Language writing

This week I'm reading Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman. Perelman's _The Marginalization of Poetry_ (1996)--only the first two chapters, so far--is the key text. Silliman's response (1997) is an add-on to provoke a bit more thought from me. Both Perelman and Silliman write against binary thinking (the either/or), and both are more or less effectively trapped in their own binary thinking. Silliman points out Perelman's caught up in the academic/critical context with his Princeton U. Press book, and then Silliman sets out to describe what might have been a book for _poets_ instead of academicians.

Still, though, Silliman does articulate clearly what he sees as the problem with Perelman's approach. Silliman uses Grenier's _Sentences_ and other writings to show how total the focus/import of language writing is on _presence_ and how central to achieving _presence_ is the absence of meaning, the absence of _aboutness_ and _value_. And _presence_ is what Benjamin's _aura_ is.

Some names: Ron Silliman, Ann Lauterbach, Juliana Spahr, Steve Evans, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Spicer,

Some anthologies: Allen. _New American Poetry, 1945-1960_ Silliman. _In the American Tree: Language Realism Poetry_ Messerli. _"Language" Poetries: An Anthology_ Hoover. _Postmdern American Poetry (1st ed. 1994 and 2nd ed) Swenson and St. John. _American Hybrid_

 Some precursors: Stein, Zukofsky, Oppen,

Walter Benjamin, etc.

I'm taking a class this fall at Southern (Southern Connecticut State University) in post-modern poetry and poetics. One of the readings this week is Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay that's translated as "The Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." I hadn't read it in about 30 years. Maybe, 35. Anyway, we're reading it because of its obvious connections to art in a digital age, which can be understood as an subsequent revolution in reproducibility. I had remembered that aspect of the essay, but had forgotten its Marxist basis and its Marxist interests. Fascinating that Benjamin sees Fascism as introducing aesthetics into politics and conversely sees Marxism as responding by introducing politics into art. For Fascists--read Capitalists, war becomes _the_ art form. Benjamin doesn't say this, but it seems the logical consequence of his analysis that for Marxists, art is revolution (not propaganda), an act of liberation (not of persuasion or coercion.) Many other pieces of the essay are fascinating and productive: the connection of the uniqueness of a hand-made object in its particular place and time--its authenticity, its authority, its aura--to ritual and magic or religion; the loss of the possibility of apperception by an individual of that authentic authority by being in the presence of the object's aura in the age of photography and film with the consequence that only _mass_ and not _individual_ responses are possible? Maybe. And so how to fit this with Paul Hoover's introduction to the _Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry_ with his discussion of the _avant-grade_ and the post-modern era? Benjamin's essay is certainly far stronger, more rigorous, more predictive or powerfully illuminating than Hoover's, which seems a facile re-hash of the conventional thinking about the avant-garde and post-modernism. Avant-gardists think of themselves as revolutionists, liberators (not necessarily Marxists, of course, but that is the usual drift of self-regard.) I'm pretty confused by the terms avant-garde and post-modern. I haven't read anything as clear about what they are as Benjamin's essay. I'll have to look around for good essays to clarify these concepts for me.

Yale Working Group on Contemporary Poetry (WGCP)

I went to the first meeting this year of the WGCP at Yale.  It was excellent. We talked about Ben Lerner's _Mean Free Path_ : Copper Canyon Press, 2010.

More about the book in a few moments, but the people at the meeting were very nice. Some of them have been meeting for years, and the friendships and warmth among friends was very welcoming. The discussion was insightful and lively and fun.  About 20 people in all. And we had champagne! One of the members, Sarah, passed her PhD oral exams this morning. Though it did seem that champagne was part of the routine. I like that.

David Gorin has a terrific, thoughtful review of the book here: 

http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-lerner-rb-gorin.shtml

(David was at the meeting; he is a new PhD student at Yale.)

I'm now reading the book thoroughly for the first time. It's amazingly good. More later.

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry

Reading a bit of Hegel for a course on Milton

I'm taking a course on Milton at Southern Connecticut State University and the first set of assignments included a bit of Hegel, from his _Phenomenology of Mind_. It is a short passage on Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (#178-196). Fascinating. I haven't read Hegel much and not since college, 35 years ago.

