Lyn Hejinian and my "Good Ideas" class. . . .

 This morning I listened to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On the Harvard site that introduces this, she is quoted on this philosophy, which I might consider the topic of communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written, "The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

That expresses what she's up to here, though she doesn't say it quite like that. 

Anyway, after she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended (by me, too, if you listen)--the students in the audience want to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish an aesthetic event"?

This is not exactly something she came to address, so naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of a collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

Various ways, huh? A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Okay then. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

In speaking of the earth, a poet beats the New York Times (again)

This week The Times devoted their Sunday magazine to a single article, which I only scanned, about how we (they?) didn't address climate change last century. Now some of my Facebook friends are arguing about the essay and about the real (real) cause of our failure to fix. I think it's too late for all of it, and maybe impossible anyway, and our only recourse is poetry.

Fortunately, poetry is quite a recourse. Poets.org has just published a brill pair of stanzas on and around the topic from Marcella Durand. Read from The Prospect here; below are a few lines that work like a surgeon on the situation, opening its ugliness cleanly to take stock.

                                                          I finally understand

what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand 

       what I put in the water I drink the water and if together 

       we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find 

       my way to the water 

What a Week

Prompted by my computer breaking down on Sunday along with the mortgage bail-out, the nationalization of AIG and the overall U.S. economy rescue mission, I did a heck of a lot of reading this week -- and it was pretty wonderful. I worried about connecting with my students, naturally, but I survived that by complaining to my husband and a few friends and continuing to read. First I read Papal Lies, a book my Pope-hating friend gave me about the popes of the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. The book is so out of print that it's not even listed on Amazon, but it was a fun romp through a seriously corrupted organization that leaves no question as to why Luther and a few others were angry back then.

Then I re-read a few of my friends' poetry books in progress, including Tonya Foster's A Swarm of Bees in High Court, which is composed entirely in haiku. I also read through Zone: Zero the wonderful and very difficult new book by Stephanie Strickland which Robin Reagler has featured on Big Window this week. This one definitely bears more than on re-reading, and I haven't yet played the interactive CD that accompanies it. I read the Japanese fabulist Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore in one day -- all 436 pages of a wild and magical novel that I highly recommend. And after hearing Tomaz Salamun read his poetry at St. Mark's Poetry Project Monday night, I bought and read most of his first book in English, Poker.

Poker was originally published in Slovenian in 1966 and was seen as revolutionary and subversive. Which is a pretty good definition of what I want from poetry--words that undermine the obvious paths of thought to (help me to) break into new vistas. Of course, when I came home from the reading and told my husband I'd heard the most marvelous Slovenian poetry, he behaved as if I were trying to act like an effete New Yorker. But, truly, he is the most marvelous. Here is a quatrain from the very middle of Poker. It sits alone on a page at the beginning of a long poem called "Things."

Between any two points in space
you can always draw a straight line
but where is the way
between the same place

Where indeed is the way? No doubt we'll all find it next week. Keep blogging, my students....

What I'm reading

I'm reading Sophocles' Antigone, or actually re-reading it, which is actually more like thinking about it. The play is thought to have been first performed in late March, 441 B.C.

I fear B.C. is a politically incorrect term, as it means Before Christ and not everyone is Christian. I believe the new term is B.C.E. Before the Common Era. Forgive me!

The play was part of a public festival known as the "Great Dionysia," which celebrated Dionysius, the god of wine. During the annual Dionysia many of the famous Greek trajedies--and commedies and satires--were first produced.

The play is not Sophocles' easiest. It is the story of a myth, or the part of the myth that occurs at the tale end of the Oedipal disaster, after it's been discovered that their father was also their brother -- that is, their mother is also their grandmother. (You'll figure it out, if you don't know the story already) Other things have happened, such as their father poking his eyes out and their brothers killing each other. The people left in the family are the two sisters, a bossy, high-strung and righteous Antigone and her sweet mild lil sis, Ismene, and an uncle, Creon, who has taken the throne and immediately promises to kill anyone who attempts to properly bury Antigone's outcast, and already quite dead, brother.

In the first scene, Antigone meets her sister outside the castle--or whatever Greek royalty lived in--and says, "Ismene, my sister, mine own dear sister, knowest thou what ill there is?"

I'm impressed with how easy it is to read Antigone online. MIT has it here, Bartleby has it here, the awesome Diotima has it here, and Sparknotes--whoever they are--has it here.

It would be cool if all of those links worked.

More on tragedy--Greek--soon.