Organizer and moderator: Rebecca Walsh
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL
rwalsh@siue.edu
“A Word of Welcome”: Formally Innovative Poetry and the Ethics of Hospitality
This paper stages an interaction between formally innovative poetry and the hospitality theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. For Levinas, language itself is a hospitality/hosting which permits the relationship between an individual and the Other that “consists in speaking the world to the Other” (Totality and Infinity 173). This means that the speaking to the Other is otherwise than being, causing "an incessant alienation of the ego... by the guest entrusted to it ... being torn from oneself for another in giving to the other the bread from one's mouth" (Otherwise than Being 79). For Derrida, the deconstuctive possibility always exists that the guest could becomes ghost, or a visit become a visitation, or a host become a hostage. My paper considers experimental modes of composition as embodying an ethic of hosting which emphasizes, in the alienation of the writer’s ego, the guest’s status AS guest, as fundamentally not at home. I read CD Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining and Fanny Howe’s One Crossed Out as examples of what Levinas would call “sojourning in a home.” Understanding writer/reader as host/guest allows us to read experimental poetries as paradoxical political efforts that making peace through alienation.
Tiffany Eberle Kriner
University of Wisconsin-Madison
tjeberle@wisc.edu
Taking Chances: “Poethical” Risk and Reader Acknowledgment in the Writings of John Cage and Joan Retallack
In this paper, I will argue that John Cage’s and Joan Retallack’s uses of chance operations create texts that operate as performance spaces where writers and readers meet in what Retallack has called “complex realist conversation.” The intersection of chance and intention is central for the kind of project that Retallack has designated as
“poethics,” that is, “what we make of events as we use language in the present, how we continually create an ethos of the way in which events are understood.” In Cage’s essays and lectures, such as those that comprise Silence (1961) and I-VI: methodstructure… (1990), he uses randomness to distance his compositions from his controlling
intentions. The texts produced thus allow greater space for the reader to exercise agency in creating meaning within the parameters established by the author/composer. Retallack’s poems and essays, such as those found in AFTERRIMAGES (1995), How to Do Things with Words (1998), and The Poethical Wager (2003), enact a similar project of ethically charged conversation, calling on the reader to resist familiar models of intelligibility in order to remain sensitive to unexpected “swerves” of attention that challenge our common modes of interpretation.
Mark Cantrell
University of Wisconsin-Madison
mcantrel@wisc.edu
“A Wholly Unnatural Inclusiveness”: Ethics and Form in the Work of Claudia Keelan and Brenda Hillman
Recent experimental directions in American poetry have been driven by feminist ideologies. I will focus on work by Claudia Keelan and Brenda Hillman. Each has broken from the received tradition of the first-person lyric to invent inclusive poetic syntax. Keelan’s poetics work at the level of the pronoun to blur distinctions of number, gender, and subject/object position. The resulting “wholly unnatural” grammar, redistributes agency and social power in the “Utopic” world of the poem. Brenda Hillman’s career-long interests in the relationship between material physics and spirituality have led her to a new voice in Cascadia (2001). The collection embodies California geology in poetic form, with the decentered speaker locating her (it?) self in a variety of cultural, natural, and personal spaces. Again, Hillman’s strategy works to undermine some of the privileges associated with the traditional, first-person, removed-from-the-world, poetic speaker. Her purposes, however, differ from Keelan’s. While Keelan’s explicit interests in social justice drive her utopic grammar, Hillman puts the reader in contact with transcendent energies on macro- and micro-scopic levels, inferring some of her environmental and political messages.
In my presentation, I will use recent poetic and non-fiction works by each writer to illustrate the ethics of their experimental poetics. Tentatively, I will plan to conclude by raising Bob Perelman’s phrase, “utopian prefiguration of liberation,” to describe these social poetics. Both Keelan and Hillman reach toward potential languages—Keelan: “our language will have to change for our culture to get better.” It’s interesting, I think, to raise the question of the impact those languages might have.
Bill Stobb
Viterbo University
westobb@exchange.viterbo.edu