Feburary 25, 1999. Jackson Mac Low & Jena Osman,with introductions by Stephen Mounkhall and Sharon Lattig.
Jackson Mac Low was born on September 12, 1922 in Chicago and has published 32 books; published 32 performance scores and broadsides; published work in at least 150 periodicals; published work in 92 anthologies, exhibitions and other collections; published three records and five audio tapes; read and performed throughout North America, Europe and New Zealand; contributed to two double- CD anthologies of verbal and/or musical works; and contributed to a CD-ROM anthology of verbal, musical and/or visual works, among many other projects from the late 1950's until now.
Maybe you feel as if your attendance at this reading tonight were determined by a series of informed choices. An invitation arrived in the mail. You circled Jena Osman's name and Jackson Mac Low's name in the Poetry Calendar. A friend told you about it.
Maybe you feel as if your attendance at this reading tonight were determined by a series of chance operations. An invitation arrived in the mail. You circled Jena Osman's name and Jackson Mac Low's name in the Poetry Calendar. A friend told you about it.
I feel as if my attendance at this reading tonight were determined by a dialectic of choice and chance.
I first saw Jackson Mac Low at a poetry reading at St. Marks. Seated in the front row, he was writing in a small notebook as the poet read. He was not writing furiously in order to block out the world, but seemed, rather, to be completely engrossed in what the poet was saying, his posture an icon of active reception, of listening.
Soon after, I began to read Jackson Mac Low's Representative Works:1938-1985 (Roof Books) and was quite frequently as moved by his notes on "the methods used in composing and performing" his poems as I was impressed by the work itself. The strict binaries of theory and practice, methodology and art, process and product I had carried around within me for many smug years began to unravel.
In the years to follow, Jackson's work, for me, became a shibboleth for a certain anarchy of attention as it applied to the composition of poetry. Joseph Cornell, making art, sifting through trash bins on Utopia parkway. Kurt Schwitters, making art, spreading flour and water over paper, moving and shuffling and manipulating his scraps of paper around in the paste while the paper is still wet. With his fingertips, working little pieces of crumpled paper into the wet surface (adapted from Elderfield Collage: Medium and Meaning 85). John Cage, writing music, bent over an astronomical atlas, placing transparencies over the charts and turning the star positions into notes (Salzman liner notes WER 6216-2 5). Jackson Mac Low, writing poetry, creating 202 words spelled from the letters of a friend's name and then using random digits from Rand's A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to draw words from the list and to control placement on the page (Mac Low Representative Works 281).
These touchstones cavorted in my head in defiance (or at the very least alongside) of the world's inexorable demand for narrative, for celebrity, for product. And even though, Jackson Mac Low is, in his own words, "no longer composing by chance operations," his current evocative and hauntingly beautiful work is, at least in part, informed by his years of writing dialectically between chance and choice.
In an essay published in The Politics of Poetic Form (ed. Charles Bernstein Roof Books 1990), Jackson Mac Low suggests the ethical roots of his poetics lie in a basic "Buddhist and anarchist paradox: that one may make meaningful choices while being choicelessly aware and fully respecting others' choices." He makes this comment while elucidating how it is possible that the performance of his "Simultaneities" might constitute an analogical model of the types of utopian societies usually called 'anarchist:"
If such performances are utopian analogies, the procedural rules, texts, scores, and other given materials are analogs of the circumstances given by nature and historical development that would confront individuals in any society. Freedom, spontaneity, and intuition are confronted by necessity - the given - and this opposition may be 'dialectically overcome' or 'transcended' in the course of performances...When they're realized by fully committed participants, audiences and performers may live for a time in a climate close to utopia (220).
As the committed author-composer for many years of systematic chance operations, Jackson Mac Low has toiled in a climate of "bare attention," created arresting poems in an environment "relatively unburdened by the composer's emotions, taste and predilections..." (218). So now that his poems are written by largely subjective methods, his poems still "both problematize the subject from which they proceed and empower each reader [or listener] to become a co-producer of their meaning" (Mac Low introduction to Twenties Roof Books 1990).
When I was inviting Jackson Mac Low to read at the Dactyl Foundation, the talk eventually turned to the problem of labels, the problem in particular of labeling what it is Jackson Mac Low does. "Innovative" he said "is too boastful, and avant-garde is wrong because of the militaristic connotations. Experimental sounds too tentative, but I've been coming around to using the term "otherwise." It was Kurt Schwitters who said 'always do otherwise than others' and 'otherwise' feels appropriate to me."
I invite you to join me, along the continuum of chance and choice, in co-producing the meaning of the 'otherwise' Jackson Mac Low is about to read. It is presentable again..." (murmur 55).
