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Post by afilreis on Jan 11, 2023 10:15:27 GMT -5
Dear all:
Here is a link to the recording of our recent live, participatory Zoom session:
As an option, please watch all or parts of the recording and use this thread to comment in any way you like—and/or continue the conversation started there.
—Al
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Post by Darcy on Jan 11, 2023 11:01:33 GMT -5
I watched the recording and agree wholeheartedly - I could not have got through this work without the help of the collective. It takes a village!
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Post by Paul K on Jan 11, 2023 12:15:41 GMT -5
Al,
I did not see a notice of the Zoom session. I signed up just before this SloPo course started. Where should I have been looking?
-Paul
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Post by afilreis on Jan 11, 2023 12:17:13 GMT -5
I watched the recording and agree wholeheartedly - I could not have got through this work without the help of the collective. It takes a village! Long live collaborative interpreting!
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Post by afilreis on Jan 11, 2023 12:17:43 GMT -5
Al,
I did not see a notice of the Zoom session. I signed up just before this SloPo course started. Where should I have been looking?
-Paul
Paul - are you not receiving my daily email messages sent to the group? - Al
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Post by Paul K on Jan 11, 2023 12:28:59 GMT -5
Al,
I did not see a notice of the Zoom session. I signed up just before this SloPo course started. Where should I have been looking?
-Paul
Paul - are you not receiving my daily email messages sent to the group? - Al No, I am not. Just checking in on this forum. Should I get you my email address in some appropriate way? -Paul
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Post by afilreis on Jan 11, 2023 12:31:17 GMT -5
Paul - are you not receiving my daily email messages sent to the group? - Al No, I am not. Just checking in on this forum. -Paul
Ah that explains it. Send me a note to modpo@writing.upenn.edu and I'll add you.
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Post by Vijaya Maddali on Jan 11, 2023 12:45:36 GMT -5
Yesterday's zoom session was just so enriching and inspiring. I loved Lydia's analogy of a 'difficult joke', and I remember that in my initial years in Mod Po, I would feel that way about so many poems. Stacy talked about understanding how Retallack reassures us that incomprehensibility is ok. And also, Al pointed out how there are two kinds of people in this world - one kind who cannot stand uncertainty and the other type who welcome it. I was of the first kind. Not only did I feel wretched with the complexities of life, but I also felt wretched with the complexity of relationships. And I find that reading these poems in this collaborative space has made me more attentive to everything around me and more accepting of people and situations. I now feel that these difficult poems can also be pleasurable. Close reading like this seems to open up all the closed and clogged neural pathways in one's brain.
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Will B
ModPo student
Posts: 19
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Post by Will B on Jan 11, 2023 14:11:29 GMT -5
I, too, want to express my gratitude to everyone who helped us to get through a lot of Retallack's work yesterday.
Like Cat McCredie and others, I find this type of poetry/prose tough to engage with. I have settled on a sort of meditative approach, where I simply keep reading without understanding at the time and hope to (magically?) get it later on. It's like trying to remember a word or a person's name--the harder I try, the less likely I am to recall it. If I give it time or sleep on it, the word or name will come to me as if out of the blue (surely you have experienced this). Sometimes, with work like this, later or much later, I have an "aha" moment where it (the poetry or essay) suddenly makes some sort of sense to me, which is not to say that it is an understanding that others might share. But there's a satisfaction in the waiting and in the revealing. It first worked with Gertrude Stein (who nearly drove me away from ModPo the first time), it has worked with other experimental poets/authors, and it seems to be working with Retallack.
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Post by Laura De Bernardi on Jan 11, 2023 14:31:03 GMT -5
I agree that there are some people who relish uncertainty. I've seen people dominate via the exercise of it. Uncertainty can be a ploy used in offices world-wide, where people in positions of power deliberately create uncertainty, so that everyone around them rushes around fixing problems they have created, while they exercise power and climb the corporate ladder. Many a talented person has been crushed by the use of such power dynamics.
Uncertainty can't be so simply defined as 'loving it or hating it'. It has a moral quality to it. I think that it's possible to describe those who pushed QAnon themes as loving uncertainty and Trump as being its CEO.
The implication here at ModPo is that those who relish 'uncertainty' are somehow better, more creative, inspired, able to do the work most valued, that of poetry etc than those who find 'certainty' important. If you like uncertainty, you are a plodder, uninspired, somehow challenged. I think that there are serious problems with such thinking. I suspect that those of you who relish 'uncertainty' suddenly lost your job, or your home, or your entire family - as is currently happening in Ukraine - might find that relishing 'uncertainty' is not as appealing a psychological category.
Lear on the heath - having lost it all - gone from king to pauper, that's uncertainty - and there's no relishing it, and he goes mad - as Shakespeare makes clear. Uncertainty and madness are seriously correlated.
Philosophy involves thinking - the ability to think, evaluate, push arguments along - that's all I'm doing here. This is not about causing offence, or getting people offside - but about challenging issues that require challenge.
