Retallack #6: JR reads herself through Stein (audio)

I really enjoyed your post, Lou, especially the image of JR as ' A woman standing within a larger-than-life hollow.... seeking to crack open from inside the form"  I also feel that because she is more political and philosophical, she is in a way less difficult than Stein.

Ray asks 'Anybody having trouble with this material?'

I certainly am. Which leads me to ask 'Why is it difficult?' At the moment I understand this as an 'in the moment question'. While hesitant to draw an equivalent with mindfulnees, asking why something is difficult for me is to ask a question that is in itself complex: how am I feeling tight now? What has led to that feeling? what is going on in the wider world that influences that feeling? and so and so.

So now I understand that beginning to think about Retallack's poethical praxis is unavoidably complex. In one sense it doesn't matter where I start because I cannot avoid the complexity of her thinking. But as Ray helpfully suggests one has to start 'somewhere'.

In fact of course I have already started with the question about difficulty.

In the link that Lou Nelson gave us
www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-200414-7-3-2-49/audio-arts-published-supplement-john-cage-art-is-either-a-complaint-or-do-something-else
 there is a passage where Cage reads: 'Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it / Ditto ' If the 'object' is Retallack's thought, then I have already engaged in that process. As I understand Retallack at the moment, the doing something is driven by poethical curiosity.When we are curious, we ask questions (think back to Al's earlier post suggesting that responses could be in the form of questions).

But Retallack talks about poethical doing being a 'radical reformulation'. Could the question I asked earlier 'Why is this difficult?' be - or lead to - a radical reformulation? Could this question also be - or lead to - a radical reformulation? Ditto. And so and so.
It has certainly changed my understanding a bit. That'll do compared to Retallack's 30 years plus of thinking in this way.

So what are my new understandings:

1) in complex environments, starting anywhere is a form of doing. The choice of starting point is a poethical decision but the consequences of that decision can only be imagined (sometimes wrongly)

2) in complex environments an act of doing changes everything even if some things more than others

3) the moment of time in the changed complex environment is now different: 'in' the time or 'of' the time? (Maybe this is why no two readings by JR are identical)

4) so the relationship between the environment and doing is in constant evolution in a fluid (and inderterminable) way.

5) This might develop into a pedagogical practice if any reader chooses to radically transform this post.

I found this audio intriguing but challenging to process. I listened to it twice while doing some household chores, so that may have been the distraction, or other household noises. Sometimes I find I can absorb these conversations better when my body is doing something else than being still. This was not one of those cases. I did enjoy especially Retallack's reading related to Jasper Johns at the end -- the reading in which fork as painting is valued as better than painting as fork, if I recall. There's something about that language, and knowing a bit of Johns' work, that makes the use of words/symbols vs. use of objects/materials lay more bare for me. Or the use of words to stand in for objects. In Stein, perhaps, words sometimes stand in for sounds -- repetition, rather than helping us learn a language, helps us unlearn it in her oeuvre. The rest, I didn't know quite how to follow. Just wanted to participate and share some thoughts.

To me the Why seems the most important, and Retellack answers the why in the Poethical Wager and in the essay, What is experimental poetry (http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml) ?


Why write like this? Why eschew conventional grammar? How can you be sure what you want to convey is being conveyed in the “right” manner to your reader? What is the writer’s intention and what does the reader make of it? How do you know you’ll be accepted? And then of course you come across the uncannily perceptive observation from Stein: When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic.


I think, in embracing Steinian chutzpah, by throwing convention to the wind, Retallack wants to show us the dangers of conformity. Unless you experiment, unless you bend the rules, how will new ways of thinking be born? I just started reading the book Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and I see similarities in genius minds that want to think out of the box and their predicament when they feel they can’t. Even men of science (and I say men because there were very few women scientists in those days) were forbidden to think beyond certain boundaries, and for centuries, erroneous hypotheses and theories persisted regarding trait transmission and transmutation. In What is experimental poetry, Retallack mentions Neils Bohr and Max Plank, and the unconventional route the scientists took to understand particle physics, the physics of the very small. I imagine genius writers do the same thing with language. Again, another line from Gene stands out. Mukherjee mentions Wallace Stevens: “In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.” Mukherjee goes on to say that Stevens is talking about language and its “deep structural mystery.” But then he compares the mystery of language with that of hereditary science. “ …a sentence carries more meaning than individual words….and so it is with genes.” I find the comparison fascinating.



