This is a (mostly) unstructured opportunity to meet and talk with other poets about writing, inspirations, poetics, prosody, or the lack thereof. Bring a topic you'd like to discuss -- or none at all. We'll throw them in a hat and let the conversation take us where it leads us.
We'll meet once a month or more often in the North Portland / West side area. Come meet other poets and people interested in poetry and poetry theory. We'll talk about poetry or any passing cloud that interests us. Bring a favorite poem if you like. No pressure!
from Ricardo:
There's a philosophical intention here. Talk of poetry turns too often to talk about the poet (and this is true for any of the arts) and forgets the craft. Here's something Foucault says about the necessity of the author:
I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is the process of changing, that the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode... one which will have to be determined, or perhaps, experienced.
All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? It is really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hardly hear anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?
-- Michel Foucault, What is an author?
Foucault reminds us, and this should be particularly true for our hyper-individualist American culture, that behind the author is a craft tradition. Underneath whatever the author is attempting to say is the discourse on Poetry itself: how the poem comes to be in terms of style, form, elements, sounds, and balance -- how a poem, in its wholeness, or even a line or stanza within it, propagates itself into the discourse on the poetic arts. We like authors, and there's room enough in this space to talk about them, but let's discuss the art of poetry as well.
from XineAnn:
He thinks a lot. :) But perhaps it also this way: Poetry makes its own sense of things. The goddess breaks through -- Calliope, Erato, Euterpe open the door for her. And if I have read enough good poetry, written enough bad lines, and practiced my craft in the service of my own passions and interests, then perhaps I will be ready to bear the poem that drags me out of bed to waltz it through the house before being written down.
Perhaps the only thing that makes sense is this:
I suppose poetry is
Listening Out Loud
And what one listens to is language --
language in one's head
(only a fool would confuse that with himself thinking
only a fool would think the things that he hears languaging in him
are things that he himself is thinking)
Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.
Witless, clueless, we await a sign.
Pindar tells us a sign is never clear (at least a sign from Zeus) --
hence the poem veers towards a kind of
lucid incomprehensibility,
[Eventually after a few hundred or thousand years we begin to comprehend the incomprehensible -- Dante, Aeschylus, Milton -- and they become classics and become of great celebrity but diminished use. But till then the texts are of great power, startling, provoking, eliciting. Some grand provokers -- Pindar himself, Li shang-yin, Lycophron, Hoelderlin, Stein -- still wait their turn, still turn us towards the poem we must write, the poem they force us to write, to make sense of what they do to our heads.]
The incomprehensible provokes the reader to acts of preternatural awareness.
This incomprehensibility factor is what the ancient Greeks called Mousa, Muse. [The Spartans -- sturdy workmen, who would have liked the sacred gizmos of Elshtain's gnoetry -- called her Moha.] (I told her I would work her into this evening.)
The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening to you as you read.
And that's the only happening poetry has?
The luster of listening.
Or what we hear in poetry is groans from the battlefield where time struggles against space.
Robert Kelly, STATEMENT FOR THE MODERN POETRY CONFERENCE AT CUNY
We look forward to meeting you.
February 12 at 2:30 PM, 7 poets attended
Let's talk poetry
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Wednesday, Feb 29
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