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Post by afilreis on Jan 13, 2023 8:42:22 GMT -5
Hello, everyone.
I'd like us now to turn toward an audio recording of a 28-minute presentation Joan Retallack gave at the Kelly Writers House in October of 2000. We invited nine poets to KWH and asked each to choose a modernist that had been a significant influence. Joan chose Gertrude Stein.
During her presentation she talked about Stein, read some of Stein's writing, and read some of her own most Steinian work. She added commentary in between each.
Our next project is to listen to the entire presentation. Imagine ourselves in the audience that evening at the Writers House. Take in the whole and try to understand overall what Stein has meant to Retallack — as a writer, as a thinker, as a poet in an aesthetic lineage.
You can see the "set list" of this reading and find links to the audio by going HERE.
Then post to this thread your impressions. I can't wait to see what you have to say!
—Al
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Post by Darcy on Jan 13, 2023 9:59:42 GMT -5
What struck me during her reading was the repetition of words, such as "composition." In her selection of readings, is she saying that all poetry is but a repetition of ideas already presented? Or, perhaps, in order to truly hear/understand a work, we must repeat it - either by reading silently or out loud - over and over again.
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Post by stacyantoniadis on Jan 13, 2023 17:48:14 GMT -5
Retallack says she in interested in procedures, such as deciding in advance and whose rules you compose...as this will take the poet somewhere they have not been before or never planned. Her SteinZas in Meditation seems to reflect this; she reads her composition, alternates with a "SteinZa", etc. Now I am trying to figure out where this new "rule" took the poem in the reading. Still workin' on it
Stacy Antoniadis
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Post by Paul K on Jan 13, 2023 18:03:30 GMT -5
What struck me during her reading was the repetition of words, such as "composition." In her selection of readings, is she saying that all poetry is but a repetition of ideas already presented? Or, perhaps, in order to truly hear/understand a work, we must repeat it - either by reading silently or out loud - over and over again. Darcy,
Repetition is a major theme--even love or passion--of Stein's. As you noted, in Stein's "Composition as Explanation," the word composition--and really many of Stein's thoughts, are repeated and repeated.
One of Stein's early works is a very long novel, The Making of Americans. As far as it is story, it is a fictionalized version of the story of her own family: immigrants, children of immigrants, grandchildren (Stein's generation). In it, she says she sees people both as real (themselves) and as like someone else (types). Most people don't like to be seen that way, but it seems to Stein both important and something to be loved. Retallack edited a selection of Stein's writings (Gertrude Stein: Selections, 2008). She chose to include just this passage from The Making of Americans. I think it is worth reproducing the first four paragraphs of the passage, both for the statement about repetition in life and Stein's enactment of that repetition in her writing.
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like someone else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. Every one is always busy with it, no one of them ever want to know it that everyone looks like someone else and they see it. Mostly every one dislikes to hear it. It is very important to me to always know it, to always see it which one looks like others and to tell it. I write for myself and strangers. I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated. There are some who like it that I know they are like many others and repeat it, there are many who never can really like it. There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it. This is now the history of the way some of them are it.
I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it. At least they mostly do not like it that every one is of a kind of men and women and I see it. I love it and I write it.
More grist for the mill!
-Paul
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Post by Paul K on Jan 13, 2023 18:08:09 GMT -5
Retallack says she in interested in procedures, such as deciding in advance and whose rules you compose...as this will take the poet somewhere they have not been before or never planned. Her SteinZas in Meditation seems to reflect this; she reads her composition, alternates with a "SteinZa", etc. Now I am trying to figure out where this new "rule" took the poem in the reading. Still workin' on it Stacy Antoniadis Stacy,
I am with you 100%. This idea of adopting a procedure in order to get someplace (be put someplace) you would not get to following your own associations of thought was one of the central striking ideas I heard in her "reading herself." But indeed, where has it taken her. And, perhaps, has it truly taken her to a different place? --Just an open question, a la Quinta Slef, the skeptic.
-Paul
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Lou N
Community TA 
Posts: 38
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Post by Lou N on Jan 13, 2023 23:41:35 GMT -5
To start: I listened to the reading twice, and it was challenging to listen to fragments without a context. So, I went searching and found the extremely moving audio of John Cage reading his mesostic sourced from Jasper Johns text here: If you have a few minutes, it is well worth the time.
However, there are, in JR's inimitable fashion, significant differences between the text she reads and the text as published. It gives you some idea of the amount of work and editing of her own work she does. Every word is weighed.
