Jennifer K. Dick
Jennifer K Dick is Director of the English Department (from Jan 2021) & Maître de Conférences (since 2010) at the Université de Haute Alsace where she teaches American Literature, Creative Writing & Civilization & is a member of the ILLE research lab. From Paris III: La Sorbonne Nouvelle she holds a DEA (on M Roche, L Jarnot, S Howe & CRoyet- Journaud) & PhD (on Mallarmé & Apollinaire’s influence on Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe & Anne-Marie Albiach’s writing).
Jennifer K Dick’s academic research explores the overlapping fields of poetry & visual poetics. She is fascinated by the liminal spaces between language use in the visual arts & typography & imported visual work implanted on the page in contemporary American & European Literature (as seen in Susan Howe, Anne-Marie Albaich, Jacques Sivan or Anne Carson’s books). This focus on visuality has also lead to recent explorations on multilingualism as visual & textual space in the identity poetics of American authors like Craig Santos Perez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or Myung Mi Kim. Publications on these topics have appeared in La poésie motléculaire de Jacques Sivan (presses du reel, 2017), American Multiculturalism in Context (Cambridge, 2017), Point, Dot, Period…The Dynamics of Punctuation in Text & Image (Cambridge, 2016), Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (University of Michigan Press,2015), Trans (Paris III), Poétiques scientifiques dans les revues européennes de la modernité (1900-1940) (Classiques Garnier, 2013) & in the volume L’Ecriture Emprisonnée (Harmattan, 2007). She conceived of & co-organized the international conference Lex-ICON : treating text as image & image as text in June 2012 (http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/). A forthcoming article from the Nov 2019 Université de Lyon II conference "Le Depaysment" on Craig Santos Perez is under peer review. Presenting at "La poésie hors du livre" conference (Paris, October 2013), Jennifer extended her focus out of the book space to examine poetry on billboards & walls.
Wider research interests include the varied practices of postmodern poetic autobiographies (primarily those using visual & collage techniques in conjunction with more standard written forms of poetry) & cyborg poetry & poetics (Bhanu Kapil, Jacques Sivan). The interest in autobiography & reality vs fiction stems as much from her own creative as from her critical work. A first talk on this topic was presented at the 2013 SAES conference in Dijon, France ("Self-Naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography") though the roots of this work can be seen in her explorations of Susan Howe's writing (see: "Invisible Collisions: Considering Susan Howe’s Reform of the Poetic, Critical & Autobiographical Essay," online on Seventeen Seconds: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Ottawa, Canada, issue 7, 2013, pp 7-24).
Tangential to her literary study, has been her interest in translation practice & theory. She co-organized three conferences on Poetry in Expanded Translation in the UK & France alongside Zoe Skoulding & Jeff Hilson (Jan 2017-2019), & has participated in conferences on alternative forms of translation & on self-translation. She co-edited with Stephanie Schwerter 2 books on translation in the social sciences: Transmissibility & Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities (Ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart, 2012) & Traduire, transmettre ou trahir: Réflexions sur la traduction en sciences humaines (éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris, 2013).
Additionally, Jennifer co-organizes Ivy Writers Paris (since Jan 2005) &, since 2010, the residencies Ecrire l'Art with the Directrice of La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d'Art Contemporain. Their book assembling 10 years of texts from this project, accompanied by their avant-propos, was published in Sept 2019: Ecrire l'art: DOSSIER DES OUVRAGES EXECUTES (Kunsthalle éditions, available through les presses du réel, France).
Jennifer is a published author of poetry & prose (most recently Lilith: A Novel in Fragments, Corrupt Books, 2019, & That Which I Touch Has No Name, Eyewear, London, forthcoming 2021). She is also a translator--including poems by Vannina Maestri (forthcoming 2021), Véronique Arnaud (gallery catalogues, 2018), Jean-Michel Espitallier (poems in READ, 2019), Yves Peyré’s chapter for book Takesada Matsutani (Centre Pompiou/Hauser & Wirth, 2019), poems by Michaël Batalla (for book Concrete LTD, 2014, & in PLU n°3 2015) & poems by Jérôme Mauche & others.
