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Post by vijaya on Jan 20, 2023 14:26:39 GMT -5
I enjoyed the poems because I happened to start reading The Poethical Wager simultaneously. The ideas that she talks of in that are reflected in her poems. If art is a mirror of what is happening around us, it seems reasonable that the ‘ethos’ of poetry reflects all of that. In the retelling of the Aesop Fable in Western Civ Cont’d and the visually arresting fractured poem 28 she gets the readers to ponder on all our contemporary concerns. There is a kind of truth that emerges in that space between us as readers and her as a poet that is not the loud, ugly, and fractured vision of the “Power- Fueled” voices which are sucking the oxygen out of the very air we breathe. This is where she gets us getting into the messiness of Complex Realism in the poem. I find the fable an insightful but straightforward narrative engaged with all the current preoccupations. But 28 is anything but straightforward visually and verbally. We as readers are drawn in to observe, consider and reflect on how the poem speaks to us.
According to JR we are at a point in time when ‘we are at the end of certain things as we have practiced them in the past’ And this she says is true of earlier eras too. In a broken world like this where the most dangerous thing is not to belong to a group (the more powerful group, the better), she reminds us of how it is the individual outliers like Galileo, Mandelbrot, Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Duchamp, and John Cage who ‘’ redefined the boundaries of their disciplines in relation to experiences that lay outside generic definitions. In None too Soon, it appears she is expressing this exact idea. Maybe she is addressing the individual writer who is struggling with his/her craft. But there is a philosophical aspect in her poems that touch upon life and the way it is lived by anyone not necessarily only writers.
I must admit I found the poems from How to do things with Words the most difficult and the most inaccessible to me. I might find it easier next year. I do not know. But I have decided not to fret about that, nor do I want to complain. I love JR’s work a lot so maybe I am biased.
JR says the new formalists are conservators and the Language poets are innovators.
In Not a Cage she is the conservator. It is such a pleasure to encounter the surprising turns the lines take.
JR’s edification of Stein becomes a kind of way for me to approach Stein and gives me hope for a more comfortable reading of Stein in time.
My favorite is The Problem of Evil. I keep reading it because it fascinates me, the cinematic quality with the lights, the blazing and the flashes reminds me of how we all are bonded with the TV which is the center of all our homes. The complex and chaotic world is inside our homes, on the TV, on our devices, we are connected and yet we are isolated and insulated from others' experiences. I love it that she creates this whole aspect of light and darkness in this piece. Good and Evil are always represented in our mythologies and cultures as Light and Dark. But on our screens, heroes and villains blend and blur. A god who can divide the light from the dark is suspect. Can anyone, even a god do that? The phrases ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’ and ‘light of my life’ are cliched phrases. What do these mean inside the poem? I am suddenly not bothered by what JR’s intentions are but concerned more about what these phrases inserted here mean in general.
I feel that the overall tone of JR is hopeful and empathic to our human condition. Unobtrusively, as we confront these poems, we also get a sense of what it means to confront this complex world. She deliberately avoids wearing the mantle of a ‘guru’ but her edification of other intellectual and thinking minds has this effect of gentle persuasion to consider her ideas.
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Post by vijaya on Jan 20, 2023 14:36:24 GMT -5
Thank you, Al, for this wonderful session on Joan Retallack. It was intimidating sometimes, but always stimulating. I am leaving for India next week and will be confronting the chaos and complexity of the craziness that is India. The wonderful thing is I will be meeting Rahana at Haiku meet which we both know we will be comparing to our Mod Po forums and find difficult not to do.
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Post by Greg Colburn on Jan 20, 2023 14:54:26 GMT -5
Thanks for the introduction to JR, including all the print and video materials.
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Post by kymminbarcelona on Jan 20, 2023 15:28:47 GMT -5
As always seems to happen, I only manage to pop in and out, but I am so appreciative of the opportunity to participate even that tiny bit! Thank you Al, and everyone on here, for helping me discover a little more about Joan Retallack. Enough to take some amazing lines with me. See you for the Snowman!
