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."

Translating Iliad, 21, lines 34-138, 2d part, belatedness, modernism, and post-modernism

Finished the second group of 5 lines, 40-44. It is slow going, and I am dependent on the cribs I make of the other translators. My present sense of the Greek syntax is too poor to diagram the relationships within a sentence. Well, I can find the subject and the verb. I am at the start of a long recovery and a long path for growth.

Still, it is fascinating, fun, and absorbing. I have to work so hard to think in Greek explicitly of the diction, the syntax, the story. Compared to this, I am on automatic pilot when I write English. I am beginning 40 years late. Yet I don't feel any sense of belatedness. I can not change the past and I will not let a notion about it stop me from doing what I want.

I had an idea today about modernism and post-modernism. It sort of applies here because my thought relates to distinguishing between modern and post-modern by means of each era's primary sense of time, or of our relation to time. The connection is belatedness. Belatedness is a concern of modernists and not of post-modernists. For the modernist, time is an arrow. It has one direction only. There is a point of the arrow and then there is all the rest of behind the point. Thus for the modernist, the importance of the avant-garde--those who are at the point of the arrow. Modernism is a corollary of the idea of progress. For the modernist, the new must be better than the old. Else why be in the forefront of art or ideas?

For the post-modernist, time is a river, an old river that winds its way to the sea, a growing river that gathers other rivers into it, and streams, and creeks, and run-off, too, a river that spills itself into the sea in a massive chaotic delta made of its water and the earth it has carried from everywhere it has been. There is a mouth, there is a head, there is the ribbon-like body of the river itself, but the river has no beginning or end. It empties itself into the sea. And the sea evaporates and replenishes the air with moisture that falls again as rain that refills the river again and again and again. The post-modernist lives in the spreading delta and uses any of the water and any of the mud it carries and any of the fish and birds as needed or wanted.

Translating Iliad, 21, lines 34-138

From reading Robert Lowell's letters and writing poems with the Southern (SCSU) poets, I have come up with both a summer project and a rebirth of my interest in Greek. I am translating a passage from the Iliad (book 21, lines 34-138, Achilles' encounter with Lycaon in the river), and I am re-learning my Greek. I had two years of Greek in college and graduate school, but had not read Greek for about 25 years. Now I am re-learning Greek by reading Homer's Iliad. I wish I had started with Homer in college.

I am using Pharr's _Homeric Greek_ (Boston: Heath, 1925, 5th edition) and the Perseus project at Tufts. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. A bit of the old and the new. And I am using my college text, Luschnig, C.A.E. _An Introduction to Ancient Greek_, Case and Phillips _A New Introduction to Greek_, and Mollin and Williamson _An Introduction to Ancient Greek_.

And I am looking at a number of old and new translations of the passage into English, from Hobbes, Chapman, Pope, and Butler to Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Ian Johnson. That part is fun, too, but that is more important for the 2nd part of my project: writing my own poem based on this passage. I guess that would be my own translation of the passage, but I think of it as my own poem as the english is mine and I separate this section from the whole of the Iliad.

This is delightful, and I am thrilled to be learning to read Greek again.


It is slow going. I have translated the first 5 lines! Ha! We'll see if I can do so much as five lines a day.