Jennifer K Dick’s academic research explores the overlapping fields of poetry & visual poetics. She is fascinated by the liminal spaces between language use in the visual arts & typography & imported visual work implanted on the page in contemporary American & European Literature (as seen in Susan Howe, Anne-Marie Albaich, Jacques Sivan or Anne Carson’s books). This focus on visuality has also lead to recent explorations on multilingualism as visual & textual space in the identity poetics of American authors like Craig Santos Perez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or Myung Mi Kim. Publications on these topics have appeared in La poésie motléculaire de Jacques Sivan (presses du reel, 2017), American Multiculturalism in Context (Cambridge, 2017), Point, Dot, Period…The Dynamics of Punctuation in Text & Image (Cambridge, 2016), Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (University of Michigan Press,2015), Trans (Paris III), Poétiques scientifiques dans les revues européennes de la modernité (1900-1940) (Classiques Garnier, 2013) & in the volume L’Ecriture Emprisonnée (Harmattan, 2007). She conceived of & co-organized the international conference Lex-ICON : treating text as image & image as text in June 2012 (http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/). A forthcoming article from the Nov 2019 Université de Lyon II conference "Le Depaysment" on Craig Santos Perez is under peer review. Presenting at "La poésie hors du livre" conference (Paris, October 2013), Jennifer extended her focus out of the book space to examine poetry on billboards & walls.
Wider research interests include the varied practices of postmodern poetic autobiographies (primarily those using visual & collage techniques in conjunction with more standard written forms of poetry) & cyborg poetry & poetics (Bhanu Kapil, Jacques Sivan). The interest in autobiography & reality vs fiction stems as much from her own creative as from her critical work. A first talk on this topic was presented at the 2013 SAES conference in Dijon, France ("Self-Naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography") though the roots of this work can be seen in her explorations of Susan Howe's writing (see: "Invisible Collisions: Considering Susan Howe’s Reform of the Poetic, Critical & Autobiographical Essay," online on Seventeen Seconds: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Ottawa, Canada, issue 7, 2013, pp 7-24).
Tangential to her literary study, has been her interest in translation practice & theory. She co-organized three conferences on Poetry in Expanded Translation in the UK & France alongside Zoe Skoulding & Jeff Hilson (Jan 2017-2019), & has participated in conferences on alternative forms of translation & on self-translation. She co-edited with Stephanie Schwerter 2 books on translation in the social sciences: Transmissibility & Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities (Ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart, 2012) & Traduire, transmettre ou trahir: Réflexions sur la traduction en sciences humaines (éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris, 2013).
Additionally, Jennifer co-organizes Ivy Writers Paris (since Jan 2005) &, since 2010, the residencies Ecrire l'Art with the Directrice of La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d'Art Contemporain. Their book assembling 10 years of texts from this project, accompanied by their avant-propos, was published in Sept 2019: Ecrire l'art: DOSSIER DES OUVRAGES EXECUTES (Kunsthalle éditions, available through les presses du réel, France).
Jennifer is a published author of poetry & prose (most recently Lilith: A Novel in Fragments, Corrupt Books, 2019, & That Which I Touch Has No Name, Eyewear, London, forthcoming 2021). She is also a translator--including poems by Vannina Maestri (forthcoming 2021), Véronique Arnaud (gallery catalogues, 2018), Jean-Michel Espitallier (poems in READ, 2019), Yves Peyré’s chapter for book Takesada Matsutani (Centre Pompiou/Hauser & Wirth, 2019), poems by Michaël Batalla (for book Concrete LTD, 2014, & in PLU n°3 2015) & poems by Jérôme Mauche & others.
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Support: Livre broché
Nb de pages: 240 p.
ISBN-10 2-7351-1530-5
ISBN-13 978-2-7351-1530-3
GTIN13 (EAN13) 9782735115303
All in all, this book is a comprehensive, compact survey of the cultural and linguistic translation and transmission issues in the social sciences today. Transmissibility and Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities is illuminating and informative. A great tool for study or debate.