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 20, 2023 15:38:55 GMT -5
I want to throw in one last fractal/chaos theory allusion: I realized the cover to “Procedural Elegies/Western Civ Cont’d” reminded me of Conway’s game of Life, wherein a grid pattern of squares and a few rules for the iteration of these patterns produce a cellular automaton that displays complex “behaviors” depending on the initial configuring pattern. ![]()    It made me wonder if this might be what Retallack refers to as “dire indexical black and white squares”—what’s more dire than life and death. youtu.be/C2vgICfQawEIt makes me think of the way Retallack’s works engage with the indexicallity of language and thought and sociality (poethics). And how apt that in Conway’s game of Life, a cell stranded alone and atomized, perishes. There’s a different feeling of sublime to her works that feels more involute, again like a fractal. As if her interest in passionate procedure, were a way out of the pernicious stickiness of language, by tunneling in and through it, nuance as a kind of puncture or wormhole, different spatialities of attention that might engender more modalities of care and engagement. Thanks Al! Thanks fellow Retallackians, Joansters! Let’s keep the convo going! Freeforum does feel more robust and less glitchy than Coursera, but I miss the coherent threads, though I’m sure that ModPosters will find a workaround. |
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Post by Jason Dougherty on Jan 20, 2023 15:56:14 GMT -5
I absolutely LOVE SloPo courses, and this one was no exception. Thanks so much for doing this, Al. And three cheers for everyone who contributed to the discussions or spent time lurking in the forums (believe me, I lurked a lot!). Also, three cheers for the ProBoards format! OK, maybe two-and-a-half cheers; I miss the ability to have nested/threaded responses to comments, but I don't miss Coursera's glitchiness. Regardless, this was a fantastic course and a great way to kick off the SloPo season!
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Lou N
Community TA 
Posts: 38
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Post by Lou N on Jan 20, 2023 16:18:52 GMT -5
When I think of my experience reading and listening to JR, I think of rootstalks (aka "rhizomes: a continuously growing horizontal underground stem which puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.") I've been stretching out my understanding of her context and referrents, and in doing so have come to a clearer sense of what she articulates in, as rayschrempf would say, dissonance. Her use of patterning, aleatory methods, references, and challenges to the use of words to express thought all wind back to an exceptional capacity to engage with philosophers and questions. A more dedicated miner one could not hope to find. She digs and digs, and sweeps and swerves. I'm in awe of her.
Thank you, Al, and everyone else in this course, for helping me broaden my understanding of what she's up to and come to a greater appreciation of her work.
PS In the Profile tab, there is a tab called Notifications that lists all the people who have "liked" your comment in any of the threads. PPS I couldn't resist playing with the colours.
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Elisabeth Frischauf
Guest
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Post by Elisabeth Frischauf on Jan 20, 2023 16:36:49 GMT -5
This has been a complex, concentrated immersion into a hermetic universe of, for me, language manipulation. I really appreciate the depth and breadth of the offerings and many threads. This community process is like a multifaceted prism, enhancing my thinking and reacting. Unfortunately a virus named Covid, took away some of my brain's capacity to enter its entrails to the fullest extent. The intellectual magnitude and variety of Retallack's, I submit, experiments is dazzling.
Without the course, I would have never gone in so far, as I wouldn't call her work accessible. I also found her readings brought a musicality to much of it, which I do not get silently. I am struck by the humor and irony in much of what we read, but wonder when it verges into "shtick." She is relentless in her pursuit of dissection and rearranging, so I got yearning for some lyric joy, playfulness rather than playing around.
That said, I am glad to be exposed to her work and sensitization to thinking more about what language does, is, can/can't do, in the very act of using it for our consumption.
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Post by David Bender on Jan 20, 2023 17:09:55 GMT -5
Al, Thanks for another fascinating mini course. You never fail to amaze.
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Post by Carla Stein on Jan 20, 2023 17:55:20 GMT -5
Thank you Al, ModPo and everyone who posted in the forums about JR’s work. It was a great introduction to her oeuvre as I was unfamiliar with her poetry prior to this mini course. Her work carries on a long tradition of responding to artists who have already put their stamp on the field and adding her own investigations and innovations. I’ll be looking at her work more closely in future.