Personally, I find Stein, Retellack, and experimental poetry in general to be extremely difficult (it may seem incoherent, but the whole is so much more than the parts). In her brilliant essay on Stein (Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism on JSTOR), Marinne DeKoven mentions Noam Chomsky’s degrees of grammaticalness. First degree grammaticalness is all about convention (John plays golf/ a year ago/perform the task); 2nd degree takes certain liberties (golf plays John, a grief ago, and so forth) and third degree is mind bending, a la Steinian writing (a the ago, perform compel, golf plays aggressive)! It is also mentioned in the article that “[Stein] continues to be the least read giant of the 20th century…” Perhaps Retallack's and other experimental poetry will fuel a new fervor in the modern reader’s mind?



I recently attended a class on asemic poetry---poetry without language…no semantics—just visual elements—almost like calligraphy, but not quite. And yet, it is communicating an emotion and connecting the reader and writer with a gossamer thread. The more I read Retellack, I feel she is trying to do just that.

I think it's important to JR that the person in the room is a woman -  She is captive in China she begins. Much is made of 'history' and 'property'. JR refers to a 'thought experiment' but maybe it's not Searle's but a metaphor for how women's thought has been stymied? What are the 'black and white squares'? What does she mean when she says there must be a division between 'light and dark"

One of the difficulties I face in understanding JR is her status as both poet and philosopher. It is clear that the philosophy informs the poetry but does the poetry inform the  philosophy?

Read as itself, Tractatus is not poetry if we wish to retain the distinction. However thoughts or words from it, placed in certain con-texts by JR, can be read as poetry. Is that in itself a 'radical transformation'?

So it seems to be up to me as an active participant in the time/meaning evolution of the poem to decide whether I am reading philosophy or poetry. The key distinction for me here is whether what is being expressed can be understood by pure reason alone.

That is why JRs statements about reaching into the  inexpressible are significant: can we ( or should we) find a way of communicating unknown unknowns without invoking religion or magical metaphysics. Much of JRs curiosity is directed at philosophical metaphysics - the nature of reality or of being through her concepts of poethics. To me she seems to understand the world by understanding what it is not. This happens through a continuing conversation with her 'slef'.  Understanding evolves dynamically while at the same time being unstable to 'radical reformulation'.

The philosopher Judith Butler has said something that resonates here:

'I’m interested in cultivating a new sense of who we are as human beings and how we treat each other on the basis of an interdependent ontology, if you will, with a historical, political mindfulness about the unequal grievability of lives in our contemporary world. Justice is great, but it would be more probable in a world in which we’d learned to think clearly about who suffers violence disproportionately and who inflicts it disproportionately.'

In the same article, Butler gives an example of what I understand as a 'poethical' practice:


'We could have an angry and rageful art practice that exposes and counters violence without being violent. Being contaminated by violence is not the same as reproducing the systemic or institutional violence that we’re seeking to oppose.'
bit.ly/3IRTfNW

I have been trying to formulate something short and succinct to summarize this read through. Every time I listen through it I review my formulation as a means of re-thinking it and of trying to get closer to the essence. I suspect his is not what I’m supposed to do. But, to be charitable with myself, my excuse is that I would seek to use this to apply in understanding other things of JR’s that I read. I could expand upon this rationale by saying that this would be something like what JR does in applying a modernist compositional method to an existing composition in order to get closer to an essence. It would be my formulaic.

What is mad about the method in modernism is it’s project of making the compositional method itself the means of manifesting a mystical union with creation. It is in the selection of the method of composition that one is permitted this union. The method allows you to arrive in a place that would have been inaccessible to you without the method. It puts you in touch with the unknown or what would have been otherwise unknowable. It gives you a direct impression of the unknowable. That’s the mystical union.

It reminds me of Cage’s 4’33”. Just be quiet and listen to what is already there. It’s something like meditation. There are no words - only breath. And you end up with a satisfying experience of something distant and close at the same time.