More about the original

 Novelist and suicide Hubert Aquin in “Occupation: Writer” (Writing Quebec):

. . . if we are to be perfectly honest, the originality of a piece of work is directly proportional to the ignorance of its readers. There is no originality: works of literature are reproductions (which serve a purpose of course in a society with large amounts of spare time to kill and blessed, moreover, with pulp) run off from worn out plates made from other “originals” reproduced from reproductions that are true copies of earlier forgeries that one does not need to have known to understand that they were not archetypes but simply variants. A cruel invariability governs the mass production of those variants that go by the name of original works. History, too, copies itself. Originality is as impossible there as in literature. Originality does not exist; it is a delusion. 

qtd. in Marilyn Randall's Pragmatic Plagiarism (235) 

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. 

Carte du Tendre

Carte du Tendre published on Poetry Project as cover of e-zine “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

Eco Poetics / Ecopoetics

Thinking about ecopoetics all the time, as we do now, I came upon this from Stephanie Strickland's collected works, How the Universe Is Made. I was struck still by the conflation of language, string data and enormous amounts of information with a glacier. From her V: Wavetercets / Losing L'Una (which is itself a reformulation of V: Waveson.nets / Losing L'Una) are tercets 223 and 224:

223
Words of others.
Lists and strings are fluid data structures.
The Glacier calving, enormous roar 

224
into a gray silent sea,
turquoise
lining.

Does a calving glacier destroy information?
I'll give that a gray, but not silent, yup.

"Delphi" on Missing Witches' Beltane Episode

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a site.... Check out the episode here--and visit the fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are doing the goddess' work. 

Poetry Month Sez Who

Ralph Emerson:

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is...to be surprised out of our propriety...to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.....The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

Teaching, Not Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

The first time I assigned NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, a book for which I practically needed a trigger warning the first time I heard of it, I did not want to get it wrong. 

I'm hardly a perfectionist as a professor. My pedagogy hero is Count Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote:

To teach, to bring up a child, why, it is a chimera, an absurdity, for this simple reason, that the child is much nearer than I am, or any grown man, to the true, beautiful and good to which I undertake to raise him.

I take comfort here, especially when discussing complex texts that are meaningful to me with a room of nineteen-year-olds. I was never confident about explaining Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Helene Cixous, anyway. In my class, you don't have to like anything, but you have to know the general facts and you have to have a grounded opinion on what a text is, have to be able to connect it to a few other things you know. 

Still, back in 2017, considering the teaching of Zong!, I conscientiously gathered my notes and proceeded to read the truth to the youths. I got the students to read, then made them write to several prompts that would turn into a -- yes -- a paper. They had to get it, and they had to get it my way. 

But at the end of the semester, a few of the students who came to my office hours regularly were still puzzling over their papers -- or simply trying to ensure As. One afternoon, four of them had gathered and we began reading the poem together. We were in a large adjunct bull pen at the Bronx campus that sits in the middle of the Economics department. One fellow read, then another, then we decided to read it in pairs, then to split it up and read it in columns, overlapping, singing, really. An athlete, a musician, a philosophy major, and a senior who just needed an English credit to get out raised their voices. There were no adjuncts around, to my dismay, because the result seemed to me very beautiful, but when a few of the Economics folks peeked over the safety glass that encaged us, I was proud.

This semester, I'd learned my lesson. Rather than "teaching" Zong!, it's been all reading. Little chunks at first, then larger chunks, and, yesterday, the passages at the end, the part from the printer foul-up. 

At first three of them were reading downward--one for the left column, one for the right, and one for the center. Some admiration, some complaints. (Fine.) Then we were all reading--one third of the room to the left column and so on. After we'd done a page it was as if we'd emerged on a new beach. Some of the students still were not happy with the text--not clear, not connected--but others were joined to it, intrigued, excited. when I suggested we record ourselves and send it to MNP herself, they were thrilled. 

Et voila. 

The next morning, I'm not sure this is good enough for her. Not yet. But posting here and will start digging around to reconnect to her on Twitter, where we once followed each other, or to get her email another way. Maybe we will revise--I guess, a la Tolstoy, I should let the class decide.