September 1, 2023

Event 103: Poetry, Translation, Crisis

SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN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.

… More

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August 20, 2023

Entry 50: Magnetic North (III)

Friday, June 9
SAS 347 TRD > OSL

Heimdalsgata 35, Gamle, Oslo

Carla Harryman

According to my source, there are three kinds of space: absolute, relative, and relational. Looking for the proper airport code for Trondheim, I became enmeshed in the military and aviation history of its location in Værnes (not, evidently, the Værnes where the village church is located; the place name is repeated at two locations on the coast). Reading the entry, I stop at the exact description of the runway, its length, manner of construction, and what kind of air traffic it serves. “The main runway is 2,999 metres (9,839 ft) long, and runs east–west at 09/27. It is 45 metres (148 ft) wide, plus shoulders of 7.5 metres (25 ft) on each side. The runway is equipped with instrument landing system category 1. . . . ” In absolute terms, the runway thus materially exists. Should an airplane positioned at one end of the runway develop sufficient thrust, given the mass of the airplane and the lift of its wings, it will take off. Pilots know this and rest assured at the controls while passengers suffer through the mysterious event time and again. “Værnes has a theoretical capacity of 40 air movements per hour, but this is reduced during bad weather, so the airport has a registered capacity of 25.” In a given year, three to four hundred military aircraft are served by the facility, the entry goes on to state. What follows is a history of the transition from its use in the German Occupation to an important outpost for NATO, with continuing American military presence, likely being increased as I write.

… More

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August 13, 2023

Entry 49: Magnetic North (II)

Monday, June 5
Icelandair KEF > OSL

Sjøgata 4, Oslo

Carla Harryman

Travel consists in the denial of any goal for travel. Often one travels from point A to point B, but the experience of travel is otherwise than reaching the destination. This is why, for agéd traveler William S. Burroughs, “It is not necessary to live; it is only necessary to travel.” An interstitial space, the Interzone, the in between points of origin or destination, with the sensation of and material means for movement. One can become addicted to travel. Moving from a point of origin, it is often impossible to discern where that is—the “mooring of starting out” John Ashbery recalled as a condition of his availability at the outset, wherever that may be. We certainly did not begin our travels in Rochester, N.Y., though we passed by there recently on return from celebrating Ashbery with his tribe. One can adapt the field of aesthetic experience to the road map of travel and its discontents. Thus the rental car outside our hotel in Reykjavík must be returned directly to the scrappy terminal at Keflavík, site of former American airbase built on bare lava fields, roughly an hours drive south. The difficulty of locating the final gas station turned into a near catastrophe, but was masterfully overcome. Our transition continued through ticketing kiosks, baggage drops, crowded spaces, and passport checks where a border official tried to personalize each succeeding applicant before giving them a stamp. Once in the air it was normal, or anxious, or asleep. Then out the window the clouds parted and we saw the Farœ Islands, now the destination of a lifetime, soon to be passed by. After an intermission of blank time the massive coastal ranges of Norway loomed, with substantial snow cover, frightening in their immensity and lack of any habitation. The dramatic muscularity of glaciated ranges and valleys resolved into a flat plane of arrival and modern transit to an overpriced and inconvenient city and its arranged destination for one night. Whose amenities were mainly its proximity to the renovated harbor zone where one could find something to eat at a substantial price.

 

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July 29, 2023

Entry 48: Magnetic North (I)

Thursday, June 1
Icelandair DTW > KEF

Carla Harryman

The lonely imperative of travel, as if one is uniquely hailed. That is ideological, covered in pin feathers (illustration by Icelandic expatriate artist Eero above). It was an idea of mine to go north, to seek out the (scratch that). Over the long duration of our disease, the two survivors had lived on only home cooking and streaming Nordic crime series on Netflix. In the event, something was missing or being covered up—that is what is meant by “the body,” which kept us glued to our seats. The disused warehouse of narrative effects is where all bodies are kept, we would find, each waiting to be worked into the upcoming narrative. Not really—for years there had been a blank place in the narrative, now determined to be “magnetic north.” At some point in early winter it was decided, she suggested. Putting in place a plan, all would unfold but not necessarily the way it was predicted. I believe there is no drama here, only the outer shell of a fate that would be enacted, to be revealed. The crime genre is never really surprising, as we are gripped in our seats. The seats were booked on a newly refinanced Icelandair Boeing 737 Max, now returned to service, on a stopover in Iceland. The real thrill was seeming to go nowhere and ending up in a place we had imagined. Blank fields of lava unfold under the belly of the plane with special webcams for passengers. It will be early morning the next day when we arrive at our destination.