With respect to Retallack and Stein: It seems to me that there is a great difference in their methods. I don't know if Stein used aleatory procedures to generate her writing, but she did use a lot of repetition, and her work is paced by breath. From the little I've read of Stein, I'd say she seems to evacuate meaning from words in order to allow for new perceptions and associations to arise. There is something about this that, despite appearances, seems organic, that is generated from the material, the matter, of words themselves. On the other hand, with JR, I have the sense of a mind hard at work, wrestling with history, with the philosophers, with the canon, with the impositions of language. I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago with this image: A woman standing within a larger than life, hollow, human-shaped form made of clay or perhaps metal. She has a hammer and chisel and is working on making chinks from within, seeking to to crack open the form that imprisons and encases her. JR has, I think, a more political objective than Stein. I think she wants to destroy the old forms, all our assumptions about the world and how it's supposed to work that we take for granted, as givens. She wants to open up new avenues for thinking about the world, thinking differently, in ways that we cannot even yet envisage. She says it herself at around 19:30 in the audio reading: "How to not inscribe yourself in the system you're opposing / opposing opposable thumbs". I read the "opposable thumbs" here as us, the too-clever-by-half homo sapiens currently bent on destroying our world. To change that we need to change how we think; we need to become more aware of what our words are saying.
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Post by sophianaz on Jan 13, 2023 23:52:16 GMT -5
“The possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself” This felt key to my understanding of what JR does with her writing. It’s like a mirrored portmanteau reflecting on itself and also back at you, the reader.
Have listened to the recordings several times now. Jigsaw puzzles, kaleidoscopes, plush soundscapes are some sensations. I particularly like the Chinese room, it feels like one of those boxes that keeps opening and revealing another box..,
In true Cageian fashion I have nothing to say an I am saying it..
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Post by Paul K on Jan 14, 2023 0:27:10 GMT -5
My response to "JR reads herself" has been to search out the texts she reads from.
Given her strong urging to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus before reading her own poetry, I have got to proposition 3.13 tonight. I have written to a friend whose dissertation was titled Logic and Sin in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
She is clearly writing in reference to a cultural "conversation" with Wittgenstein, Stein, Austen/Austin, Cage and more. Full appreciation of her work may come from walking the road she has walked. Or some type of appreciation. Or the key I need. Or want.
Yet, the pleasure principle. Stein, in the later part of her life, said of her writing, "If you enjoy it, you have understood it." Too simple? From early in JR's Memnoir: "Studies have shown that the brain / prefers unpredictable pleasures."
I have to say I loved the parts of "SteinZas en Mediation" that simply compiled the first words of each line in the first stanzas of Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation." I have been reading substantially in "Stanzas in Meditation", especially this past fall, and falling under its spell, despite or because of its combination of incompleteness and tumbling of variations. Somehow the stringing of first words from its lines felt organic to the poem. (Unfortunately, the text to "SteinZas en Mediation" is, by my preliminary search, not available online.)
Remember, from Stein's "Composition as Explanation": - continuous present - beginning again and again - using everything leads to composition
In conversation with Stein and Jasper Johns, Wittgenstein: [my comments in these brackets]
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
2.01 A fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs. [!!!!!!!]
2.02 The object is simple. [?! -- and protean?] 2.063 The total reality is the world. [per 1.13 and 2.01 then, combinations of objects in logical space = the world = total reality]
2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts.
2.12 The picture is a model of reality. 2.13 To the objects correspond in the picture to the elements of the picture. 2.131 The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.
2.14 The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way. [composition; per Stein]
2.15 The picture is a fact.
That's it for today.
-Paul
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lidia
ModPo student
Posts: 24
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Post by lidia on Jan 14, 2023 6:35:43 GMT -5
The Memnoir is kind like an enactment of Stein's Composition piece. Memoir sits uneasily in what seems like a bewildering mass of influences - philosophical, linguistic, cultural ... 'Noir' is never neat and comfortable. It is designed to unsettle and destabilize.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 14, 2023 13:23:22 GMT -5
To start: I listened to the reading twice, and it was challenging to listen to fragments without a context. So, I went searching and found the extremely moving audio of John Cage reading his mesostic sourced from Jasper Johns text here: If you have a few minutes, it is well worth the time.
Well worth the time. Fragments without context => fragments creating new contexts; sometimes still fragments; repetition; the recurrence of words, images, ideas in new relations or new contexts; always the context of these fragments; in sequence but/and overlaid. I hid. I did not wish to reveal. What I did. Something real. My work. Air. Space.
**
Cage does to Jasper Johns' words what Stein does to her own ? Yet they do not seem emptied .
-Paul
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Post by Paul K on Jan 14, 2023 13:59:03 GMT -5
Here is the inscription JR chose to begin her introduction to her Gertrude Stein: Selections:
Gertrude Stein. She came and there she was and here she is still. But what was she, and what is this vast and contradictory, wonderful and maddening body of work? It means so much to us, has made so much possible, is so full of pleasure and still constant surprise. Yet there are long stretches that tax one's attention, putting the reader in a difficult position. The work asks us to invent new ways of reading.
-Dita Froller, New Old World Marvels
Stein willingly frustrated the normal expectations of sense-making, let alone story-telling. Stein willingly tried the patience of readers to make her point, to enact her point. Stein made words and combinations of words things in themselves, or things with new possibilities. Enactions.
Every moment is/was/is a present moment, continuously. Beginning again, there is repetition in new configuration. There is repetition. There is not repetition. There is [not] repetition. Use everything. It is all available. Whatever you choose. You choose.