Jena Osman
I fortuituously entered the body of Jena Osman's poetry by way of the
epigraph to her (1993) book AMBLYOPIA. In it, Walter Benjamin posits that
within the most intentional, end-directed act resides a content obscured to
vision. In the fleet passage of in-between, inaccessible to an eye occluded
by nature, even the teleological is riddled with uncertainty. The poet
later characterizes this destined unknowning as "the act of walking as a
product of what one is walking towards." It is in its allocated "three
feet" of visual space that this poetry enjoys its vigor. The innate
amblyopic experience, shaped by an eye active in "our custom of looking
inward/for the slightest burning/on the street" because "the original can be
seen in its first form only with the aid of a device." constructs a focal
distance for the work which is perhaps best characterized by Ted Pearson
when he writes "at every turn we find the literally descriptive valences of
our perceptions mediated by their stark (un)representability."
Osman investigates this conundrum as it plays out between, on the one hand,
the gaps that language generates, the seismic pressure exerted within it,
against which "The letters push together one by one until they inform." and
on the other, the ineluctable flux to which language aspires.
Or is it the "mess" of the flux in and through which language runs and the
"beautiful cut" to which it aspires?
A passage from a current collection speaks to this dilemma:
"The line is that which 'humanizes' imagination; it forms a ledge so that
we won't fall into the 'bottomless.' . . . "Authority instigates distances
and distance is crucial to the maintenance of the line. A sentence (the
line)(the body) is the link between two spaces; it is that which is the
overcoming of sides."
By means of its "dazed format" the poetry demonstrates that poise is an
activity; it resides in the continuity of a dance negotiating extremes.
In Osman's poetry, the theatres of science and the law serve as venues (of
authority) in which these extremes may be tried. In the poem "The
Character," the speaker counters expectation by asking: "can we fault you
for delimiting the justice system within an aesthetic sphere?" In other
words, can we be faulted for the impulse to (re)orient ourselves in the
ongoing drama of the puppet show which is the vast complexity of the
quotidian? The "language of law" (which poetry is and is not) commands a
syntax in which words demand other words, or, in other words . . the
literal and factual are drained by qualification until the revelation of
their arbitrary nature may be witnessed. As footnote begets the restless
elaboration of footnote, the reader participates in the chance operation of
finding purchase, of alighting on a perch of predicate to observe the
process as it unwinds into flailing gesture. Eventually, in "Authorities
(A Lecture)" the overwhelming question "But what if the nature of judgment
itself is a matter of chance?" is given voice.
In the hypertext poem "The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago,
Oculist," the periodic table yields small poems from which the reader may
initiate "chemical reactions" thereby generating new poems through the
random collisions of words. To quote Jena Osman quoting Joan Retallack
"who once heard a scientist who loves poetry say, the language of science
and the language of poetry have in common that they are both natural
languages under stress."
Under the stress -- traditionally perceived as scientific or legal -- of
language wrenched to mean singularly, the pressure of the alignment or
interlocking of term with definition, the hermetic tradition of the
preservation of agreed meaning of symbols stored in "figural cabinets," the
rigid order of dynamic systems gives way to particle collisions in the
connotative field from which new forms self generate. Under the poetic
stress of Dionysian chaos, of untrammeled Protean multiplicity, lurks the
threat of the "Loss of words or their repetitions" but also leads to the
revelation that unintelligibility is a force of preservation. The myths
embedded in the chemical elements provocatively named Niobium and Tantalum
are appropriate to a poetry concerned with a grasp which fruit and drink
elude, with the desire outside of desire. They are also a reminder that
mythos is the Greek word for 'word' and that latent within each is an
inertial energy Osman has so skillfully released. One traces the paths
opened by explosion and in doing so pushes back a frontier into a realm that
is neither legal, scientific nor conventionally poetic but infinitely more
than the sum of its elements.
It is my pleasure to introduce Jena Osman.
aces the paths opened by explosion and in doing so pushes back a frontier
into a real
--Sharon Lattig
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
Throughout its emergence over the past 30 or so years, Berssenbrugge's
poetry has consistently tested the ability of language to depict experience.
Hers is foremost a poetry of the ineffable presence of perception. It
records the human struggle for orientation from within the apperceptive flux
of being. Ranging unconstrainedly, her line entails the fleeting quality of
moment through the tug of its tempo at the stasis that would permit the
illusion of the apprehension of the object. Often engaging with the tropes
of the photographic and the visual, it subverts the imperialism of the eye,
eventually transgressing its confines. Field becomes unframed -- through
its motility and shift, limits expand, even dissolve. The attempt to fix
oneself in relation to the changing vista only produces a further altering
of the phenomenal world. The object's stability is thereby revealed as a
"subterfuge." Ever-emerging from the "ethereal" fog produced as the mind
contends with them, objects instead manifest becoming. In a mode of roam,
poetic attention is redirected as it shifts from the framable artifact to
the activity of experience itself with vivid authenticity.
