Entries tagged with poetics

A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats

Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia 

“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”

In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trill­ing’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies. … More

Scaffolding Repetition: Gertrude Stein,
Language Writing, Electronic Dance Music
(online here)
eLyra 22, special issue on “Poetics and Politics
of Repetition,” ed. Bruno Ministro, 25 December 2023
(online here)

Abstract: This essay takes up the critique of repetition in Gertrude Stein, her claim to have written a “continuous present” that “begins again and again” and “includes everything” versus her later qualification that repetition is always shifting in terms of “insistence” and “emphasis”. Even so, Stein focuses on the unfolding of the verbal material primarily in a linear fashion, though resonances and overtones abound. In Electronic Dance Music, from Detroit to Berlin techno, one finds more vertical layerings and “scaffolding”—a term taken from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky—as a way of building up sonic elements in pleasurable and meaning-bearing ways. Using these two contrasting models of repetition, I read three language-centered poets—Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Marjorie Welish—in terms of their complex forms of temporality in poetic form, seen in terms of Stein’s often repeated framework of “beginnings, middles, and ends”. I conclude with a discussion of ”vital movement” in the electronic dance music of Berlin DJ Ellen Allien.

Keywords: Modernism, avant-garde, repetition, language writing, poetry, electronic music, American, Berlin

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MATERIAL TRANSMISSIONS:
DEMOTIC SURREALISM/HIERATIC LANGUAGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, 1975–1980

Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive
of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly
hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.

—André Breton, “The Automatic Message” (1933)

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SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN

Poetry, Translation, and Crisis:
From the Post-Soviet Moment
to War and Emigration

American Comparative Literature Association
Montréal, 14–17 March 2024

Due to the difficult circumstances of the global present,
the organizers have canceled this session proposal.
Stay tuned for plans for a virtual colloquy in 2024.  

In 1989 and 1990, eight American avant-garde poets traveled to then-Leningrad to meet with Soviet counterparts, experimental poets working under quasi-nonofficial conditions during late Perestroika. These meetings followed extensive travel and translation activities in the 1980s. Among then-Soviets, the poetic schools of “metarealism” and “conceptualism” were well represented—by poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitrii Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. These events and developing contacts led to the publication of the collectively authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and a flurry of translations. Three decades later, the dialogue between American poets and poets of the former Soviet territory, including both Russia and Ukraine, has continued. A comprehensive anthology of American experimental poetry, Ot “Chiornoi gori” do “Yazikovo picmo” (From Black Mountain to Language Writing), appeared from NLO in late 2022, with a publication event in Moscow and subsequent online reading. Other translations are imminent or postponed under the present circumstances, while interest in and translation of two generations of poets, now disrupted by war and emigration, continues. This session solicits contributions on past and on-going translinguistic, transcultural projects from both periods: the post-Soviet moment and now. What “cultural work” is being undertaken and advanced in these works of translation and affiliation, crossing over global spaces of conflict and establishing global poetic networks? The session language will be mainly in English, but contributions in Slavic languages are encouraged, and hopefully English translations can be arranged.

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Can We Still Teach the Beats?:
Holism, Antagonism, Poetics,
and Pedagogy

A talk by Barrett Watten

Wednesday, April 26
WSU Humanities Center
12:30–1:30 PM, 2339 F/AB
In person/Zoom (here)

This talk will be drawn from a theoretical and historical reading of Beat poets Michael McClure (famous for transgressing species barriers and writing in “beast” language; now seen as a pioneer ecopoet as well as a poet writing at the intersection of language and the body) and Lenore Kandel (famous for her 1960s sex-positive collection The Love Book and other erotically charged writing; she is now seen a proto-feminist representative of the 60s sexual revolution). Both poets were subject to censorship in the 60s—McClure for his play The Beard, featuring a dialogue between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow; and Kandel for The Love Book; both would be vindicated in the long run. Encompassing this moment are the poetics of “open form” promulgated by Charles Olson and others, as the pedagogical framework for Black Mountain College through the 1950s, and at later experimental programs. In adapting my research to the present talk, the question on the table is how to teach the work of the Beat poets today, with their expressive/embodied excesses and absolute refusal to comply to with normative decorum. This is not a hypothetical question. The recent decision at Cornell University not to require trigger warnings for difficult material was a significant pushback against content restrictions in the classroom, and supported the discretion of faculty to present course material. But this issue is not simply a matter of Right or legal guidelines; how does one present and interpret the transgressive work of an earlier period, both as a research topic and a teaching occasion? How did the Beats themselves imagine their work as “teaching, and being taught,” as we see in the publicity photo of Allen Ginsberg from 1965? How do we contextualize their historical present from the perspective of ours? The stakes for our pedagogy in the increasingly corporatized university are high. … More

Questions of Value: Rethinking the Discourse
of Valuation in Literature and Art

The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
Saturday 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Room: Humanities 109
Chair: Barrett Watten, Wayne State University

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
“Questions of Value: Poetics as Living Labor
and the Specter of Past Work”

David Kellogg, Coastal Carolina University
“Literary Values after the End of Curation:
Broadening the Scope, Limiting the Claims”

Tyrone Williams, University at Buffalo
“’Bessie, Bop or Bach’: Iconoclasm, Coterie, and/or
Communalism in Montage of a Dream Deferred

Adeena Karasick, Pratt Institute
“In the Value of the Shadow of. . . : Questions of
Value in 21st Century Art and Literature”
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“Transpositions: Global Poetics @ EAM 2022”
Readings by Kazim Ali, Carla Harryman, Abigail Lang, Barrett Watten
Saturday, September 3, 17:00
Bar Barraca-Cinearte, Lisbon, Portugal

