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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 20, 2023 23:48:44 GMT -5
Thanks to Joan Retallack for her body of extraordinary work, Al for facilitating the SloPo course with excellent leading questions, almost daily e-mails, and a great opportunity to gather on zoom, and thank you to all who wrote so thoughtfully about each selection of JR's writing. The community input helped me to see things I would have never noticed on my own. This short course definitely enhanced my appreciation for Joan Retallack's lifelong work. I agree with Paul, I did feel the style of this forum made it difficult to have an easy opportunity for a sustained conversation inspired by an individual post. As far as I could tell, there are also no e-mail alerts when a writer gets a response or is asked a question about what he/she/they has written. I missed those features. Barbara, you do get alerts if you join as a member. Hear, hear to everything else you write.
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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 20, 2023 23:55:59 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. Ohhhhh, meeting Rahana! This is fabulously exciting. Have a wonderful trip, Vijaya!
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Post by vijaya on Jan 21, 2023 0:02:22 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. Ohhhhh, meeting Rahana! This is fabulously exciting. Have a wonderful trip, Vijaya! Yes, Cat I am super-excited about meeting with Rahana and her daughter and about the trip. Thanks!
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Post by Debjani Chatterjee on Jan 21, 2023 0:20:48 GMT -5
Thank you Al , for introducing Joan Retallack and making us appreciate the wonder of dissonance and complexity .Also the easy and energetic juxtapositions between meaning , ideas and bias.Really shaken up my powers of comprehension.Would love to delve into her poetry for more of the same, of course with pointers and insights from you and all those who could ‘ grapple ‘ with her poetry.
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Post by cat mccredie on Jan 21, 2023 2:36:25 GMT -5
Hello, everyone:
Our active time together is drawing to a close. Our group officially concludes on Friday, January 20th. These discussion forum threads will remain open into the foreseeable fiuture so please never hesitate to continue posting, asking questions, adding ideas.
Meantime: now and through the end of January 20th, let us post our final thoughts? What more do you want to say? What haven't you said but have wanted to say? Which of the writings we've discussed did you admire or appreciate most? Which gave you the most trouble? What your sense of Joan Retallack's ideas and art overall? What seems to be her vision? Her goal? Her overall effect?
I look forward to reading your final thoughts!
- Al
Hi Al and all,
JR's work was quite alien to me. I didn't give as much time to the material as it and I needed for a properly satisfying engagement.
I often felt jarred by JR's words -- like in this passage from the 'Poethical Wager' Intro:
The highly rewarded entrepreneurial strategy of forging ahead with an air of mastery no-matter-what spawns impatience for the point or gist. This is the economy of generically busy expertise. It must detach itself from values that encourage the necessarily inefficient, methodically haphazard inquiry characteristic of actually living with ideas. This doesn't sound like the business / entrepreneurial environments I've worked and continue to work in. An entrepreneur who is not 'actually living with ideas' will fail. Or put it this way, it sounds like a sweeping generalisation and a false binary. Much though I couldn't grasp much of what Retallack was saying, I often felt she had no understanding or knowledge of most of my interests and points of reference. So that's quite exciting.
The responses to the material were rich and universally interesting, the Zoom call was incredibly helpful (Ray, that was your chance to get some tuition from Al!), I think JR's work is generative and I want to continue engaging with it, but then I think of my enormous TBR pile and think, really?
Even with my limited engagement, the work worked on me and was making me more aware of my words when writing and of how much is unknown to me, which looked at another way is space into which I can grow (if I choose to). In other words, my writing/thinking has improved and gained subtlety because of this course.
Most of all, I've appreciated being part of this epicurious community. Oh, yes, I'm awarding Ray best jokes.
THANK YOU, MODPO
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Post by Prithvijeet Sinha on Jan 21, 2023 3:10:58 GMT -5
There is definitely nothing of finality for writers, readers and learners who constitute any community promoting sincere scholarship. So for me, the first part of 2023 with SloPo and Ms. Joan Retallack's oeuvre is the starting point to veer away from distractions and give credence to our creative minds collectively.
Thank you to the MODPO team and all participants here for being such a vital, collective force to be reckoned with. May the February chapter be one of robust intellects, concentrated empathy and the excitement of being eternal 'students of life'
Love and literary greetings, Prithvijeet Sinha.
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 21, 2023 3:51:20 GMT -5
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.
Wow. Thanks Jim, Jason and Joan - Intention must be important in any issues of obscurity. That much is clear! This is precisely where I need to go next. Thanks for the Jacket2 link. Best, Ray
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Post by jennifer on Jan 21, 2023 6:05:39 GMT -5
Thank you so much Al. I particularly loved the first poem and am still going back to it from time to time. Thank you everyone for you thoughts on all the poems. I was not able to make it to the end but will work on the late postings when I have a chance. Very challenging.
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Marti
ModPo student
Posts: 11
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Post by Marti on Jan 21, 2023 10:31:33 GMT -5
I recently purchased her digital book, 'MusiCage', sonething I wouldn't have done prior to this mini-course, and I'm only a couple of chapters into it, and I'm finding it quite engaging already. A section in the book that mentions, when she is explaining John Cage's work style, she quotes him as saying, 'that the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society', re-listening to a piece of music is like re-reading a poem, the more familiar it becomes, the more easy it becomes to understand.