The opening lines of FOUR YEAR OLD GIRL exemplify the core negotiation of
the poetry:
"In a world which transcends the confines of her transient being, she can
reach and bring existences within the compass of her life, without annulling
their transcendence."
The remainder of the book is a subtle articulation of this interaction.
This is a poetry of severance in two senses: that of the condition of
rift-making and that of reimbursement, the balm or salve which aims to
assuage and ultimately repair discontinuity. Attending to edges, gaps,
cracks and intervals, it confronts the way the mind bisects and then
enforces reparation -- the figures of dashes, sticks, I-beams and bridges
function as provisional sites of re-attachment. That they are provisional
-- make-shift and temporary -- permits the continued interaction upon which
the poetry depends. In its unflinching Odyssey, the interplay between the
hypothetical polarities of immanence and transcendence is charted, and it is
via their interdependence/cross-reliance that the riddle of the transcendent
is finally penetrated. The ethereal inhabits the earthbound; the earthly
and the earthy are freed to levitate. As Denise Newman writes: ". . . in
the long lines of the poems . . . a synthesis of the inner and outer
prohibits borders of any shape. This comfort with space is the result of an
integration, as opposed to the Western reaction of separation and
otherness."
The breathtaking stretch of Berssenbrugge's line -- termed "perilous" by
Barbara Guest -- flirts with overextension. Like the recurrent trope of the
horizon it frequently describes, it lives poised at the edge of its own
resolution into the infinite. As illusory limits signifying illimitability,
both horizon and line function in the words of Leslie Scalapino "as if there
were one infinite line of 'relation' that constitutes the 'event horizon' .
. ." "The event horizon is so loaded, the horizon’s everywhere." She quotes
from Sphericity: "the seam, my experience of our experience, a horizon at
dawn, is the instant of apprehension."
This "instant of apprehension" also embraces other problematic
integrations: it is the restraint of the voicing in her poems which,
through its apparent distance, gives way to the intimate. Representing
(which perpetuates an other) is juxtaposed with containing (which brings the
other within) in the text of FOUR YEAR OLD GIRL. Formally, the syntactical
play with fissure cannot exist without, nor be erased by the elision which
is its remedy. The deft handling and achievement of these integrities were
what no doubt led Jackson Mac Low to name Berssenbrugge "a poet of the whole
consciousness."
--Sharon Lattig
C.D. Wright
The author of ten books of poetry, she is a Professor at Brown University,
a co-editor of Lost Roads Publishers and the current State Poet of Rhode
Island. Among her many accolades are awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute;
she is also the recipient of the Poetry Center Book Award, the Witter Bynner
Prize, and a Rhode Island Governor's Award for the Arts.
Tonight, I've chosen to lead you into C.D. Wright's poetry by way of her
most recent work, DEEPSTEP COME SHINING. This book, a single, ranging and
remarkably inclusive poem, is an exploration of the elastic core of place as
it is revealed by a necessarily transient observer. By uttering the line
"Now do you know where you are" the poem bespeaks the ongoing nature of the
act of bringing into relation upon which understanding depends. It poses
the unspoken question to the passer-by: How does one connect with the
meaning that permeates what the poet has named "the flow of stimuli" but
endlessly recedes from the full frontal view of its interpreter? One is
seduced by the pursuit, drawn in as journey's register is given full
expression.
In asking "Where do you folks live at?" and replying "Between the a and the
t," the work situates itself on a cusp between sensory poles: that of the
piano -- the "dead mother" -- whose original sounds resounded in prenatal
darkness, and that of the prominent, belated status of vision, here
obfuscated by the sounds of smoke. In its will to consume the unaverting
eye and effect an unseeing through violence and the assimilation of sight
back into the other, more immediate senses, Wright's language undertakes a
poetic descent, an Orphean deepstep into a netherworld in which the bard
lives through the act of returning to this world what was previously
invisible in it. Poised on the verge of turning to see what is forbidden to
sight, resisting at last in favor of the sound of the steps that echo, the
sightlessness of inspiration, of deep knowing is paradoxically allowed to
shine. Through this process, environment regresses to atmosphere: "The
genesis of direction breaks and scatters" and the poetic is liberated. In
closing, the poet writes: "In the hither world I offer a once-and-for-all
thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning." Hither, with us, this
evening, we are happy to bring you C.D. Wright.
--Sharon Lattig
The Work of George Oppen in a Time of War
Lecture and Discussion by John Taggart, Professor of English and Director of the
Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Shippensburg University and Michael Davidson, Professor of Literature, University of California,
San Diego
Friday February 22nd
Introduction to “The Work of George Oppen in a Time of War"
Rick Snyder
I’d like to thank everyone for coming out tonight. This event is the first in a series of poetics lectures at the Dactyl Foundation, and I’d like, first of all, to thank the director of Dactyl, Tori Alexander, for her kind and generous support. Before we get started, I’d also like to say a few words about how this particular event came about, and why I’m pleased to have John Taggart and Michael Davidson, two very distinguished poets and critics, speaking tonight on the work of George Oppen.
