Book Presence in a Digital Age, Poetry Revolutions in London, and New York School in Australia

I’ve had some time away from this blog due to two trips to the United States for conferences last month and the need to prepare for another trip now just underway, which will take in the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, the Poetry and Revolution conference in London, and a conference on Book Presence in a Digital Age in Utrecht.

In the meantime, I’m taking advantage of some time en route to begin to catch up on the exciting events of the last month.

Among the many highlights at the Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent conference was Brian Reed’s talk on the New York School in Australia. The paper was part of a larger study in which Reed looks at the readings (or misreadings) and use of New York School writers in a variety of countries ranging from Australia to Poland. Reed’s is a fascinating project that, like A Common Strangeness, engages questions about cross-cultural reading, translation, and transnational literary history.

Recordings of the talks at the Poetry Communities conference are now available for download here.

Poetry and Translation

Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics has a new special issue devoted to poetry and translation, which you can read here.

The issue includes translations, commentaries, and essays on translation from a number of poets and translators, working with languages ranging from Italian and Polish to Russian and Chinese, and with writers as diverse as Tibullus and Neruda.

The issue also includes a piece by Cilla McQueen and me on translating Dmitry Golynko.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Alternative Paths in Contemporary Russian Poetry

A special forum on “Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Alternative Paths in Contemporary Russian Poetry,” edited by Evgeny Pavlov, has just been published in the latest issue of the Slavic and East European Journal. It is wonderful to see this renewed attention to Dragomoshchenko, who is (in my view) one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets but who hasn’t to date received the attention his work deserves. (Stephanie Sandler’s wonderful essay in Contemporary Literature is one of the few exceptions to this rule. For those who read Russian, Mikhail Iampolski’s essay on Dragomoshchenko’s “poetics of touch” is likewise an insightful introduction to his work.) The forum includes excellent essays from Pavlov, Anna Glazova, and Dennis Ioffe.

I also have an essay in the forum. My essay (available for download here) focuses on Dragomoshchenko’s correspondences. These correspondences include both his 1,000 page correspondence with Lyn Hejinian and his development of the modernist complication—as exemplified by Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”—of romanticism’s stress on correspondence between language and the world. Interestingly, as I explore in the essay, this double meaning of “correspondence” does not work in Russian, which has two distinct terms: perepiska and sootvetstvie. A revised and expanded version of my essay forms a chapter of A Common Strangeness.

Large-Scale Literary Studies

On 30 March, I’m speaking on one of a series of panels on “The Theoretical Possibilities of Large-Scale Literary Studies” organized by Jing Tsu and Eric Hayot at the 2012 American Comparative Literature Association conference in Providence, RI. I’m very much looking forward to learning from the wonderfully rich range of papers on offer. The seminar will also be an opportunity for me to extend my exploration in A Common Strangeness of how economic and geopolitical events at the end of the Cold War transformed the way we think about literature and culture on a global scale. Here is the full list of speakers and paper titles for the seminar:

March 30, 10:15-12:15
David Damrosch, Harvard University
“English as a Transit Language”
Christopher Hill, University of California, Berkeley
“Inductive Histories”
Jacob Edmond, University of Otago
“The End of the Cold War and the Ends of Literary Theory”
Avishek Ganguly, Rhode Island School of Design
“Some Notes on ‘the Worldly’ in Contemporary Literary Studies

March 31, 10:15-12:15
Jing Tsu, Yale University
“Area, Scale, and Method”
Adam Kola, Nicolaus Copernicus University
“Literature and the Other Social Systems. World(-)System Theories and Social
Constructivism”
Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
“The End of History and the Beginning of the World”
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
“Archaeology of the Protocols”

April 1, 10:15-12:15
Eric Hayot, Penn State University
“Structure and Scale in World Literary History”
Mariano Siskind, Harvard University
“Against World Literature, against Latin Americanism: The Case for World-making and
Deseos de mundo”
Robert Frederick Voigt, Jr., Stanford University
“Instantiating Theory: On the Necessity and Prospects of a Computational Approach to
Large-Scale Literary Studies”
Alexander J. Beecroft, University of South Carolina
“On Premodernity”

A talk on A Common Strangeness

I gave a talk on A Common Strangeness at the University of Otago last week. An mp3 recording of that talk is now available for download here. Amongst other things, I discuss Dmitri Prigov’s video performance piece Rossiia (Russia), which can be viewed on YouTube here.

Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent

The program for the conference “Poetry Communities & the Individual Talent” hosted by the Kelly Writers House and the University of Pennsylvania is now online here. It promises to be a great conference. Speakers include Maria Damon, Craig Dworkin, Brian Reed, Steven Yao, Kaplan Harris, Bob Perelman, and Al Filreis. I’ll be speaking on “Conceptual Writing: Community and Anti-Community,” probably with particular reference to Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, but perhaps also with a glance at their Russian forerunners. The paper is partly inspired by Place’s expression of disgust at the notion of community when I mentioned the conference to her at last year’s Poets and Critics @ Paris Est symposium on her work.

Charles Bernstein and Jerome Rothenberg

On his blog on Jacket2, Charles Bernstein has recently posted a piece by Ernesto Livon-Grosman on Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred. The piece was originally written for the celebration of Rothenberg’s 80th birthday late last year.

In A Common Strangeness, I explore how Rothenberg’s poetics shaped Bernstein’s development as a poet in the 1970s and later informed his response to the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War and the rise of multiculturalism in the United States. Drawing on Rothenberg, Bernstein came to suggest (in his essay “Poetics of the Americas”) that poetry might transcend borders through its “commonness . . . in . . . partiality.”

As I point out in A Common Strangeness, Bernstein provides a model for comparison attuned to the rhetorical structures—the poetics—that shape cross-cultural thinking. But his vision of “unity in di­versity,” with its connotations of US imperialist ideology, also helps to crystallize the persistent tension in the various appeals to textual, per­sonal, and collective strangeness in the work of all the writers I discuss in A Common Strangeness and in comparative and global theory at large: a tension that arises from the fact that an appeal to strangeness can easily become an assertion of com­monality or global meaning, so erasing the very particularity with which it began.