Rethinking Histories on a Planetary Scale”
Friday, September 2, 9:30–11:00 and 11:30–13:00
Barrett Watten, Aleksandr Boškovic, Claudia Franken
Lauri Scheyer, Kazim Ali, Abigail Lang

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“Modernist Poetics: New Genealogies
of ‘Making the Work’ in Modernity”

Seminar for “Making Modernism”
Modernist Studies Association
Portland, Ore., 27–30 October 2022

NOTE EXTENDED DATE FOR SEMINAR REGISTRATION
AUGUST 31: REGISTRATION HERE

Seminar led by Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
and Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University
with invited guest Lyn Hejinian, UC Berkeley

Seminar prospectus (to enroll see below)

This seminar takes up the conference rubric, Making Modernism, as a question of “poetics”—a discourse of “making the work.” Poetics may either immanent to a modernist work of art or a supplement to it; it is an aesthetic or theoretical reflection that offers a blueprint for how the “work” is made and how to read it. Poetics may take the form of a separate instance of writing, a preface or explanatory essay external to the work of art, or it may be described or enacted in the work itself, as a set of instructions to the reader on how work may be read. In this seminar, we will seek new ways of understanding modernist poetics, at or beyond the epochal date of 1922, as a response to the crisis of modernity. Modernist poetics is often characterized as “formalist,” after avant-garde manifestos, the New Critics, or the Russian Formalists. For this inquiry, Eliot’s “Notes” to The Waste Land and his editorship of The Criterion would be as important for modernist poetics as the poem itself. Extending this principle, Joyce’s turn to writing “Work in Progress” and its serial publication in transition from 1927 on would depart from the modernist masterpiece into another kind of writing; Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” (1926) would supplement the publication of Geography and Plays (1922); and McKay’s development of vernacular prose romances from Home to Harlem (1928) to Banana Bottom (1933) would augment the formal poetics of Harlem Shadows. After 1922, a reflection on the “making of the work” emerges in numerous works of poetics that address the modern present and its “condition of possibility.” Such a deliberate inquiry into the making of the modernist work motivates the prose/poetry dialectic of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923); it is found in the self-reflexive explorations of women authors such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, and Djuna Barnes; it extends to the social discourses on poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular Front; it is everywhere in the manifestos of the avant-garde, especially surrealism; it appears in the turn to fascism in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis; it is central to key works of Critical Theory such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” and Theodor Adorno’s many writings on modernism. This seminar invites literary, historical, cultural, and theoretical inquiry into works broadly seen as “poetics” in modernism. What will count as a key work in modernist/modern poetics is the task of participants to determine; our aim is to establish a broad and productive series of works that represent the aesthetic, cultural, political, and critical “making of the work” under conditions of modernity. In so doing, it seeks a broad discussion on modernist poetics in line with our earlier work on contemporary examples in A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan UP).

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In Questions of Poetics, I wrote that, in contrast to André Breton’s motto “I seek the gold of time,” what I wanted is more like the “currency of history.” All this bears on the question of value, of course. Breton’s wish to alchemically transform desire into substance is inscribed on his tombstone, where it is still doing its work. In another present, I see history as a gold mine of another sort, making meanings that circulate and become value. Such is the task of the poet, broadly put, writing works that will be circulated until they find their meaning and use. It is also the task of the literary historian, to establish the contexts, motives, situations in which such meaning may be made. There needs to be more literary history, not of the old, positive kind but one addressed to the making of value in poetics as history. This could begin with the work of an archive, as an assembly line of parts for meaning making—eventually tending toward a form of comprehension, like the work of literary history depicted above.

Lilian Chaitas’s Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes contains, in my reading-in-progress, the best account of the debates on early Language writing I know. Published in 2017, it is a meticulously detailed, 435-pp. account of American poetic avant-gardes from the New Americans to Language writing, drawing its theory from Renato Poggioli and Pierre Bourdieu, with a glance back to Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995). Originally it was a 2013 dissertation written to German standards under the direction of Bernd Engler at the University of Tübingen, where not coincidentally I was hosted as a Fulbright scholar in 2005 and staged a raucous conference on Authorship and the Turn to Language that December—a currency of history itself. But I did not know the work existed until a section of the last chapter, retelling the 1978 Duncan/Watten cataclysm in microscopic detail, turned up as a pdf on Dispatches from the Poetry WarsI finally located a copy on Amazon.de, which arrived last month from a warehouse in Nijmegan, Netherlands. The last chapter, “Language Poetry in the 1970s and 1980s,” is what concerns me here—and which so impressed me that I provide it in three separate pdfs (here and below), one for each of the major sections. These address, in turn, “The So-Called ‘Language’ School”; “The Duncan/Watten ‘debat/cl/e'”; and “Stalin as Linguist.” … More

Document 93: Global Ideation

The global circulation of ideas advances with the publication of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, edited by Laurie Scheyer from Hunan Normal University. As with last year’s special forum on “Modernity @ Zero Hour,” this issue contains a set of papers—distributed through a capacious issue with numerous related themes—that developed in an online webinar, “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,” which took place during conditions of COVID in March 2021. The webinar itself, thanks to Zoom, was itself global and involved participants from seven time zones, from New Zealand to Moscow. It also could include a performance event, the in-time screening of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance,” originally proposed for the canceled EAM conference in Fall 2020. In this best of all possible worlds, our proposed event went forward; papers were presented, comments generated, drafts revised, and the results are now distributed to the world at large. Below I list the contents and link to the six papers that were the result of that effort, seen as part of a larger conversation in a global framework. Indeed my own contribution, “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” looks at the form of the global exhibition after the German documenta, but it easily applies to what we are doing here. … More