In my mind, and in the minds of many others, I think—Oppen’s poetry been all too relevant over the past five months and 11 days. Though they had long been meaningful to me, it seems sad now that it took a horrible and disorienting event and its predictably insane and disorienting aftermath to return my attention fully, again, to Oppen’s poems. Indeed, though Oppen’s work has always been, I think, vital and relevant to anyone who would take the time to read it—it has taken on an even greater sense of gravity for me in the past few months. In some ways, this is perhaps predictable in a time of tragedy and crisis—as Oppen’s work frequently and movingly recounts his experiences fighting in France in World War II. Moreover, many of Oppen’s poems not only address experiences of war, but are refracted through his profound dismay over the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam war, which was raging throughout many of his most productive years. But one of the reasons I think Oppen is great poet is that his work exhibits a type of direct complexity and deep contextualization that make it impossible to accurately speak of it as “war” poetry, or any other “type” of poetry—perhaps even Objectivist poetry. Indeed, much of Oppen’s work is concerned with the contexts—the environments, both natural and cultural—in which identities are formed and agency is created or negated. His best-known work, “Of Being Numerous,” directly engages ideas of singularity and community within the context of atomized, commodified urban life—along with concerns of history, war, and personal love. Such widespread concerns are treated as truly inseparable in Oppen’s work, which can be seen as multi-perspectival and capable of rendering, in concise form, a large portion of the world as known, recalled, and hoped for by one person—but one person who actively empathizes with the situations, the contextual environments of so many others. As John Taggart has written of Oppen’s work, “This is a different sort of empiricism, an emotional empiricism.” Indeed, in his commitment to this type of empathic yet empirical encounter, Oppen produces a deeply layered poetry that’s at once social and personal, and that seeks knowledge, as Michael Davidson notes, through “a relationship between rather than of things, a negotiation rather than an appropriation.” This sense of relationality pervades Oppen’s work, and can be read, as Taggart has demonstrated, as the means by which the poet creates his own sense of identity. But as he forges an identity in relations, in what Taggart calls “opposites held in opposition,” Oppen’s commitment to the materiality, to the empiricism of both language and the world leads the reader to a realization of the interdependence that binds the idea of the singular to that of the numerous. Along the way, Oppen helps the reader to see the limitations of both the seemingly independent individual and the seemingly known community, as well as of the language by which each encounters and understands the other. “Oppen calls attention not only to language as a structure,” Davidson writes, “but to the spaces that words are presumed to fill.” These qualities of Oppen’s work, which I think can be described as ethical as well as aesthetic, are among the reasons I wanted to discuss it, and why I am so pleased to have such distinguished Oppen scholars as John Taggart and Michael Davidson here tonight. Indeed, I can think of no poetry I consider more relevant or necessary than Oppen’s in a time when many people, I think, have had to reconsider what is at stake in such terms and concepts as American, Afghan, imperialist, terrorist, office worker, and villager.
Before we get started, I’ll say tonight’s event will feature presentations by the two speakers, and after those, we’ll open the floor for a question and answer session. I’d like to mention that both John Taggart and Michael Davidson will read tomorrow at 4 p.m. at Double Happiness, 173 Mott St., just south of Broome—and I hope that everyone can it there as well.
Our first speaker tonight is John Taggart. The author of nine volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is When The Saints, Taggart has also published a collection of essays on contemporary poetry and poetics, Songs of Degrees, as well as a book of meditations on Edward Hopper, Remaining In Light. Taggart is, indeed, well known as both a poet and a scholar, and what distinguishes Taggart’s critical work is the depth of his engagement with and his long-standing commitment to the work of such poets as William Bronk and Susan Howe, and particularly Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Taggart’s work is uncompromising in its commitment to understanding—to fully investigating the terms and tropes—by which poets such as Howe, Zukofsky, and Oppen generate meaning in their sometimes difficult works. As part of this commitment, Taggart seeks to engage the works of these poets at many, often overlapping, levels—such as the semantic, musical, social, and historical. While there are many reasons to recommend Taggart’s critical writing, perhaps what I admire most about it is its insistence on following its own route, on letting an engagement with poems under consideration lead the critic and the reader into a deeper, and perhaps unexpected, clarity of understanding. I’m happy that he was able to come here to speak tonight, and I’d like to mention that we have copies here of a recent Chicago Review that contains Taggart’s compelling 65-page essay on Oppen, which I alluded to earlier in the introduction. Please welcome John Taggart.