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Post by Denny on Jan 20, 2023 18:50:17 GMT -5
Thanks to Al and all of you for affording this opportunity to take a closer look at some of the corpus of JR’s extensive work with the benefit of all your commentary and observations, much of quite helpful. I’d like to thank JR for making so much of her work available online. I hadn’t realized that the whole of the poethical wager could be found easily at monoskop.org/images/6/66/Retallack_Joan_The_Poethical_Wager.pdfI found that reading the introduction, essay as wager, and then the poethical wager, gave greater perspective. I’m only partway past that in wager as essay now, but I intend to continue as I like the writing and think it may make greater sense the more of it I read. Reading JR has also made me want to take another look at Dewey’s lectures about art as experience. I tried reading those some years ago and didn’t get far. Same with Wittgenstein Tractatus, which I found totally daunting when I attempted to read it. I figured you need be an accomplished logician then but perhaps just being a poet is enough! It certainly seems that way to hear JR read selections from it. One funny thing about Wittgenstein is that with the exception of the Tractatus most of the other stuff, most of it from notebooks I think & published posthumously, most of the bit of that I’ve read is very readable. |
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 20, 2023 20:34:59 GMT -5
I’d like to take another try at my final word. In my first one I might have broken my rule about not being obscure for no good reason. (Not my first offence.). JR certainly had a much better reason to be obscure than I did.
I wonder if I am the only one who sometimes wishes Al might answer some of the questions that he poses? But I realize that is not the way to go about this. I would not accuse him of being purposefully obscure. He has to find a way to lead us to our own answers. In that sense he is a teacher - not an instructor. I wonder if Al sometimes has a complimentary urge to give us the answers when he sees us struggling?
I hope he does have the answers! I would like to think so. It’s nice to think there is such a person and that he is so generous with his questions. Thank you sir.
I actually made some Sally Lunns this evening.
Tasty.
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 20, 2023 22:31:56 GMT -5
I wonder if I am the only one who sometimes wishes Al might answer some of the questions that he poses? But I realize that is not the way to go about this. I would not accuse him of being purposefully obscure. He has to find a way to lead us to our own answers. In that sense he is a teacher - not an instructor. I wonder if Al sometimes has a complimentary urge to give us the answers when he sees us struggling? I hope he does have the answers! I would like to think so. It’s nice to think there is such a person and that he is so generous with his questions. Thank you sir. I actually made some Sally Lunns this evening. Tasty. Hi Ray, I don't know that there *are* any answers—I realize this sounds like some kind of ModPo party line--dwelling in possibility--but with some of these experimental works, it really does seem like they're playing in the realm of inscrutability and irresolution, that the meanings might not even be completely transparent to the poets themselves. Sometimes I do feel like I'm coming at a poem like it's a cryptic crossword puzzle, trying to parse what feels like obscurantist subterfuge, but then it begins to feel reductivist and counter to the openness of the poem. I remember in the recent ModPo anniversary live stream, Al disavowed the notion that in moderating these collective close readings he's being Socratic, on the contrary Al claimed that he doesn't come to these readings with a predetermined direction or lesson. For sure there's a pedagogical aspect necessary to the curating of what we read, to show the wealth and breadth of a particular poet's works. But the questions feel more like suggested entry points or loose framings, but any other entry we're able to find is just as useful. And maybe that's the bargain of any collective close reading, that meaning is always going to be subjective, that a diversity of opinion does matter, that maybe it's like we're all peering into somebody's dream, so that there's no real advantage in any particular vantage, that there won't be and shouldn't be any single exegesis, that multivalence is what we've come here to practice and commune with. btw Sally Lunns sound divine--eggs, flour, cream, butter—the warm heartening world! |
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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 20, 2023 23:43:59 GMT -5
Adding my thanks to all--Al for the syllabus and questions, JR for the writing, all of you for being part of this sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, sometimes intersecting conversation. I feel rewarded by your and my efforts.
