p></o:p></div>
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through the hollow-hearted dome of recursive dreams <o:p></o:p></div>
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that constitute their own reality, personal paranoia unpoliced
<o:p></o:p></div>
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by reason or decorum as it pushes new inventions forth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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From the doldrums of the brain spring fire and ice. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Shrouds that are both lifelines and garments of the soul,<o:p></o:p></div>
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encased in hoarfrost, snap in the Antarctic winds.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Melancholy as Freud asserts knows no end.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Donald Wellman</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-50599195082796896042016-07-04T10:12:00.000-04:002016-07-04T10:12:11.710-04:00Nochixtlán, ("Prolog Pages," 2009):<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">[For news view LiveLeak]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=984_1466666115" target="_blank">http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=984_1466666115</a>]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">Proud
women<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES">La Señora de
Soledad <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES">tiene una cara
alba<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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On her altar of gold, <o:p></o:p></div>
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in her gown of gold<o:p></o:p></div>
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Black and white medallions <o:p></o:p></div>
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of her beneficence. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In her house, her son <o:p></o:p></div>
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hangs, dependent from<o:p></o:p></div>
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a vault of coiled gold.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hyperbole of the cipher <o:p></o:p></div>
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Mayaguel is<o:p></o:p></div>
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The finery of goddesses<o:p></o:p></div>
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an infinity of beings<o:p></o:p></div>
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Torrential rain <o:p></o:p></div>
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softens clay<o:p></o:p></div>
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With four teats<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mother and virgin<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mixtec dress, <o:p></o:p></div>
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basket weavers,<o:p></o:p></div>
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red with gold bars<o:p></o:p></div>
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walking beside the road<o:p></o:p></div>
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toward the cattle pen.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Underlying expressions, <o:p></o:p></div>
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deeply erotic<o:p></o:p></div>
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transforms<o:p></o:p></div>
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Flowers for Angela <o:p></o:p></div>
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Polyangular<o:p></o:p></div>
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Singularly purposive<o:p></o:p></div>
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public insurrections<o:p></o:p></div>
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Badly educated<o:p></o:p></div>
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today’s children want<o:p></o:p></div>
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to think for themselves<o:p></o:p></div>
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Reform travels <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="ES">from Nochixtlán, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES">escuela primaria,
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in waves that fall away<o:p></o:p></div>
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shy of the plunge<o:p></o:p></div>
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Terrorized<o:p></o:p></div>
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Always a mouth to feed<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-9527227882398917142016-06-15T13:47:00.000-04:002016-07-28T17:25:52.929-04:00"Vegetable" -- a phenomenological reduction<br />
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The vegetable dreams; its life is sleep. In it reality and
dream are one, as in fantasy, for it dreams itself. And also because it sleeps
permanently and what it dreams is what is. The plant is the shape of its dream.
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In the animal bad dreams begin; the dream that is different from
its own being, the nightmare. Nightmare is the dream opposed to life. The dream
that bears down on consciousness or the hint of consciousness and that has to originate
in the necessity for movement. The quiet vegetable, ecstatic, is immersed in
its sleep and in not moving does not distinguish, between outside and inside.
And so does not need to have consciousness.</div>
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Consciousness has risen from movement and the movement in
turn makes it feel and creates the sensation of a rift in its reality, divides
it into my “outside” and my “inside.” Movement is necessary for the animal, it
is the generic form of its life, because its necessity is without limits. And
because it must go far in search of its satisfaction and this too is its power.
Without movement it has no power. And so the root of its necessity and the root
of its power equally oblige it to move.</div>
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For the plant all must be felt inside, only gently may it
feel the outside and not as such, but as a brush, as a wound in the worst case.