200 Seiten, Paperback. 2012
ISBN 978-3-8382-0402-4
More Blurb extracts:
"The fugitive blur of selfhood—and the desire to be 'held' captive within identity—is the human problem that governs her work throughout. Reading the book is like watching film footage of an explosion at a railway station in reverse; we begin with language in diaspora—words scattered across the page, across consciousness, across the political map—and we arrive, curiously, at a reconstituted world of forms. It is the literary progression from trauma toward understanding; and readers, in the end, will be left with the timely and ethical understanding that words are 'abbreviations for what is in their hands.'"
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Facts for Visitors: Poems
"All of this exploratory and inventive work ultimately becomes heartfelt music for the reader. . . . This is great stuff."
—Stride Magazine
"Fluoresence is moving. Both emotionally engaging and in motion to match the realities of our moment, Jennifer Dick's poems are accountable to the truths of a violent kaleidoscope world."
—Laura Mullen, author of Murmur
"The project underlying this collection is precision, and Jennifer Dick carries it out beautifully, always keeping her language as sharp and explorative as her questioning. A strong, beautiful book throughout."
—Cole Swensen, author of Goest
David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence
“In the ec-, ec- ectoplasm of the echo,” Jennifer K Dick’s new concerto sings vibrato, rocking us boldly into shadowscape of the serpentine underworld of starboard saints the order of Orpheus and Eurydice, those Hansels and Gretels. Lushly and lavishly into the underworld we descend to look and to never look back, to forage forward and toward her lyrical horizon, sinking cock-eared and then tipping into her dreamscapes, begging, “make it double,” please.
Sandy Florian, author of The Tree of No
In the sinuous descents of Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt, we are among the debris of doxa not left to lie around an ailing modernist Thames or Rhime, but rather bound up again in the fascicle of a deeper myth-going gauntlet. Eurydice is the by-proxy birth of the lyric, of both its sad and smiling aspects (the marriage ceremony and the broken quest), two divided faces which both promise never to look back. Sex and scalpel, fusion and fissuring, no identity is left unknit in this astonishing revival. So we too may go deeper, into the passages of our choosing: “just follow the tracks in the dark, steady, steadying.”
Nicholas Manning, author of Novaless
In Jennifer K Dick’s wonderful rewinding of “loosely wound” myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are strung out on contemporary anxieties and pulled through the compelling lines of a tensely rhythmic language, an element at once familiar and strange. Description is unsteady, under revision, and flatness and depth make sudden shifts the characters (including reader and writer) negotiate, making forward movement exciting: the stakes are still high, even as we’re reminded the game is lost. Meanwhile the field of the author’s attention is mobile, errant, including the frame or what takes place elsewhere, beyond (around, askew to) a “story.” The subject of this splendid collection is the texture of understanding in its uneasy motion through the “sonorous dark”—in other words, the work of love.
Laura Mullen
Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt occurs at intermission—the point at which one act is made historical even as another supplants it. Inside this book, Eurydice and Orpheus wander the streets of Paris (which is also New York), Hades looks strangely like the Metro, and everything pickpockets the attributes of everything else. “Already what’s awaiting is rerouted,” Dick writes, as the tectonics of identity shift, destabilize and reconstitute, ushering forth a postmodern noir that sizzles with cosmopolitan smarts. Just further proof that poetry, like life, brooks no stasis: all is syncopation.
Chris Pusateri, author of Anon
Betwixt is a contemporary myth. It’s a “gaze cast,” where the unseen are momentarily seen—within shadow, under the pale light. It’s a dicey game of chance, in which time folds in on itself. Intimacy is held captive and released: “To: think only of her. Not to forget: she is. To: know this.” The impulse to turn leaves us standing still. In awe. Marveling at Jennifer K Dick’s “condensation of meaning.”
Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Beloved Integer
Notre thèse explore les multiples voies proposées par Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim et Susan Howe pour organiser visuellement l’espace de la page. L’usage de la dimension visuelle en poésie ouvre des possibilités que le Verbe a toujours eues : dépeindre, se dédoubler, et produire un écho visuel et sonore. La dimension du voir permet également la création de paradoxes par des juxtapositions d’éléments. Tout cela met en question le statut du langage et du langage poétique. Cette thèse étudie les moyens par lesquels des poésies interpellent leurs lecteurs et continuent à produire des significations qui dépassent par leur multiplicité la formation traditionnelle du sens. Ces œuvres créent des significations que l’on doit voir, et non comprendre, par le biais d’une lecture plurielle de composants (iconographiques, linguistiques, abstraits, sériels).