Two administrative notes that seem important to the community of ModPo:
RE the new forum (here rather than Coursera): It took a short while for some of us to learn how to use the quote feature to comment on others' posts, but I think that, for the most part, we did so. It does not allow for seeing a string of comments back and forth in a compact way. Perhaps that allows us to stay all focused on the larger conversation we are all having? But I don't have a big enough vision or long enough history with Coursera to really evaluate.
RE moderation: We had one instance of conflict and hurt. It underlined for me the challenges of communication, written communication, and open forums like this. Figuring out how to respond in a helpful way in an open forum with no chance of side conversation is difficult. Thanks, Cat, for trying. I don't know, of course, if Al or another moderator engaged Denny and Laura through other channels. I would value continuing to hear from both.
And final thoughts:
I have been thinking about serious play and what poetry is. Some may recall my post about "How to Do Things With Words" in which I complained of wanting rhythm. Rhythm is one way to play with words. So are rhyme, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, metaphor, simile, line breaks, manipulation of capitalization and punctuation, and many more. And so, I now see, are fragmentation, systematic and random rearrangement, discontinuity, and the collage of cast-offs. All this play, well done, can give illumination and delight and do something.
I turned back to "How to Do Things With Words" tonight and found connections and themes appearing where initially I had been at much of a loss. I was even able to read the first page of it aloud to my wife and make her laugh--not shaking her head, but with appreciation!
The period of our course concludes, but my reading of Joan Retallack is not done. I look forward to continuing in other ModPo/SloPo courses. May we all--animal, mineral, vegetable--be sometimes dreaming!
-Paul
Thank you, Paul, for everything you've offered during this course, and to your two administrative notes here, which I agree with. I'm still figuring out whether or not I'll continue reading Joan Retallack (what with limited time) but your final words here encourage me to think it would be worthwhile. |
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Post by jimlynch on Jan 20, 2023 23:44:21 GMT -5
I wonder if I am the only one who sometimes wishes Al might answer some of the questions that he poses? But I realize that is not the way to go about this. I would not accuse him of being purposefully obscure. He has to find a way to lead us to our own answers. In that sense he is a teacher - not an instructor. I wonder if Al sometimes has a complimentary urge to give us the answers when he sees us struggling? I hope he does have the answers! I would like to think so. It’s nice to think there is such a person and that he is so generous with his questions. Thank you sir. I actually made some Sally Lunns this evening. Tasty. Hi Ray, I don't know that there *are* any answers—I realize this sounds like some kind of ModPo party line--dwelling in possibility--but with some of these experimental works, it really does seem like they're playing in the realm of inscrutability and irresolution, that the meanings might not even be completely transparent to the poets themselves. Sometimes I do feel like I'm coming at a poem like it's a cryptic crossword puzzle, trying to parse what feels like obscurantist subterfuge, but then it begins to feel reductivist and counter to the openness of the poem. I remember in the recent ModPo anniversary live stream, Al disavowed the notion that in moderating these collective close readings he's being Socratic, on the contrary Al claimed that he doesn't come to these readings with a predetermined direction or lesson. For sure there's a pedagogical aspect necessary to the curating of what we read, to show the wealth and breadth of a particular poet's works. But the questions feel more like suggested entry points or loose framings, but any other entry we're able to find is just as useful. And maybe that's the bargain of any collective close reading, that meaning is always going to be subjective, that a diversity of opinion does matter, that maybe it's like we're all peering into somebody's dream, so that there's no real advantage in any particular vantage, that there won't be and shouldn't be any single exegesis, that multivalence is what we've come here to practice and commune with. btw Sally Lunns sound divine--eggs, flour, cream, butter—the warm heartening world! Hey Ray and Jason – concerning your question on “answers”, here's something Retallack said at the Writer's House in 2001 – from the transcript of “Alternative poetries and alternative pedagogies” in Jacket2 (all of it worth a read) (and audio of it on her Penn Sound page): Retallack: Well, I never presume to know the intentions of the writer. Even if the writer has told me what they were, I’m not sure. I am very happy to discover I didn’t know my own intentions when I was writing something or that they’re not shadowing the piece. I think intentions have to do with the production, with the energy that went into making an object that then becomes a public object. The reader’s intentions perhaps become more powerful than the writer’s intentions at that point.
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