lidia
ModPo student
Posts: 24
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Post by lidia on Jan 13, 2023 3:47:14 GMT -5
I'm wondering what you think of Rokhl Korn, Jewish/Yiddish poet, (1898-1982): yiddishkayt.org/other-side-of-the-poem That poem struck me when I first read it - its power immediate - and I am moved and feel teary every time. Yes, it's moving for me too Laura. I was brought up on folksongs and lyrical poetry. I memorized it as a child so it resonates for sure.
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Post by Laura De Bernardi on Jan 13, 2023 12:45:34 GMT -5
lidia, so interesting to hear that you memorised it as a child and that it continues to resonate. There is something about good poetry - it makes an impact - over a lifetime - and it does that in its honesty, its sincerity - and the love embedded within it - for language and for the human condition.
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Post by Laura De Bernardi on Jan 13, 2023 13:30:30 GMT -5
Denny, When you say that 'taking me to task' was a poor choice of words, are you saying that you wish to continue to 'take me to task' but with a better choice of words? I'm asking whether the motivation itself - of taking me or anybody else here at ModPo to task, because you do not agree with them, or because their 'tone rankles' - is a reasonable one regardless of the language used to convey it.
If you mean to continue to take me to task - which has the implication of chastisement - then that is something that I need and have the right to know going forwards, as I will make adjustments accordingly.
I also want to be clear about the issue of my 'tone' 'rankling' you. In any disagreement, I take it as a given that another's tone might rankle. Disagreements usually rankle. That's their nature. Are you saying that you do not want me to disagree at ModPo? That I must not rankle? And, if I do rankle, are you suggesting I should rankle only a way that pleases and causes no discomfort?
I'm also interested in this question: What is what does it mean to you to enter into a disagreement? What it means to me is this: I believe in communication and conversation that is dynamic. I do my best to explore areas of weakness within myself and my thinking and to shift and change when I find them. I offer up positions, points of view, not because I believe I am right, but because I think they require further assessment.
My study of Buddhism has taught me to work with the notion of provisional truths - which means knowing that what I think today may change tomorrow as more information becomes available. I presume myself to be blinkered. I presume that my point of view is essentially and by its very nature, limited.
I presume that what rankles me today may not rankle tomorrow. What I do not understand today I may understand tomorrow. I also presume that I may be less blinkered in the future, or that present forms of blinkeredness will consolidate, or that new forms of being blinkered may arise.
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 13, 2023 20:40:16 GMT -5
Is there any chance of seeing the Caterpillar poem that Vijaya read? I missed some of the words. The words I heard I liked. Thanks.
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Post by afilreis on Jan 13, 2023 22:34:31 GMT -5
Is there any chance of seeing the Caterpillar poem that Vijaya read? I missed some of the words. The words I heard I liked. Thanks. Ray, it was a poem by Sophia Naz. Al
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 13, 2023 22:46:07 GMT -5
Is there any chance of seeing the Caterpillar poem that Vijaya read? I missed some of the words. The words I heard I liked. Thanks. Ray, it was a poem by Sophia Naz. Al Ah, missed that part too. At least I’m not making the mistake of not making a mistake.