Our next speaker, Michael Davidson, teaches Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century and Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and The Material Word. His most recent books of poetry are Post Hoc and The Arcades. Like his poetry, Davidson’s critical work is among the most engaging I know, in part, because of Davidson’s ability to illuminate the individual works of poets by subtly placing them within a larger social and historical context. His work on the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance is a wonderful investigation of both how these poets represented themselves, and how their work can be seen as reinforcing or countering such representations. Davidson’s most recent critical volume, Ghostlier Demarcations, presents a number of compelling investigations of the idea of materiality—both social and linguistic—in the works of poets such as Gertrude Stein, Robert Duncan, Susan Howe, and George Oppen. In this book, Davidson presents his idea of the literary work as a “palimtext,” a physical artifact that bears the traces of its environment, its influences, and its own processes of development. Such a concept seems crucial to understanding modern poetry in general, and the literally layered work of George Oppen, in particular. Regardless of its exact focus, however, Davidson’s work is always marked by a finely honed understanding of the multiple factors that go into the creation and reception of a literary work. This understanding is readily apparent in his fine introduction to the New Collected Poems of George Oppen, copies of which we have here tonight. I’m very pleased to introduce Michael Davidson
May 14th, 2002 Meena Alexander, Illiterate Heart
Introduction by Yi-Chun Tricia Lin
Good evening. Today we are here to celebrate the words of Meena Alexander on the occasion of the publication of her latest collection of poetry, Illiterate Heart. One of the most prominent names in cross-cultural American poetic writing, Meena does not limit her writing to one genre. In fact, her words travel almost all genres. Her essays, fiction, and memoirs are equally celebrated. Her words, be they in poetry, fiction, or essays, bring worlds and languages to our literary imagination, and as such, have enriched our literatures. The world histories (movements, partition, and independence) and geographies (rivers, cities, states) are brought into the intimacy of our reading, savoring of her poetics. As Meena writes in “Gold Horizon,” “Place names splinter/on [her] tongue and flee.” Let me name some of these names. Many of the facts of her life are well documented. I gleaned the following fragments from the BBC “Her Story” Page (incidentally, to show you the “splintering” of Meena’s name, let me quote that a quick Google search yields 4,260 sites):
· Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad in India in 1951 to a family of Syrian Christians.
· As a very young child she moved back and forth between Allahabad in the North and Kerala on the southwest coast, where her parents came from.
· When she was five, her father started to work in Sudan and she travelled by boat, with her mother, to join him.
· In the Sudan she received an English education, and went on to study English at Khartoum University at thirteen. There she wrote her first poems in English, which were translated into Arabic and published in a local newspaper.
· At eighteen she travelled to England to study for a Ph.D. and then returned to India to teach at universities.
· In 1979 she moved once again, this time to live and work in the United States with her husband.
Now, a Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Graduate Center living in Manhattan, Meena has not stopped quilting her multilingual, multicultural, and multinational trajectory through places and oceans with her words.
Michel Foucault notes that “[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” This postmodern epoch of juxtaposition and boundary blurring, defined by Foucault, cannot be better captured in the worlds reflected in Meena’s poetic words. They embody the personal/political, the private/public, the self/other, the local/global, the native/the migrant, the diasporic/transnational in our age. In this epoch, one constant that remains, in Meena’s words, seems to be the multiple movements of “migrancy”—the moving between and among words, emotions, things, places, and so on.
I have arrived at Asian American literature, alone away from my far-away island of Taiwan and lonely from sitting too long in the philosophy classrooms, with the empty echo of différance and all other forms of thinking made all too abstract. Let me say that I wish I had had a more formal introduction to Meena’s and her colleagues’ work in Asian America. In my aloneness and loneliness—and desperation, I stumbled on their words quite unintentionally, perhaps in spite of the careful designs of all my professors in the doctoral program where I did my Ph.D. My contact with Meena’s work would mark my departure from my previous intellectual pursuit and my entry into the so-called “ethnic” and cross-cultural literature.
It seems as if I had left the objective and the universal for the subjective and the personal, but the quest persists wherever I go: Who am I? What am I? From reading Meena, I know that the objective and the universal is always already subjective and personal. In her search for the truths to these civilization-old questions, Meena has invited all her readers to partake in the quest. Her writing invariably returns to such self-reflective queries, as seen in "Gold Horizon," where the questions are posed in Hindi and Malayalam:
Kya, kya kum kon hai? Indher kum kon hai?
Namal invide ara? Ivide namal ara?
Her ruminations over the who-am-I, what-am-I quests are at turns both philosophical and personal. The answers of who and what one is are as meaningful as the examining and re-examining of all that surrounds the "who-ness" and "what-ness." In this way, Meena has "translated lives" for herself and all those that participate in the journey with her and arrived at "a politics of constructing meaning," Trinh T. Minh-ha’s definition of translation.