On prend comme point de départ l’étude des typologies du fragment et illustre comment la discrétion visuelle du fragment est intimement liée au développement de chaque poète. On interroge le rapport du mot à l’image afin de dégager des antécédents des procédés utilisés sur la page. On confirme que ces œuvres emploient des techniques « iconiques », comme le faisaient les calligrammes d’Apollinaire, mais y associent les techniques mallarméennes en étendant la lecture sur plusieurs pages. Les poésies de Howe, d’Albiach et de Kim présentent une synesthésie totale des correspondances entre des formes jusqu’à-là exploitées séparément. Par conséquent, ces œuvres radicalisent la notion de possible poétique en assimilant les techniques de la publicité, de la pop culture, du collage et du montage.
Mots clés : poésie, fragment, visuel, Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe.
ENGLISH VERSION:
The visual use of the page in American and European poetry : Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe and Anne-Marie Albiach
This dissertation explores the diverse ways in which the work of Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe visually organises the space of the page. The use of poetry’s visual dimension enlarges the traditional possibilities of the Word: to depict, multiply and produce an echo which is simultaneously resonant and visual. Exploiting the gaze also creates paradoxes through the juxtaposition of various elements. All of this calls into question the status of language, and poetic language in particular. This dissertation studies the ways these poets engage their readers as they produce a plurality of meanings which extend far beyond traditional sense-making. These works have significations which need to be seen rather than understood, via a reading process of its multifarious components (iconographic, linguistic, abstract, in series).
This study’s point of departure is the consideration of various types of fragments which illustrate how the fragment’s visual subtlety is intimately linked to each poet’s development. Connections between word and image are closely examined in order to locate the antecedents for the procedures being applied to the page. These works use “iconographic” techniques much as Apollinaire did in his calligrammes, while associating with these Mallarmé’s methods of drawing a poem’s reading out over numerous pages. The poetries of Howe, Albiach and Kim present a synesthesia of correspondences between all the forms which had heretofore been used separately. Consequently, these works radicalize the notion of what is possible in poetry by assimilating advertising, pop culture, collage and montage techniques.
Key words : poetry, fragment, visual, Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe.
École Doctorale 120 :
Discipline : Littérature Générale et Comparée
(Comparative Literature — French and American 20th Century Poetry.)
Signatures 17 octobre 2016 Création et politique, Entretiens, Livres, Traductions.
Ce chapitre explore les relations intimes entre l’art (visuel et littéraire) et la guerre. Premièrement en examinant comment SIC reflète une relation entre les arts et la langue des dernières avancées scientifiques comme outil pour l’art, pour le commerce et pour la guerre. Nous verrons comment le dialogue entretenu par PAB entre les arts et le monde politique et scientifique le mena de plus en plus fréquemment à des critiques des deux univers. Cet homme demandait qu’on soit moderne, plus moderne, et plus moderne encore—et donc il invitait ses contemporains à être de plus en plus en avance dans leur avant-gardisme. PAB en vint à remettre question la propagande artistique et industrielle. Il s’attaqua à la fois à l’art et à l’industrie et montra «par maints exemples empruntés à l’industrie et au commerce, que notre vie nationale souffrait surtout du manque d’initiative». Ses critiques devinrent un appel aux changements et à la création dans un espace où les frontières de l’art et de la science devenaient perméables. Comme Arlette Albert-Birot l’écrivit en août 1972, Sic reste «le témoin—ou l’acteur—de bien des bouleversements». Comme on pourrait le sous-entendre dans l’un des poèmes-préfaces de SIC : p106, PAB
"Le définitif n’existe pas.
Tout n’a pas été fait.
Ingénieurs ! toutes les forces n’ont pas été
employées : cherchez-en d’autres […]
Les 400 sont meilleurs que les 420 : c’est bien,
mais ce n’est qu’un perfectionnement.
Perfectionner est bien !
Créer est mieux !
Pourquoi ne regardez-vous que dans la direction
où regardent les autres ?