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Post by Denny on Jan 14, 2023 1:20:53 GMT -5
Denny, When you say that 'taking me to task' was a poor choice of words, are you saying that you wish to continue to 'take me to task' but with a better choice of words? I'm asking whether the motivation itself - of taking me or anybody else here at ModPo to task, because you do not agree with them, or because their 'tone rankles' - is a reasonable one regardless of the language used to convey it. If you mean to continue to take me to task - which has the implication of chastisement - then that is something that I need and have the right to know going forwards, as I will make adjustments accordingly. I also want to be clear about the issue of my 'tone' 'rankling' you. In any disagreement, I take it as a given that another's tone might rankle. Disagreements usually rankle. That's their nature. Are you saying that you do not want me to disagree at ModPo? That I must not rankle? And, if I do rankle, are you suggesting I should rankle only a way that pleases and causes no discomfort? I'm also interested in this question: What is what does it mean to you to enter into a disagreement? What it means to me is this: I believe in communication and conversation that is dynamic. I do my best to explore areas of weakness within myself and my thinking and to shift and change when I find them. I offer up positions, points of view, not because I believe I am right, but because I think they require further assessment. My study of Buddhism has taught me to work with the notion of provisional truths - which means knowing that what I think today may change tomorrow as more information becomes available. I presume myself to be blinkered. I presume that my point of view is essentially and by its very nature, limited. I presume that what rankles me today may not rankle tomorrow. What I do not understand today I may understand tomorrow. I also presume that I may be less blinkered in the future, or that present forms of blinkeredness will consolidate, or that new forms of being blinkered may arise. Laura you write fluidly and prolifically and much of what you do say in most threads I find substantive and compelling and often I will find much to agree with. I certainly do not want you to make any ‘adjustments’ . You are entitled to your opinions and I would rather you express them than not. I am sorry that I began voicing my objections to things you have written by using language such as ‘taking you to task’ . I did feel ‘compelled’ to respond then just as I do now. It may well have been a mistake for me to say anything as I don’t believe myself to be nearly as adept at this sort of thing as yourself. It consumes much effort and is likely not worthwhile or maybe even counterproductive for me to do so. In fact I worry that I’ve chased poor Ken off again ( although maybe it was something else) by getting all worked up over a few words here in these threads. Regardless of what I may say I hold him and you in high esteem and so I’m now ‘compelled’ to make myself better understood to the best of my limited capabilities. Most people cannot be expected to like, appreciate or buy into the likes of Stein, Cage, aleatory writing or difficult philosophical experimentalist poets. I think you could find much company in maligning the stuff. That said, I found your initial post regarding certainty and uncertainty to be muddled, not pertinent to the content of the excerpted text under discussion, and deliberately offensive. I can only suppose such an assessment by this critic comes as a surprise to you since you ended it by saying “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” If what came before you wrote that was thinking than I don’t think much of it. First of all , the terms certainly and uncertainty do not appear in the excerpted portions of the reading under discussion, secondly they are pretty vague. Thirdly, in my view, the only certainty, besides death, is uncertainty. If you are interested in seriously engaging a panacea of philosophical inquiry, you might begin by actually reading things Retallack has to say than making some sort of straw person out of her and voicing vague generalities as objections. You can find the complete essays in the wager here and much more can be gained by reading the book from the beginning sequentially in the order it was intended to be read monoskop.org/images/6/66/Retallack_Joan_The_Poethical_Wager.pdfAnd in fact you did explicitly cause offense by lumping all those in Modpo together into a bunch of folks who somehow think they’re better than everyone else cause perhaps they believe in uncertainty. You also invoke the Q conspiracy as somehow pushing uncertainty, a comparison I found not only wrong but completely off base. And that was the second time you had done so. The first was in another response in ‘ How to do things with words’ where you suggest that Q can be characterized as ‘playful’, to which I strenuously disagree. Add to that your recent use of Q as a comparative where you empathically put yourself in the poor maligned Q loving masses shoes to see it from their perspective …, “People who are attracted to Q and its new manifestations are afraid of the certainty of the elites. That's another way of looking at it. In a very real sense, they don't trust the politic, economic and academic elites, which they blame for wreaking havoc in their lives. That's why the language that's becoming normalised in the USA now amongst these groupings is "awake not woke". Maybe you’re impervious to the state of race relations in this country and the fact that people who ascribe to loaded and reactionary culture war memes like ‘awake not woke’ also by and large subscribe to white supremacy and anti blackness. It’s pretty thinly veiled ugly and dangerous stuff and Q is all up in that mix and has no place whatsoever as a rubric by which to measure any of the ideas espoused by Retallack. I nearly felt trolled by this sort of talk and unfortunately have felt compelled to answer to it. Now it’s possible and or likely I have completely misunderstood, misinterpreted and misread you. Maybe it’s just the general fact of this stuff seemingly in my face all the time. It’s also a holiday here on Monday. Martin Luther King Day. One of the last books I read was an essay published in 1962 by James Baldwin called ‘ the fire next time’ or ‘Down at the Cross: Letter from a region of my mind’ Unfortunately his essay felt contemporary, as if not much had changed. I look forward to seeing you in the forums and expect you to keep speaking your mind and I shall attempt to do the same while trying to be clearer and less didactic
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leahs
ModPo student
Posts: 11
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Post by leahs on Jan 14, 2023 18:26:11 GMT -5
I enjoyed listening to this Zoom conversation a lot! Another reminder to me that verbal/oral discourse is always different from the written/textual. Wonderful insights from everyone, just a different format than our forums here. Thank you!