The tree, the plant live their dream within, not only feeling the earth where
its roots are buried, but all of space, the dome of the sky. For these are born
not in going out from itself, but in a budding; a passing from darkness to light,
and the air that continues to cover them as before the earth did the seed, but
without oppression; an inside very spacious and light where its being unfolds
and enters through subtle relations with “the other,” “the others,” as with the
animal. “The other” which is the origin of “the enemy.”</div>
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The feeling for other bodies will present itself to them in
different forms of relation without struggle, or antagonism; corresponding
perhaps to moments of contemplation of the beautiful in human life.. The beautiful,
even happiness devolves for man from the world where the vegetable has
continued to live, since they bring it to the interior without boundaries. To a
spacious “inside” where it is not imprisoned or exiled. To live outside is to wander
in amazement and in struggle; to live inside is to be bound and isolated. This
manner of vegetal<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>living and that which
man enjoys when he feels beauty or is happy, is neither outside nor inside;
participation in the life of the whole, without going to find it; is the presence
not pursued; the being without boundaries that senses the richness of the
universe unfolded. Meanwhile in human life one seeks the whole of that which <span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“the other” [el otro] and “the other” [lo otro] </span></span> enclose within themselves, pursuing it, conquering
it among the avatars of the necessity to possess what refuses us all the same,
the quietude of living within and the freedom of living without.</div>
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<span lang="ES" style="mso-ansi-language: ES;">Maria Zambrano, “El
vegetal,” Roma 1954, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Algunas lugares de
la pintura, </i>Madrid 1991 (Reprinted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cuba
secreta, </i>ed. Jorge Luis Arcos, Colección ensayo, no. 90. Madrid, 1996:
148-49.)</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-420476650437263589.post-44581534037583479362016-05-04T14:46:00.000-04:002016-07-14T13:31:28.570-04:00Addressing the poets who are at war over Charles Olson's Legacy<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #141823;">We gather
today and examine a reading from </span><i style="color: #141823;">Maximus IV,
V, VI. </i><span style="color: #141823;">Please note there are no page numbers to this edition, complicating
the matter of indexing and requiring a scrupulous degree of attention. The
selection is the last pages of Book V </span><span style="color: #141823;"> </span><span style="color: #141823;">and concludes with the lines that begin “off-upland
/ only Ubaid / gets “in” / to riverine / (Squam” The parenthesis is not closed
as often is the case when Olson nests concepts within concepts. These lines are
followed by a generous amount of white space, a usage of the keyboard that has
nothing to do with Mallarméan white space. The words, “Old Norse / Algonquin,” follow.
The suggestion is that there is an over-lay of different geographical riverine
registers: Ubaid, where earliest agriculture may have begun in hills above the
marshy shores of the Tigris-Euphrates confluence and the basin of the Annisquam.
</span><span style="color: #141823;"> </span><span style="color: #141823;">One paratactic system is laid over the first
in the line, “Old Norse / Algonquin,” an allusion to Leland’s </span><i style="color: #141823;">Algonquin Legends of New England, </i><span style="color: #141823;">where
the argument is found that Norse loan-words populate Algonquin language since a
time of earliest contact</span><i style="color: #141823;">. </i><span style="color: #141823;">This page
will remind us both that Olson is a poet who “reads” and second that the
process of paratactic nesting involves the construction of multiple fields in
overlay or in nested matrices. I note that “reading” can also be a shamanistic
process of decoding ream-images. And third, I stress, Olson is also a poet who
invents his necessary fictions.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #141823; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The
pages selected for this morning’s reading begin with one of the most coherent
narratives to be found in <i>Maximus</i>,
the poem “The Gulf of Mane.” Olson alters his reading of the record of a storm and
shipwreck in Damariscotta Harbor and of the underlying socio-political
situation, by adding language that indicates a concern for the welfare of the
widows of the lost sailors, “sturdy pense / in recompense / of their dear
husbands.” He also projects a conclusion in which some ribs from the shipwreck
be set up as a memorial for the valor of the lost sailors; although he doesn’t
expect appreciation of the deep history enshrined by the memorial, he concedes
with irony that “well-dressed persons” will “frequent it.” In this instance we
find Olson the citizen of dour disposition. Is it an issue of false identification
to suggest the presence of palpable, emotionally-based subjectivity in these
lines?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #141823; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Let’s
continue our reading. Be advised, if you are following my subtext that we have
already embraced several reading and interpretive strategies. The next page is
labelled “Additional “Phoenician “ notes. The notes are oblique and inscrutable
references to fertility cults practiced in the Persian Gulf or on Phoenician
shores. C.J. Jung addresses some of this material. The next page, with a generous
paratactic sweep, returns to the history of Gloucester with an account of the
mass death of phalaropes or sea geese, lured to their destruction by lighthouses
on Thatcher’s Island in 1899. The passage provides ample support for identifying
Olson one of our first eco-poets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #141823; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The
final matter discussed in today’s reading is the flawed reading of Anaximander
to be found in Aristotle and Augustine. It is a brief passage involving a pun.
If Anaximader is “alpha” with respect to ancient cosmography, then the others are
beta and “in doing so beta’d / themselves.” I hear a down-east drawl. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #141823; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Most
curious then is that the next two pages are blank. Olson invites us to write as
he does when he reads. His is a readerly writing. The blank pages may also
provide an invitation to meditate. They may indicate a prolonged and dramatic
pause before the matter of the riverine landscapes is addressed. Olson’s epic
is often indeed, in oral terms, highly dramatic. It is a constructed project
displaying deep levels of resonance. Part VI of <i>Maximus </i>which immediately follows offers the most exquisite lines
in Olson’s corpus. I will not sully them now with a historical recitation of
allusive significance. But it is with concern for the earth that I cite these
lines. “The earth with a city in her
hair / entangled of trees.” My subtext has been a desire to return to the communal
bonds that a reading of Olson’s work may inspire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #141823; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Prayerfully,
Donald Wellman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Donald Wellman
http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0