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Will B
ModPo student
Posts: 19
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Post by Will B on Jan 11, 2023 16:18:03 GMT -5
I agree that there are some people who relish uncertainty. I've seen people dominate via the exercise of it. Uncertainty can be a ploy used in offices world-wide, where people in positions of power deliberately create uncertainty, so that everyone around them rushes around fixing problems they have created, while they exercise power and climb the corporate ladder. Many a talented person has been crushed by the use of such power dynamics. Uncertainty can't be so simply defined as 'loving it or hating it'. It has a moral quality to it. I think that it's possible to describe those who pushed QAnon themes as loving uncertainty and Trump as being its CEO. The implication here at ModPo is that those who relish 'uncertainty' are somehow better, more creative, inspired, able to do the work most valued, that of poetry etc than those who find 'certainty' important. If you like uncertainty, you are a plodder, uninspired, somehow challenged. I think that there are serious problems with such thinking. I suspect that those of you who relish 'uncertainty' suddenly lost your job, or your home, or your entire family - as is currently happening in Ukraine - might find that relishing 'uncertainty' is not as appealing a psychological category. Lear on the heath - having lost it all - gone from king to pauper, that's uncertainty - and there's no relishing it, and he goes mad - as Shakespeare makes clear. Uncertainty and madness are seriously correlated. Philosophy involves thinking - the ability to think, evaluate, push arguments along - that's all I'm doing here. This is not about causing offence, or getting people offside - but about challenging issues that require challenge. This seems an unfair generalization. Doesn't uncertainty also inspire investigation? And exactly what can we be certain about? Not much, I'd suggest. Correlation (even if true) does not prove causation (in either direction).
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Post by Laura De Bernardi on Jan 11, 2023 17:15:49 GMT -5
Thanks, Will, for your reply. Correlation and causality are exactly as you describe, and so I used the word 'correlation'. You can see a similar Shakespearean outcome in the Chinese C8th poet Tu Fu, who chronicled the cataclysmic demise of the Tang Dynasty, with figures suggesting that up to a 1/5th of the world's population either died or was displaced during the upheaval: "I laugh at myself a madman / growing older, growing madder."
It's possible that most "generalisations" can be described as "unfair" if you happen not to agree with the point being made. The "generalisation" that I was attacking felt unfair to me. I think uncertainty has to be understood in context. In the context of war, as I described, it's not a good feeling. However, the astronauts who got stranded near the moon due to technical difficulties in a pre-digitial age, may have felt 'uncertain' about their ability to return, but the mathematics they relied upon and the slide rulers they were using, had some solid scientific principles of 'certainty' built in. They probably used every scrap of mental ingenuity, will power and stoic courage they could muster to master their 'uncertainty' and 'certain' mathematical principles, to return to earth safely.
Psychologically, 'uncertain' or what's called 'disorganised' attachment in childhood leads to all kinds of haphazard mental functioning. So growing up in 'uncertain' family environments where attachment is imperilled, is not what I would wish on anybody. Currently, there is no 'certainty' as to whether such 'uncertain/disorganised' behavioural outcomes can be positively resolved. Attachment happens at such deep levels in the brain that it may not be possible. That doesn't stop researchers from continuing to probe possibilities, and so knowledge about the issues continues to grow and expand.
I'm no expert at these kinds of arguments. I suspect that the human mind can tolerate some forms of uncertainty and not others. I think that some experiences of uncertainty can provoke creative outcomes, but not all. I also think that some kinds of certainty can provoke creative outcomes. Iambic pentameter can be described as having certainty and look at what a great mind did with that!
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Post by marciacamino on Jan 11, 2023 18:19:23 GMT -5
Yay. I just listened to the recording of the Zoom group session, and I stand so happy and am feeling so at home knowing that poems can be community-making machines, that we are studying that, practicing that. That poets can believe in that, and therefore build into their own poems the deep belief that readers are right there listening as both individuals and community members, and that poetry readers can believe in that and work from that belief, is truly fabulous. I was not educated in poetry in this 'three cheers for difficulty!' fashion, so I am grateful for ModPo and definitely out of my comfort zone, but I'll work to make gratitude and hope override discomfort, for they are all just cogs in the process of poetic things turning. Welcome to the machine, eh???
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Post by Denny on Jan 12, 2023 1:44:56 GMT -5
I’m compelled to take Laura to task one something she writes which is I believe completely false on it’s own terms as well as contrary to what is suggested in the wager.
“ I think that it's possible to describe those who pushed QAnon themes as loving uncertainty”
The opposite is I believe the case. People are drawn to crackpot conspiracy theories like QAnon not because they love uncertainty but precisely because they are afraid of uncertainty. They are so starved for the comfort of certainty that they’ll buy into these tortured and intricate convoluted fictions designed to simplify a complex reality.
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lynn
ModPo student
Posts: 6
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Post by lynn on Jan 12, 2023 1:52:09 GMT -5
Thank you, Al and to everyone who participated in the zoom session. It was so helpful to discuss JR and her work together. She gives us a lot to unravel and together it becomes a marvelous adventure. Thank you, Al, for providing us with the challenge.
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