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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 16, 2023 7:24:41 GMT -5
Maybe you’re impervious to the state of race relations in this country and the fact that people who ascribe to loaded and reactionary culture war memes like ‘awake not woke’ also by and large subscribe to white supremacy and anti blackness. It’s pretty thinly veiled ugly and dangerous stuff and Q is all up in that mix and has no place whatsoever as a rubric by which to measure any of the ideas espoused by Retallack. I nearly felt trolled by this sort of talk and unfortunately have felt compelled to answer to it. Now it’s possible and or likely I have completely misunderstood, misinterpreted and misread you. Maybe it’s just the general fact of this stuff seemingly in my face all the time. It’s also a holiday here on Monday. Martin Luther King Day. One of the last books I read was an essay published in 1962 by James Baldwin called ‘ the fire next time’ or ‘Down at the Cross: Letter from a region of my mind’ Unfortunately his essay felt contemporary, as if not much had changed. I look forward to seeing you in the forums and expect you to keep speaking your mind and I shall attempt to do the same while trying to be clearer and less didactic Denny, a big YES from me to this. I hadn't heard 'awake not woke' before but can recognize a reactionary culture war meme when I hear one. The state of race relations in (so-called) Australia is if anything worse than it is in the USA, so no doubt this phrase is being deployed here. I do think Laura is generally expressing mistrust in Retallack and I share some of this mistrust. It is, as Paul K wrote, an act of faith for some of us who don't straightaway 'get' her to engage in her work. And there are many bad faith obfuscators out there, including politicians -- and academics. There is a loud voice in me that says I'd be more profitably engaged reading, say, a James Baldwin essay. But it's just that there's a louder voice saying, ModPo.
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Post by Denny on Jan 16, 2023 9:14:14 GMT -5
Well Cat one of my difficulties has been from the beginning just limiting to an analysis to a bite sized piece of excerpt. Of course maybe that in itself is the fractal geometry. I also feel as I have gone pretty far afield and not been particularly helpful here . I did post a comment on the first piece excepted but should maybe have put it here instead as it was a kind of example of where I had, it seems to me, agreed a bit with Laura while simultaneously disagreeing. I think Retallack is capacious and wide ranging especially in the Poethical Wager which is really one 300 page long essay of which I’ve only read the first two chapters. My comment had to do with ideas discussed concerning a complex realism and since I had written it in ‘notes’ I can post it again for whatever it’s worth…
One funny thing about this talk about complex realism is how congruent it actually may be with the realism of the nineteenth century. Laura mentions Balzac who was a consummate writer, observer and chronicler of the human condition. His characters had a volition of their own based on their nature as they arose from the mind of the author in the act of their creation. This too may effectively be seen as a complex realism.
Another of the great ‘realists ‘ who did the same was Tolstoy, a man who held himself to the fires of his time, later spoke of all his works as a waste of time, and very much considered and was actively involved in the issues of his day on and off the pages of his fictions, which came to him I believe not beforehand as if by same pre planned mechanism but as process of thinking and writing them on the page, a conception of bringing art into being not so different from what Retallack is talking about.