… More

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April 21, 2023

Event 102: Can We Still Teach the Beats?

 

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

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March 25, 2023

Event 101: Academy of Scholars Lecture

The Inaugural Academy of Scholars Lecture in the Arts
and Humanities, in Honor of Guy Stern

Prof. Claudia Koonz, History, Duke University
author of The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP):

“Harnessing Virtue in the Service of Cruelty:
Belief, Delusion, and Race in Nazi Germany”

Friday, April 7, 3:00–4:30 / hybrid format
Shaver Music Recital Hall, Old Main, WSU
480 West Hancock, Detroit (enter West Hancock)

Open to WSU faculty, students, and general public

… More

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March 14, 2023

Event 100: Black Avant-Gardes @ ACLA

Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir: Blackness, Innovation, Futurity
American Comparative Literature Association
Sheraton Hotel, Chicago, 17–19 March 2023
Register for Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3YW8A4w

Session 1 Friday, March 17, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Lauri Scheyer, “Jitterbugging the World: Calvin C. Hernton’s Diasporic
Avant-Garde and Anti-Movement Communitarianism”
Matthew Johnston, “N.H. Pritchard’s Avant-Pastoral”
Tyrone Williams, “Autobiography of a Middle Name”
Christopher Winks, “Downward Path, Inward Path: The Hermetic Poetics
of Magloire-Saint-Aude”

Session 2 Saturday, March 18, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Andrew Haas, “Black Power’s Free Improvisation and Its Afterimage
in Tongo Eisen-Martin”
Barrett Watten, “Horizons of Complexity: The Ends of Form in Anthony
Braxton and Language Writing”
Bryant Brown, Jr., “Architectural Non Sequiturs: Renee Gladman’s
Plans for Sentences”
Joseph Shafer, “Stanley Whitney: Opposition, Dramatic Struggle &
Literary Rhythm”

Session 3 Sunday, March 19, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Noah Hansen, “The Poetics of Garveyism: Situating Garveyite Poetry
in Space and Time”
Anthony Joseph, “Performance: Sonnets for Albert and the Frequency
of Magic”
Duriel E. Harris, “Re/Sounding Serious Play: Notes on Black Listening
with/through avery r young’s ‘groun(d)’”
avery young, “rock | paper | skittles: groun(d) as soun(d) monument
fo(r) trayvon martin”
Tracie Morris, “Black Hypertonality and the Performative Utterance”

C0-Organizers

Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Duriel E. Harris, English, Illinois State University
Tracie Morris, Writers Workshop, University of Iowa
Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University

Notes

Image: AACM circa 1968: group photo in Wadsworth Jarrell’s back yard, Chicago. [Musicians t/k[ From George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008).

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February 20, 2023

Event 99: Questions of Value @ Louisville

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” … More

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December 30, 2022

Entry 47: Liberating Gertrude Stein

“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)

To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.

The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below). … More

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December 3, 2022

Entry 46: Theoretical Autobiography

Grand Piano TV episode 6: Barrett Watten
original recording, 17 November 2022
take 2: 27 November 2022

The name “theoretical biography” is intended to distinguish its territory from that of philosophy and physiology better than before, and to expand that biological approach which has been one-sidedly parad­ed and, in part, greatly exaggerated by the most recent school of psychology (Darwin, Spencer, Mach, Avenarius). Such a science would have to account for the mental life as a whole as it progresses from the birth of an individual to his death according to certain laws, just as it does for the coming into being and the passing away, and all the discrete phases in the life of a plant.

—Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903)

Introduction: method/technique

[Original recording] I’ve been thinking about how to represent The Grand Piano in this reading. One thought was simply to take a section and read it straight through with comments, build a structure out of it—like the concept of “reading out” I spoke about the other day at the Kelly Writers House event, using the text as a platform to make more text, more interpretation. I decided not to do that; rather, I decided to sample from the text and let the text do the work of commenting on itself. (If you want to experience the section that I would have read straight through, you can go to The Grand Piano part 4 and read that section.) I’ve done quite a lot of “reading out” of The Grand Piano; in Questions of Poetics there is a whole chapter on it. Even as the work was coming into focus, not yet complete, I was giving lectures on it—the whole process was entirely immodest. … More

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