Graduate Workshop Blog Spring 2018

[note: moving back and forth between the 1939 edition, Wesleyan 2013, & the revised edition, Wesleyan 2001, but using the latter's pagination] ---- “The position of each part within this whole: that is, the acknowledged validity of each specific Plantation yet at the same time the urgent need to understand the hidden order of the whole—so as to wander there without getting lost.” Glissant, from Poetics of Relation pg. 131 ---- I have a lot to say, here, but maybe not all of it can or should be communicated in this space. Obviously feculence, for me, is important to my understanding of Cesaire's text & language. But before I go there, I think I want to make a kind of false-start, and begin with a reading I must depart from. I have little experience with the Martinique and the Antille islands, Cesaire's return feels recognizable to me, and might be contiguous with my return to, and repulsion by Detroit - where I was born. Historically, p...

Here are some questions you may want to ponder in your responses to Artaud: 1) What can the "confessional" framework do for our reading of Artaud? What does reading Artaud's late poems do to the confessional framework? To the model of poetry as "communication"? 2) What is the role of "lyric shame" - or just "shame" - in these poems? How does this affect operate in/through the poems? 3) Going back to our discussion of Lynn Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure": Are these poems/drama ideas for plays "dictatorial" or "democratic"? Are the plays Artaud calls for "contained" or "open"? What other frameworks might reading Artaud open up for us when it comes to discussing the power relationship between audience/performer, reader/writer? 3.5) If we go back to John Durham Peters, how might Artaud fit into or complicate the Socratic fear of "transgressive circulation"? 4) Write an imi...

Hi, so didn't read the essays in the back yet, but hoping we can talk more about them as the blog rolls itself out. Obviously, especially for those of you who were in the translation workshop with me, I agree w/ Tawada's claims that this is a "radical form of translation that knows no other way but to cross over into poetry"; one that "[needn't] serve the readers but represent the process of translation as an artistic act." A translation that crosses into poetry by leaving "the gaps intact." But instead of summarizing any more of Tawada's intro, I just want to turn to the Wolf quote she pulls out. The one where Wolf talks about German being less of a "fatherland" language and more of a "false-landly" one. Something that spoke to me, personally (as it may have others), and also might get to the heart of the destabilization this particular translation enacts. One in which "seemingly solid meanings...appear to disso...

 Art by Loren Crabbe, from the series “ Purging Abjection .” Here's a video that I always think of when considering the difference in fear responses, and it hits several of the same topics we have this semester (uncanny, masks, and I think in terms of response, creepy and abject are similar)   ----->    Why Are Things Creepy? The avenues of exploration and interpretation in Gro Dahle's A Hundred Thousand Hours  are so plentiful, that for the sake of purely instigating a discussion of this collection with specific regards to our class's most recent conversations, I'll focus on a few larger avenues to get the ball rolling.  Dahle's poems have all the elements that should signal them as confessional- domestic space, shame (sexual), emotive lyrical language, etc. Yet from the opening poem, with the room standing to greet the speaker, we know that there are elements of surrealism and abject, radically diverging from confession. Julia Kristeva...

“The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon.” – Virginia Woolf Which Once Had Been Meadow moves through distillation. In the space of the book, even “anesthesia stiffens the walls.” Nothing is sedated; everything is charged. Woolf’s “breaking” is vital, here; the poems possess a simultaneously eruptive and meditative quality, at once “commanding” and “disorienting.” The space’s image-set—forest, wellspring, meadow, breast, beam, heart, lake—is singular only in its presentation. Each image possesses a transformative property, a profundity of scope, and—somehow, in this vastness—precise delivery. Resisting the confessional,* Jäderlund asserts: “The veil does not conceal me now / The monologue does not conceal me.” Thus, the voice of the book is an impenetrable and electrified persona, one of prophetic (or banal?) vision. As the image-set transforms, exchanges, agitates, one sees Ezra Pound’s “sense of sudden growth,”** and is commanded and disoriented b...

"Perhaps my prolificity is due to the fact that my work evolves as my daily life. My life in poetry. Poetry in my life. Afam Akeh is one of the members of my generation of poets that I most respect and listen to. I was so happy when he returned to writing poetry after about a decade or more of silence. He reads my poetry with devotion and close attention. Right from our beginnings in Lagos he has encouraged and supported my work. He may not be wrong in calling me a confessional poet but that is just one aspect of my writing. Other critics and appreciators have seen me as a surrealist poet, political poet, anarchist poet, environmental poet, abstract poet, avant-garde poet, etc. I don’t have a label for myself or what I write. Regarding where I find the energy for work, I guess it resides in my unapologetic love for life and my curiosity about everything." Uche Nduka, from this interview, in which not a few of our topics get called upon.  "A three-week visit home is ...