Even the clever mixed fable tales of the tortoise and hare which Retallack devises and which evoke thoughts of the fabled ancient author of fables Aesop are likewise central to the ideas expounded in Tolstoys great novel War and Peace. Tolstoy was much taken to task by countless critics for mentioning this business midway in the novel, where he launches into a seemingly irrelevant to plot and character story of Achilles and the tortoise and how it’s said that Achilles cannot outrun the tortoise but only incrementally get closer, and from this metaphor Tolstoy crafts a narrative about the way he believes history itself works that is really not so different from Steins. Tolstoy seems to argue that history just happens as a somewhat organic evolving of of collective actions and really has very little to do with so called leaders. Tolstoy appears to have written the entire novel in an attempt to show what Stein effectively says in a sentence. In another analogous way, the great nineteenth century painter Whistler ran afoul of the critics, chiefly Ruskin, for his series of nocturnes which could be seen as presaging the abstract expressionist aesthetics of the mid twentieth
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Post by Carla Stein on Jan 16, 2023 14:55:01 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 Carla Stein on Jan 16, 2023 15:18:22 GMT -5
Responding to Wil B and Laura De Bernadi
I think the missing piece here and what JR, John Cage, Gertrude Stein and others have been pointing towards is in part about the disruption necessary to allow openings for the evolution and incubation of new ways of thinking about poetry and life. If only the certainty of old canons are acceptable than the potential of questioning or investigation and the probability of innovation decreases or is completely stifled and halted. Embracing uncertainty entails embracing the fluidity of time and and space that is change. To quote Hericlitus: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
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Post by Maria L. Berg on Jan 17, 2023 0:48:29 GMT -5
I've been disappointed with my participation in this, my first Slo-Po, AND I missed the zoom meeting! But I watched it after, and Al was talking about how Joan led the Bard Language & Thinking Workshop, so I have something to share. When I was still a child who thought she was grown, I got a scholarship to Bard College and had to show up a month early to go to the Language & Thinking Workshop.[(I only lasted that one year at Bard due to family issues, though those issues are, of course, still debated), but found it easy to graduate early at my state school after)] I still have the book made for us to study from, and the typed and handwritten work I did. I took pictures. How do I share the pictures?
There wasn't any Joan Retallack in the copies bound into a book, but I wonder if I met Joan, and if she was one of the two women at the head of the tables, who made me write about my childhood and then made me read it aloud in front of strangers until I cried. It's possible. The experience was traumatic. And I was praised, so I think it was supposed to be.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 17, 2023 1:08:58 GMT -5
Is certainty vs. uncertainty another false dichotomy?
And yet, from "The Woman in the Chinese Room": "she thinks she knows but doesn't want to accept that in order to write or read or speak there must be a division between light and dark." Is there a way to craft our language (poem, conversation, or forum correspondence) to overcome (too easy) categorization?
I appreciate Carla's contribution (as I have those of others). "[D]isruption necessary to allow openings" has been a major theme of modernism for well more than 100 years.
My own hope for these staged disruptions is that they will open to more good and conserve what is already good. A hope.
A thought relative to "embracing the fluidity of time and space that is change." Yes, there is ineluctable change, it is to be acknowledged--as is that everything is the same (except composition, per Stein). But change by change, any specific change is no more necessarily positive than is any particular uncertainty, or even stance of uncertainty. What is changing and how? What is the change you wish to see? What are you uncertain about? How do you use uncertainty?
-Paul
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Post by Paul K on Jan 17, 2023 1:15:06 GMT -5
"The experience was traumatic. And I was praised, so I think it was supposed to be." Provoking trauma for whatever (educational, therapeutic, political) purpose is dicey. I hope it was not supposed to be traumatic. Wishing you peace and wisdom. -Paul
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