Joan Retallack's 'Excuses and Other Nonsense: How to do Things with Words' Her play on words was interesting. The comparison between the zodiac synbols within the riddle was fun to figure out and this is when I began to really understand her writing style. Perhaps the connection came easier because the zodiac signs were familiar to me?
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adef
ModPo student
Posts: 20
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Post by adef on Jan 21, 2023 15:11:24 GMT -5
Well it was certainly a mind stretcher and an imagination stretcher. I enjoyed it and at the moment that is all I think I can say, except that this will change over times. But I have learned also. 1) when I don't know, use fewer words and let the spaces between contiguous words do the explaining 2) this work is the responsibility of the reader as much as the writer 3) when asked a question consider what is not the question and address this repeatedly 4) this requires acts of the imagination There is a point of engagement with the rational world but I have not yet understood how to make the connection. Retallack however has in some of her writings. From 'Poethical Wager': 'The kind of agency that has a chance of mattering in today’s world can thrive only in a culture of acknowledged complexity, only in contexts of long-range collaborative projects that bring together multiple modes of engagement—intuition, imagination, cognition... . The more complex things are, the less certain the outcome but also the more room for the play of the mind, for inventing ourselves out of the mess.' p36 'Joan Retallack’s “Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene” blends the author’s own critical and creative practices. In this final chapter of the collection, closing out the section “Beyond Sustainability”, Retallack includes her own poetry throughout the essay, situating the piece as an “experiment in prosimetrum … a dialogic genre alternating prose and poetry” (p.229). Through this blended genre, Retallack’s chapter is an examination of the epistemological, ethical, and etymological aspects of the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, or, as she puts it: “This essay explores poetics, poethics, and epistemology of the Anthropocene” (ibid.)' antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/book-review_magrane-on-hume-and-osborne.pdfOr as Geertrude Stein puts it: 'The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.' This is quoted in 'The Poethical Wager' which can be viewed online here: monoskop.org/images/6/66/Retallack_Joan_The_Poethical_Wager.pdfSo when your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth and your voice is stopped, refresh yourself by drinking from a stein. Thank you everybody.
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 21, 2023 18:41:21 GMT -5
I recently purchased her digital book, 'MusiCage', sonething I wouldn't have done prior to this mini-course, and I'm only a couple of chapters into it, and I'm finding it quite engaging already. A section in the book that mentions, when she is explaining John Cage's work style, she quotes him as saying, 'that the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society', re-listening to a piece of music is like re-reading a poem, the more familiar it becomes, the more easy it becomes to understand. Joan Retallack's 'Excuses and Other Nonsense: How to do Things with Words' Her play on words was interesting. The comparison between the zodiac synbols within the riddle was fun to figure out and this is when I began to really understand her writing style. Perhaps the connection came easier because the zodiac signs were familiar to me? Thanks for this Marti. I have been hoping to find something where JR speaks directly about John Cage in an extended fashion. So I have also just downloaded it but have not yet read any of it. I love the cover picture and hope to figure it out eventually. Any ideas? Lately I have been drawn to books written by poets about other poets. I have My Emily Dickinson and The H.D. Book. In Musicage both writers are actually speaking to each other so this should be something special.
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lynn
ModPo student
Posts: 6
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Post by lynn on Jan 21, 2023 22:42:49 GMT -5
Thank you, Al and Joan Retallack! Thank you also to everyone for their thoughtful comments. Getting to know JR's work has been a wonderful journey. It has been challenging, sometimes puzzling, I've been amused and amazed. I really enjoyed the ride!
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Post by afilreis on Jan 22, 2023 8:15:27 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. Yes, Vijaya - that is exactly the idea! The ethical system or mode Joan hopes for involves our acceptance of complexity and difficulty (non-simplicity) as a way of responsibly and truly composing ourselves so that we are living our lives in a truly contemporary way. For readers that requires participating in the difficulty! - Al
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Post by afilreis on Jan 22, 2023 8:16:57 GMT -5
Thank you Al , for introducing Joan Retallack and making us appreciate the wonder of dissonance and complexity .Also the easy and energetic juxtapositions between meaning , ideas and bias.Really shaken up my powers of comprehension.Would love to delve into her poetry for more of the same, of course with pointers and insights from you and all those who could ‘ grapple ‘ with her poetry. Thank you for this wonderful comment, Debjani. You've nailed it: this kind of thinking and art is meant indeed to shake up your powers of comprehension. Al
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Post by afilreis on Jan 22, 2023 8:18:35 GMT -5
Thank you, Al and Joan Retallack! Thank you also to everyone for their thoughtful comments. Getting to know JR's work has been a wonderful journey. It has been challenging, sometimes puzzling, I've been amused and amazed. I really enjoyed the ride! Lynn, thanks. Joan LOVES the idea of puzzling. It combines her admiration for complexity with her emphasis on pleasure and fun — what she always calls "serious play." To write (puzzling the words) and to read (also puzzling what the words say and do) is first and foremost a form of play. Al
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