Some key words in the text (English): sublate, cancel, double, self, other, consciousness, desire, independence, dependence, free, subject, object, return, loss, action, recognition, negation, struggle, risk, life, immediate, absolute, death, life, process, extremes, essential, unessential.

 He says, more or less, that to be self-aware one must be aware of a mirrored self, the other within oneself, a doubling of the self. The self and the double are in relation to one another, recognize each other, cancel or negate each other, struggle with each other, and that self-awareness arises from that relationship within oneself's double self. Self-consciousness, then, is a process, a social process, within the individual, and to be free, the individual must risk the destruction or death of both the self and the self's other. Innocence, then is a a-social state of a kind of awareness that is immediate and direct and lacking in the reflected doubleness of self-awareness.

 Some Hegel sites online: 
1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel
 2. Stanford ... : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
 3. IEP: http://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/
 4. P of Mind (text):  http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Phil%20310/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm

My Homeric greek project

My project to relearn Greek continues. I've not made much progress on the passage of the Iliad (book 21, lines 34-138.) I am on line 66 today. But I have started using one of the schoolbooks, _A Reading course in Homeric Greek_ by Raymond V. Schoder, S.J., M.A., Ph.D.; Vincent C. Horrigan, S.J., M.A.; revised with additional material by Leslie Collins Edwards. 3rd rev. ed., 2004. 2 vols. All told, 230 individual lessons. I'm just at the first lessons on the declension of nouns. A long way to go, but only the first 60 lessons are grammar, etc. After that it is reading Homer (mostly.) I need to do a bit each day; a few lines from my chosen passage in Iliad book 21 and a lesson a day from Schoder, Horrigan, and Edwards.

Reading ...

I'm reading two interesting books just now. Robert Duncan's _The H.D. Book_ and Harold Bloom's _The Anatomy of Influence_. Each is a deeply personal book about reading poetry.

The Anatomy of influence : literature as a way of life / Harold Bloom. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2011.

The H.D. book / Robert Duncan ; edited and with an introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2011.

Both are deeply personal books about the transformative experience of reading (and talking about or writing about) poetry. Each author speaks of his own experience as a reader in a way that is fully autobiographical or confessional. I like that about each book.

Each of these books reminds me of a book I read a couple of weeks ago: Eavan Boland's _A Journey with two maps_. Also a deeply personal book about reading poetry (and about writing poetry.)

A Journey with two maps : becoming a woman poet / Eavan Boland. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., c2011.

Obviously, I am following a thematic interest of my own in finding such books and reading them. But only Boland's book is clearly advertised as a memoir, and half of it is critical readings of a dozen poets. The others surprised me with their intimacy. Happy surprise.

Another surprise, Bloom's is far more readable that I had expected (after reading his _Anxiety of Influence_ and others in that series.) Duncan's is the more idiosyncratically allusive and cryptic. No surprise there.

Cy Twombly died.

Cy Twombly died. Great painter. Friend and fellow artist with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Good obit at New Yorker Posted by Peter Schjeldahl: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/cy-twombly-1928-2011.html

Another at the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html

And also at the NYT an assessment by Roberta Smith at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/arts/design/cy-twombly-an-art-who-emphasized-mark-making.html

Brief slide show at: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-art.html

Nice site for Twombly: http://www.cytwombly.info/index.html

I like his work. I know it only a little. Often heard his name, but have not really thought deeply about him. What I know I like. I like his attitude. His silence. His playfulness. His distance from the scene. He liked the work of Arshile Gorky. I've always liked Gorky.

From the NYT article:

"In the summer of 1952, after receiving a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mr. Twombly traveled to Europe for the first time and met up with Rauschenberg. The two wandered through Italy, North Africa and Spain, an experience that later yielded some of the first paintings to be considered a part of Mr. Twombly’s mature work. “Tiznit,” made with white enamel house paint and pencil and crayon, with gouges and scratches in the surface, was named for a town in Morocco that he had visited, and the painting’s primitivist shapes were inspired by tribal pieces he saw at the ethnographic museum in Rome, as well as by artists like Dubuffet, de Kooning and Franz Kline."