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