Thanks to literary outputs from Meena and others of her calibre and versatility, it is no exaggeration to say that poets/writers like Meena Alexander alters the landscape of (Asian) American literature. Perhaps even more than altering the literary landscape is its power of altering our imaginary. Our worlds—on the U.S. continent, as a result, has become all the richer. Meena’s imagination captures the simultaneity of the diasporic and transnational. Her poetry paints a cosmopolitan, postcolonial female subject, who’s at once the other, the native, the global, the local, and who is forever the subject-in-transition, the subject-in-translation, and the subject-trans-nations.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let us welcome Meena Alexander and hear her precious words.
November 28, 2002 Kenneth Koch and Carter Ratcliff
Introduction by Gerrit Henry
Sometime in the 1960s, John Ashbery said of Kenneth Koch's poetry that it "gives you the impression that you are leading an interesting life:going to parties and meeting interesting people, falling in love, going for rides in the country and to public swimming pools, eating in the best retsaurants and going to the movies and the theater in the afternoons. By comparison, most other modem poetry makes me feel as if I were living in a small midwestem university town."
The same holds true today - Kenneth Koch continues to deliver us from the jaws of an often awesomely abysmal academic contemporary poetry into the waiting arms of contemporary poetry's most nimble and convincing comic visionary. Koch is a romancer of the sublime in the everyday, a tireless animator of inanimate objects that have just been waiting to get into the act: "is there no one," he has written, "who feels like a pair of pants?"
Beyond that, Kenneth Koch is a true and noble Romantic,probably one of our last. Listen to these words from his seminal poem, "Fresh Air": "Is there no voice to cry out from the wind and say what it is like to be the wind,/ To be roughed up by the trees and to bring music from the scattered houses/And the stones, and to be in such intimate relationship with the sea/That you cannot understand it?" These words remind me of no two poets so much as Shelley and Byron, with their far-flung empathy with nature, and their deep love of human nature and human possibility. Koch awakens us from the ongoing bad dream of bad culture, high and low, into a world where trees rough us up, stonessing, and the sea is so deep as to be gratifyingly impenetrable. In short, Koch restores luster to the tired title of poet, taking us along for the profoundly entertaining. Ladies & gentlemen, please help me welcome to the Dactyl Foundation, Kenneth Koch!
Carter Ratcliff is well-known as an art figure, as well as an art critic. His situation is much like that of a late-19th-century painter he wrote a book on-John Singer Sargent, whose suavity of manner belied a solid depth of perception. And I remember with delight - and considerable envy – one long-ago issue of Art in America with five Ratcliff articles in it. That was all the articles that were to be had in that issue - and probably all that were
needed.
Tonight is a great opportunity to acquaint - or reacquaint--ourselves with Carter's
poems, which are at least as suave and deep as his art criticism. They are a heady mix of the pop - "I'm in the mood for theater" "Did you dream the impossible dream?" - with the classical - "But where is my urban Aphrodite ?/where is my Ariadne and my labrynth?" Where are they indeed?
They're right here, at hand, in amazing multiplicity, as Ratcliff builds his poetic megastructure out of things thought and things dreamed, things seen and things felt, not all things bright and beautiful - the latent force of the terribilita that Carter is so enamored of lurks at every turn, heroic, yet lyrical, mythic, yet endearing. "Inside their shells, it's like pearly skulls," Ratcliff off-rhymes, "with grave thoughts just beneath the surface -" he seems to be speaking of his own lustrous, laconic, surface, his own hidden
depths. Even more to the point is this triplet: "You want to feel/not at home, but deep in the everywhere/where you might have wanted to live..." Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the sublime "everywhere" -and help me welcome to Dactyl Carter Ratcliff!
The Genius of (Mis)Translation Series
Tonight we're beginning the first of three evenings at Dactyl Foundation
featuring poets who do translations. Our aim is to offer a different
kind of reading series—because there are so many good ones in the City
already. Supporting translators is a way of constructing diverse
programming. But why diversity? Why support interaction between
cultures? and languages? Everybody sort of assumes that it's a good
thing, but what are the actual results? Philosophers of science now tell
us that the act of translation is a source of creativity. For Dactyl
Foundation, with our interest in theory, science and the arts, this is
an important issue we 'd like to explore.
We usually talk about the fidelity of a translator's work. If the
faithful translation has beauty as well, it ought to mimic the beauty of
the original. Translation is often a thankless task. It's often viewed
as skill rather than a talent. There is reason to believe, however,
that there may be more opportunity for creativity involved in this task
than in writing what we usually call "original" verse.