An incredible freedom on the page
-Paul
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Post by vijaya on Jan 14, 2023 14:07:15 GMT -5
I have been listening to the 28-minute audio since is listening to Joan Retallack's voice and last night over and over again. Do I understand everything? No. Not yet. Before Mod Po, Wittgenstein was just a famous name I was faintly acquainted with. It is because of participants like Denny and a whole bunch of smart people in these forums that I got to know more about his works. She assumed everyone had read Wittgenstein and I felt a bit sheepish.
While I was listening to her reading Stein, the rain outside was crazy, like some dervish, and in contrast, JR's steady, clear voice was extremely comforting. What I love about her is her ability to talk about philosophy, technology and poetry and poetics, and poethics in such a light-handed way. We do not realize that we are in the presence of such a brilliant and intelligent mind. I became acquainted with Stein for the first time in Mod Po ( talk about ignorance !!) and I did not understand her right away. I finished reading 'Tender Buttons' a couple of months back. There are large parts of it that I did not get. I realize that I need to read more of her books. I have a few on my shelf. Mod Po has 'inspired' me to buy books and now I do have a whole shelf of new books to read- hopefully, before the symposium mode begins, I plan to finish reading them. JR inspires me to really dive into Stein with less trepidation.
I plan to write more later. These were my first thoughts.
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Post by vijaya on Jan 14, 2023 17:50:29 GMT -5
The Woman in the Chinese Room is beautiful because of the layers that can be peeled from the words. Love the word 'wordswerve'' -reminds me of Emily Dickinson's The Brain within its Groove. The 'prose' she refers to in those lines- are they the prose of ' official thought' which term is referenced in the Poem Talk on The Poethical Wager. As far as the thought experiment about AI, personally, I find it hard to accept that AI could be exactly like the human mind. I want to believe that JR is also on the same side. I love the humor. when she asks how the person locked inside the Chinese room is a woman, ' there are few if any signs if she exists at all she is the content of a thought experiment begun in a man's mind this is nothing new and perhaps more complicated. ( In the text from one of the sites - it is printed as knew not new). '... she is the content of a thought experiment begun in a man's mind' is she referring to the biblical story of how woman was created by a man from a man? And again, the part- ' there are few signs if she exists at all' that brings up the idea of how women have been in a sense 'non-existent' in a man's world. Why is that a 'sad space'?- ' dire lexical black and white squares. Sad and dire because a vibrant, dynamic thing like a language is reduced to a flat image of some squiggles inside these little spaces?
The whole explanation of Searle's experiment has so much irony in it. I may be wrong. But I can only think of those beautiful lines from Hamlet, ' What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties..." Can AI really create lines like that? Of course, my quoting from Shakespeare here is strange. I find that through Joan Retallack's work, I can approach and appreciate Stein better. I do see Stein in JR's sentences, but thankfully I do not find her as difficult as Stein.
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lidia
ModPo student
Posts: 24
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Post by lidia on Jan 14, 2023 18:45:19 GMT -5
I do see Stein in JR's sentences, but thankfully I do not find her as difficult as Stein. I think I find her as difficult as Stein. Stein's use of language is more rhythmic and dynamic - her poetry can be expressed very effectively through modern dance. I could meditate on Retallak but not dance to her. I've just recently started to think that the ordering of the segments in JR's Talk is a construction/composition in the way her poems seem to be - a series of juxtapositions laid bare. Like a handmade pottery dish with all its coils on show. |
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Post by jimlynch on Jan 14, 2023 18:50:22 GMT -5
Charlie Parker blew “Now's the Time” back in the 1940's and each time he blew a little differently, he began again every time and each time it was another time but always now. Each time a composition, a composing. The Time is Now. Time is always approaching the future. I come to the moment with everything that is my past. My backpack of then. But this is the moment of being in the moment, both immersed in the past and free of it and stumbling into the future. Somewhere in my backpack of then is a memory from my future remembering me free. What is at hand. An Imaginary Transcription A statement from “An Alphabet of Feeling' ( From “When to Read”): “A darkening of the everyday created it all over again” 1) I am am I eternities of that in each subject an old accumulation of the fragment or this then has been a partial era or what the subject shall have been if as they were absorbs were they every is the time I will be outside always and where should end in my there. ball it. taught yet best account manage do while repose did time separate could perfectly choose. authority alike fulfill instigation entirety blinded repose chance allowance all mind (begin again) A scattering of the fragments of the self twice in every time one goes that so then the other. Four times as many fun. Past reflects future. Future absorbs past. In between ofttimes I ended. And anded. 2) Of yellow say hollow in whisper empty from love which must call up un white un hedge going to burn the river goes who straighten no wet began nothing who over fill with glass. Here is where I begin. 3) Of creating turn to oppose a usable system nowhere yourself past. How to point a pose in turn. Self propelling generation of self organizing thought pulling quick. 4) I gave up Manhattan after several years of reading Shelley. On the edge of the pool drawn to reflection by a dropped stone. 5) “What's blur from more” - Keep the mind moving to prevent it from sinking back into the abyss of lucky stars, from drowning in the chaos it floats upon. Make time omit emit. - Jim Lynch |
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