Ex. : Pourquoi L’ENGIN SUPÉRIEUR A UN
CANON NE SERAIT-IL PAS AUTRE CHOSE
QU’UN CANON ?
Cherchez autre chose
toujours autre chose
encore autre chose"
Support: Livre broché
Nb de pages: 240 p.
ISBN-10 2-7351-1530-5
ISBN-13 978-2-7351-1530-3
GTIN13 (EAN13) 9782735115303
All in all, this book is a comprehensive, compact survey of the cultural and linguistic translation and transmission issues in the social sciences today. Transmissibility and Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities is illuminating and informative. A great tool for study or debate.
200 Seiten, Paperback. 2012
ISBN 978-3-8382-0402-4
More Blurb extracts:
"The fugitive blur of selfhood—and the desire to be 'held' captive within identity—is the human problem that governs her work throughout. Reading the book is like watching film footage of an explosion at a railway station in reverse; we begin with language in diaspora—words scattered across the page, across consciousness, across the political map—and we arrive, curiously, at a reconstituted world of forms. It is the literary progression from trauma toward understanding; and readers, in the end, will be left with the timely and ethical understanding that words are 'abbreviations for what is in their hands.'"
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Facts for Visitors: Poems
"All of this exploratory and inventive work ultimately becomes heartfelt music for the reader. . . . This is great stuff."
—Stride Magazine
"Fluoresence is moving. Both emotionally engaging and in motion to match the realities of our moment, Jennifer Dick's poems are accountable to the truths of a violent kaleidoscope world."
—Laura Mullen, author of Murmur
"The project underlying this collection is precision, and Jennifer Dick carries it out beautifully, always keeping her language as sharp and explorative as her questioning. A strong, beautiful book throughout."
—Cole Swensen, author of Goest
David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence
“In the ec-, ec- ectoplasm of the echo,” Jennifer K Dick’s new concerto sings vibrato, rocking us boldly into shadowscape of the serpentine underworld of starboard saints the order of Orpheus and Eurydice, those Hansels and Gretels. Lushly and lavishly into the underworld we descend to look and to never look back, to forage forward and toward her lyrical horizon, sinking cock-eared and then tipping into her dreamscapes, begging, “make it double,” please.
Sandy Florian, author of The Tree of No
In the sinuous descents of Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt, we are among the debris of doxa not left to lie around an ailing modernist Thames or Rhime, but rather bound up again in the fascicle of a deeper myth-going gauntlet. Eurydice is the by-proxy birth of the lyric, of both its sad and smiling aspects (the marriage ceremony and the broken quest), two divided faces which both promise never to look back. Sex and scalpel, fusion and fissuring, no identity is left unknit in this astonishing revival. So we too may go deeper, into the passages of our choosing: “just follow the tracks in the dark, steady, steadying.”
Nicholas Manning, author of Novaless
In Jennifer K Dick’s wonderful rewinding of “loosely wound” myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are strung out on contemporary anxieties and pulled through the compelling lines of a tensely rhythmic language, an element at once familiar and strange. Description is unsteady, under revision, and flatness and depth make sudden shifts the characters (including reader and writer) negotiate, making forward movement exciting: the stakes are still high, even as we’re reminded the game is lost. Meanwhile the field of the author’s attention is mobile, errant, including the frame or what takes place elsewhere, beyond (around, askew to) a “story.” The subject of this splendid collection is the texture of understanding in its uneasy motion through the “sonorous dark”—in other words, the work of love.
Laura Mullen
Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt occurs at intermission—the point at which one act is made historical even as another supplants it. Inside this book, Eurydice and Orpheus wander the streets of Paris (which is also New York), Hades looks strangely like the Metro, and everything pickpockets the attributes of everything else. “Already what’s awaiting is rerouted,” Dick writes, as the tectonics of identity shift, destabilize and reconstitute, ushering forth a postmodern noir that sizzles with cosmopolitan smarts. Just further proof that poetry, like life, brooks no stasis: all is syncopation.
Chris Pusateri, author of Anon
Betwixt is a contemporary myth. It’s a “gaze cast,” where the unseen are momentarily seen—within shadow, under the pale light. It’s a dicey game of chance, in which time folds in on itself. Intimacy is held captive and released: “To: think only of her. Not to forget: she is. To: know this.” The impulse to turn leaves us standing still. In awe. Marveling at Jennifer K Dick’s “condensation of meaning.”
Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Beloved Integer
Notre thèse explore les multiples voies proposées par Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim et Susan Howe pour organiser visuellement l’espace de la page. L’usage de la dimension visuelle en poésie ouvre des possibilités que le Verbe a toujours eues : dépeindre, se dédoubler, et produire un écho visuel et sonore. La dimension du voir permet également la création de paradoxes par des juxtapositions d’éléments. Tout cela met en question le statut du langage et du langage poétique. Cette thèse étudie les moyens par lesquels des poésies interpellent leurs lecteurs et continuent à produire des significations qui dépassent par leur multiplicité la formation traditionnelle du sens. Ces œuvres créent des significations que l’on doit voir, et non comprendre, par le biais d’une lecture plurielle de composants (iconographiques, linguistiques, abstraits, sériels).
On prend comme point de départ l’étude des typologies du fragment et illustre comment la discrétion visuelle du fragment est intimement liée au développement de chaque poète. On interroge le rapport du mot à l’image afin de dégager des antécédents des procédés utilisés sur la page. On confirme que ces œuvres emploient des techniques « iconiques », comme le faisaient les calligrammes d’Apollinaire, mais y associent les techniques mallarméennes en étendant la lecture sur plusieurs pages. Les poésies de Howe, d’Albiach et de Kim présentent une synesthésie totale des correspondances entre des formes jusqu’à-là exploitées séparément. Par conséquent, ces œuvres radicalisent la notion de possible poétique en assimilant les techniques de la publicité, de la pop culture, du collage et du montage.
Mots clés : poésie, fragment, visuel, Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe.
ENGLISH VERSION:
The visual use of the page in American and European poetry : Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe and Anne-Marie Albiach
This dissertation explores the diverse ways in which the work of Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe visually organises the space of the page. The use of poetry’s visual dimension enlarges the traditional possibilities of the Word: to depict, multiply and produce an echo which is simultaneously resonant and visual. Exploiting the gaze also creates paradoxes through the juxtaposition of various elements. All of this calls into question the status of language, and poetic language in particular. This dissertation studies the ways these poets engage their readers as they produce a plurality of meanings which extend far beyond traditional sense-making. These works have significations which need to be seen rather than understood, via a reading process of its multifarious components (iconographic, linguistic, abstract, in series).
This study’s point of departure is the consideration of various types of fragments which illustrate how the fragment’s visual subtlety is intimately linked to each poet’s development. Connections between word and image are closely examined in order to locate the antecedents for the procedures being applied to the page. These works use “iconographic” techniques much as Apollinaire did in his calligrammes, while associating with these Mallarmé’s methods of drawing a poem’s reading out over numerous pages. The poetries of Howe, Albiach and Kim present a synesthesia of correspondences between all the forms which had heretofore been used separately. Consequently, these works radicalize the notion of what is possible in poetry by assimilating advertising, pop culture, collage and montage techniques.
Key words : poetry, fragment, visual, Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe.
École Doctorale 120 :
Discipline : Littérature Générale et Comparée
(Comparative Literature — French and American 20th Century Poetry.)
Signatures 17 octobre 2016 Création et politique, Entretiens, Livres, Traductions.
Ce chapitre explore les relations intimes entre l’art (visuel et littéraire) et la guerre. Premièrement en examinant comment SIC reflète une relation entre les arts et la langue des dernières avancées scientifiques comme outil pour l’art, pour le commerce et pour la guerre. Nous verrons comment le dialogue entretenu par PAB entre les arts et le monde politique et scientifique le mena de plus en plus fréquemment à des critiques des deux univers. Cet homme demandait qu’on soit moderne, plus moderne, et plus moderne encore—et donc il invitait ses contemporains à être de plus en plus en avance dans leur avant-gardisme. PAB en vint à remettre question la propagande artistique et industrielle. Il s’attaqua à la fois à l’art et à l’industrie et montra «par maints exemples empruntés à l’industrie et au commerce, que notre vie nationale souffrait surtout du manque d’initiative». Ses critiques devinrent un appel aux changements et à la création dans un espace où les frontières de l’art et de la science devenaient perméables. Comme Arlette Albert-Birot l’écrivit en août 1972, Sic reste «le témoin—ou l’acteur—de bien des bouleversements». Comme on pourrait le sous-entendre dans l’un des poèmes-préfaces de SIC : p106, PAB
"Le définitif n’existe pas.