What do I mean by original or new? How can you say a work is truly
"new"? A phrase that has always been possible in English, and simply
has not yet been uttered is not truly "new." No one has ever said, "The
gods of Plato had Internet access," but someone could have, because this
phrase conforms to the laws of the language and can be understood by
those laws. A phrase that is meaningless is not truly "new." No one has
ever said, "Access original is had phrase or seeing" but this utterance
is just noise. It is not a new thing because it is not a thing: it can't
do anything. It can't have an effect in and of itself, that is, without
the help of a hearer supplying it with some kind of personal meaning. (I
take a pragmatist view of reality. A thing is what it does.)
A truly new phrase communicates an idea by reinterpreting the laws of
the language. To borrow an idea from Wittgenstein, a creative piece of
language is a move that is made according to the rules of the game, but
that changes the rules at the same time.
Translators work in an area where they are more often forced to create
new meaning. If the target language does not have an equivalent for a
concept in the original poem, then the translator must find a phrase
whose meaning is not normally understood in the way the translator makes
it understood. Perhaps a pun is involved. Perhaps a metaphor is called
into service. After the reading, we'll have a few minutes of discussion,
and I'd like to invite the poets to offer some examples from their own
experiences—when they felt like they pushed the boundaries of the target
language a bit.
.
In literary studies, some argue nothing is ever really new. For example,
Roland Barthes, in "The Death of the Author" claims a text is "a tissue
of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture"; it is "a
variety of writings, none of them original" that "blend and clash. "
(146). In this view, anything "new" is actually a re-synthesis of old
parts.
Barthes is probably basing his claim on an old scientific notion that
everything has always already existed, in the sense that the same
particles that were at the beginning of time are merely reconfigured
according to laws of probability and physics (chance and necessity).
According to this view, everything that exists today or that a poet will
write tomorrow could have been predicted at the beginning of time by
someone (a superscientist) who knew the position and velocity of every
particle in the universe and who could calculate odds.
These days, most theorists working on the problem of originality believe
that creative acts are possible, that new forms do emerge out of the old
parts. They believe emergent forms cannot be predicted, not even by a
superscientist, because interaction of the parts and interpretive
contexts have very real effects on outcomes. These findings are made
within what is called nonlinear dynamics research.
However, there are limited ways in nature in which something new can
come into existence. To put it simply, most scientists these days argue
that original forms are not easily generated from within a single
system, within one language system for example. The parts of a single
system tend to work together in ways that are predefined, by the very
nature of their being part of the same system. What you get are
variations, not new creations. Rather like Barthes imagined. In this
situation, you pretty much have to wait for a super lucky mutation (or a
mistake in writing or comprehending) that, by chance, can be interpreted
in a useful way and causes the system to adapt and change.
New forms are most likely to arise between interactions between two
discrete systems. It is here at the border, between one way of
conceiving the world and another, that truly new, truly original ideas
are born. It is here at this rich interchange that all of us grow and
expand.
This is an excellent reason, I think, for supporting diversity in the
arts and interaction between cultures.
Thursday, July 17th 7pm Poetry Readings, The Genius of (Mis)Translation Series . Admission Free. If meaning between two linguistic systems is incommensurable, then the translator may be forced to expand the target language, perhaps by intentional or slight mistranslation. This is one of the few ways in which truly new meaning can be created. As a tribute to the creative genius of translation, Dactyl Foundation presents:
Joshua Beckman and Pierre Joris. Joshua Beckman is the author of three books of poetry, Things are Happening (American Poetry Review, 1998, winner of the Honickman First Book Prize), Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press, 2001), and Nice Hat.Thanks. (written with Matthew Rohrer, Verse Press, 2003). He is the poetry editor of Radical Society. Beckman will read his own work as well as his translations of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun.
Pierre Joris has published over 20 books and chapbooks of poetry, including Poasis (Wesleyan UP), h.j.r. (OtherWind Press), Winnetou Old (Meow Press, Buffalo, NY), Turbulence (St. Lazaire Press, Rhinebeck), and Breccia: Selected Poems 1974-1986 (Editions Phi / Station Hill). He has also published many volumes of translations, including Paul Celan’s Theadsuns and Breathturn, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community & Edmond Jabès’s From the Desert to the Book. Rothenberg & Joris’s collaboration, Selected Writings of Kurt Schwitters (Temple UP, 1993) was awarded the 1994 PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Translation.
