Retallack #4: "The Poethical Wager" (excerpt)

Thank you for posting these resources. I have been puzzling over Western Civ #28 since you first posted it. It eluded me. I needed to refer to The Poethical Wager to begin to make sense of it, which I still have not done. Her discussion of the "swerve" and fractal geometry, plus the zig-zag shape of the poem itself helped me to begin to orient myself. Yet I still did not get much passed seeing this poem as expressing things in the outer world (as opposed to inner, which is explored in None Too Soon), with things (i.e., space) designed, or shaped, intentionally, such as the lawn, and completed such as books returned to the library.

None Too Soon resonated with me. Curious that the one imperative is "Don't be scared," in the context of one's own mind, awareness. This poem seems evoke epistemology and questioning what one knows or perhaps tentatively knows. Lest we lose the self in solipsism, the poet shows a world we construct in which we all sometimes dream. But since this supposition is a construct, perhaps it doesn't preclude solipsism.

As you can see, I am still flailing within Retallack's world, not really sure where I am. But isn't that part of her project: to disorient the reader and present alternative perception?

You sent us a link to a book review that provided a faithful overview of Retallack's book. I have a copy of that review, but I cannot locate your email.

I see only two pages in the "Poethical Wager" excerpt as posted: p. 24 and p. 26. Page 25 is only partially visible. Please advise. Thanks!

I spent a wonderful afternoon “drifting” in this conversation! I am familiar and comfortable with “unknowing” as the primordial soup from which language and life rise as action. Studies and practice of mysticism will do that for you. This was my third time listening to the Poemtalk. I thought of Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man. I’ll keep this short for now.

 I have been reading this essay and I love it. It appears difficult. The question-and-answer format where she has this alter ego (I did not know that) asks her pointed questions about her ideas is very engaging. The form and structure of the back and forth are so brilliant. She refers to Dewey's argument about "connecting with our sensory environment if we- as a species so prone to abstraction and estrangement- are to avoid a kind of living death'' She goes on to add D.W. Winnicott's ideas to support what she herself wants to say about art. According to her, Winnicott's most important contribution apart from his object's relation theory is his theory of play. What children do so easily, engage with the world outside with their imagination, and also inventors, explorers, and "all who thrive on curiosity, puzzling, conjecturing'' All the poems we have dealt with have this sense of curiosity and child-like wonder at how our material world works. I plan to listen to the Poem Talk. I am so mesmerized by Joan Retallack's ideas - she does in her poetry what she asks artists to do in this essay.

The experience of writing as Retallack describes it is that of opening and emptying one’s self so that something can emerge (alter ego?) that is not the writer’s surface ego. (Experienced as a not-me) with whom one can be in dialog. I am not a language philosopher, but I do get the notion of word as act (in my mind spoken words shape the world and allow it to emerge in human consciousness. This is not a “process.”
It is more like a birth. This is a rich but difficult way to live in a process /progress loving meritocracy.

Referring to 'complex realism' Retallack writes "I couldn’t help but notice that those traditions in the arts called “realism” and “naturalism” were at least as removed from our experiences of reality and nature as any other aesthetic artifice." (p25)

Honore de Balzac is said to be the father of realism, of whom Friedrich Engels wrote, "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." I find it difficult to think of Balzac as "as removed from our experiences of reality and nature as any other aesthetic artifice." For example, Samuel Beckett's novels teach me a lot about Beckett's mind and maybe my own, but about society itself, precious little. I think there's a very 'real' difference between realism and absurdism, and other forms, and I don't think these differences can be swept away as easily Retallack seems to do. Or, perhaps I do not understand what she means.

I'm also struggling with the references to "we" and "us" - eg, "Sciences of complexity have altered our sense of the “essential” simplicity and rationality of all things." I find this kind of generalising disturbing. Who is this "our", "us", "we"? Is Retallack speaking for me, and if so, on what basis does she presume that I agree with her?

Quantum physics and neuroscience are complex, as are financial instruments such as derivatives. They are way beyond what reaonably well-educated people are able to understand now. But how we love and hate each and how we seek to dominate and kill each other doesn't seem to have changed much. Shakespeare's 'green-eyed monster' of jealousy and Macbeth's 'vaulting ambition' are as alive and well now as when he coined the phrases. Human behaviour has always looked complex to me, and why one person gives into jealousy and cuts a swathe through other people's lives is an enduring mystery to me. There is nothing 'simple or rational' about it and I look to my betters, people like Shakespeare and Balzac, to explain such complexities to me.

I've just read Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, about the opiod crisis that engulfed America and the dynamics of poverty and addiction. It's a self-conscious play on Charles Dicken's novel, David Copperfield and an equally conscious attempt to invigorate American letters with the spirit of writers like Dickens, who was profoundly influenced by Balzac. It seems to me that Kingsolver is an author exhibiting ethical agency in her choice of heroes, themes and plot lines. She is exposing what's going wrong in the hope of galvanising positive action, as surely as Dickens did. I can understand this kind of artistic ethical agency. But I find Retallacks arguments about 'poethics' obscure.