Partial support for this series has been provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Thursday, October 30th 7pm Poetry Readings, The Genius of (Mis)Translation Series. If meaning between two linguistic systems is incommensurable, then the translator may be forced to expand the target language, perhaps by intentional or slight mistranslation. This is one of the few ways in which truly new meaning can be created. As a tribute to the creative genius of translation, Dactyl Foundation presents: Jen Hofer, Mónica Nepote, Cristina Rivera-Garza, and Laura Solórzano.Jen Hofer edited and translated Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (University of Pittsburgh Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003). Her recent books of poetry include slide rule (subpress, 2002) and The 3:15 Experiment, with Lee Ann Brown, Danika Dinsmore, and Bernadette Mayer (The Owl Press, 2001). She is co-editor, with Rod Smith, of Aerial #10, a volume on the poetry of Lyn Hejinian. Other poems, prose texts and translations have appeared in A.BACUS, the anthology Enough (O Books, 2003), 26, Conundrum, !factorial, kenning, kiosk, NO: A Magazine of the Arts, and Aufgabe. Her next chapbook will be published by Seeing Eye Books in Los Angeles, where she currently lives. Mónica Nepote has published a number of books and chapbooks including Islario (Cuadernos de filodecaballos; Guadalajara, 2001) and Trazos de noche herida (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, CONACULTA: México, D.F., 1993). Her poetry, essays, chronicles and literary criticism have appeared in El Ángel, Biblioteca de México, Crónica Dominical, La Jornada Semanal, Nexos, Nostromo, Ovaciones en la Cultura, and Sábado. English translations of her poems have been published in Rhizome and Exquisite Corpse (www.corpse.org) as well as in the anthology Sin puertas visibles. She lives in Mexico City, where she teaches poetry workshops and writes on visual art for Channel 22 TV. Cristina Rivera-Garza was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas in 1964. She has published one book of poetry, La más mía (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, Mexico City, 1998) and three novels, Nadie me verá llorar (Tusquets Editores and CONACULTA, Mexico City, 2000), La cresta de Ilión (Tusquets Editores, Mexico City, 2002), and Ningún reloj cuenta esto (Tusquets Editores, Mexico City, 2002), as well as short story collections and numerous essays and academic texts. A translation of Nadie me verá llorar
is forthcoming from Curbstone Press, and translations of her poems appear in the anthology Sin puertas visibles. She currently lives in Toluca,where she teaches writing at the Instituto Tecnológio de Monterrey. Laura Solórzano lives in Guadalajara. She is the author, most recently, of lobo de labio (Cuadernos de filodecaballos: Guadalajara, 2001) and Semilla de Ficus (Ediciones Rimbaud, Tlaxcala, 1999). She is on the editorial board of Tragaluz and currently teaches film studies at the Centro de Arte Audiovisual in Guadalajara. Her poems have been published in Hoja Frugal, Juglares y alarifes, Luvina, Renglones, Trashumancia and El Zahir. English translations of her poems have been published in HOW2, Aufgabe, and the anthology Sin puertas visibles.
Partial support for this series has been provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Mexican Consulate.
Saturday March 13th. The Genius of (Mis)Translation with David Hinton and Cecilia Vicuna.
Hinton's translations from Chinese include The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yun (New Directions, 2001), Mencius (1999), The Analects of Confucius (1998), Chuang Tzu: Inner Chapters (1997), Forms of Distance by Bei Dao (1994), The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien (1993), and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (1989). In 1997 he won The Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his three volumes published in 1996: The Selected Poems of Lí Po and Bei Dao's Landscape Over Zero (both published by New Directions), and The Late Poems of Meng Chiao (Princeton). His other recent honors include fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña is the author of fourteen poetry books, published in Europe, Latin America and the US.
Honors include: The Pennies from Heaven Award, 2002, The Anonymous Was a Woman Award, l999, The Lila Wallace-Reader¹s Digest Arts International Award in l992, The Fund for Poetry Award in l995-96 and The Human Rights Award from the Fund for Free Expression in New York in l985.
Her most recent books are: Instan, Kelsey St. Press, 2002 El Templo, translated by Rosa Alcalá, Situations, New York, 2001; Cloud-Net, trans. by Rosa Alcalá, Art in General/Hallwalls/DiverseWorks/ New York, Houston, Buffalo, l999; UL, Four Mapuche Poets, a Bilingual Anthology edited by Cecilia Vicuña, LALRP, Pittsburgh, 1998; QUIPOem/ The Precarious , The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña, Edited by M. Catherine de Zegher, translated by Esther Allen, Wesleyan University Press, l997; Word & Thread, translated by Rosa Alcalá, Morning StarPublications,1996; PALABRARmas/WURDWAPINschaw, translated by Edwin Morgan, Morning Star Publications, Edinburgh, l994; and Unravelling Words & The Weaving of Water, translated by Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine, edited by Eliot Weinberger, Graywolf Press, l992 .
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Poetry Series Curators:
Sharon Lattig is pursuing her doctorate in English at Graduate School at City University New York. She is currently conducting research on the relationship of Science to Wallace Stevens' poetry. Her own poetry has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, murmur; Whatever.
Stephen Mounkhall's work has been published in American Letters and Commentary, No Roses Review, and First Intensity.
See Calendar For Upcoming Events