Tout n’a pas été fait.
Ingénieurs ! toutes les forces n’ont pas été
employées : cherchez-en d’autres […]
Les 400 sont meilleurs que les 420 : c’est bien,
mais ce n’est qu’un perfectionnement.
Perfectionner est bien !
Créer est mieux !
Pourquoi ne regardez-vous que dans la direction
où regardent les autres ?
Ex. : Pourquoi L’ENGIN SUPÉRIEUR A UN
CANON NE SERAIT-IL PAS AUTRE CHOSE
QU’UN CANON ?
Cherchez autre chose
toujours autre chose
encore autre chose"
L’article ci-joint répond aux questions suivantes : Pourrait-on aborder les questions de sens et du travail lyrique d’un texte à travers sa forme visuelle ? Sommes-nous toujours en train de redire ce qui a déjà été dit ? Comment aborder les paradoxes présentés par une écriture « postmoderne » ainsi que les définitions floues de ce terme « postmoderne » ?
Enfin, j’explore la notion de la « comparaison » de l’influence et de l’héritage littéraire.
This talk will explore the what next? behind these two author’s uses of red. Red of rage, of rebel, of alien, of liquid earth or of foreign planet Mars—red provides color-based symbolic ramifications for the definition of an alternate, radical self-identity. Both poetry collections center around a novel-like anti-hero/underdog character pondering “The riddle [that] persists: who am I?”(23). They navigate complex interrogations of interior and exterior worlds as their existence is entirely defined by “red”—the color of “dissent”, of “fire” for Hejinian’s “alien” and Carson’s “monstrous” Geryon (based on the Greek story of Herakles who heroically slayed him for his red cattle but who may also be, in her work, a phoenix-like immortal Yazcamac.) Red remains connected to its traditional symbolisms (rage, violence, desire, flesh, blood, love and Marxist politics). Yet in these works red is most significantly related to transformation—a red, deep fire, the life-force of lava, the earth’s center bubbling out to form new land, at once a destructive and constructive force. Red, as used in these texts, provides readers with a red-eye, perhaps even blinding, photo-flash reflection of an alternative self, one which is anti-binary, molten, other, as Hejinian’s “Human of Mars” states: “I depart, separating from myself and become a red image of it” (23) In the end these characters are “a drop of gold…molten matter returned from the core of the earth to tell you [show us] interior things” (59).
Taking back the self, exploring ancestry, origins and histories that are rich with variants from the known American History, this paper will compare and contrast two contemporary authors, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro and Pacific Rim author of [Saina] and other works) and Myung Mi Kim (Korean-American author of Dura, Under Flag and other works). I will attempt to demonstrate how their making of a new English within their poetry collections seeks to account for the experience of the multicultural and polyvalent self, for lost or vanishing cultures, but also ends up speaking for an inclusive "we" by allowing a space for that which cannot be expressed—that of the past and the present, of the Other and the foreigness in each of us. What will be explored is how these two authors, like many others at the end of the 20th century, have come to reassess the place of self and difference ON and VIA the page of the book. This presentation will conclude by trying to account for the explorations and demands made on readers of this new American poetics. As Craig Santos Perez writes: “redressed let our history be seen through watermarks heard /thru no one speech”
Publisher-authors included Lyn Hejinian (Atelos and Tuumba Press), Julie Carr (Counterpath Press—with Tim Roberts), Jérôme Mauche (Les Petits Matins), Cole Swensen (La Presse—publishing only translations from the French), Pascal Poyet (contrat maint), Charles Alexander (Chax Press), Brenda Iijima (Yo-yo labs), Tracey Grinnell (Litmus Press), Joshua Clover (**), Dan Machlin (Futurepoem Books), Michaël Batalla (éditions du Clou dans le Fer, collection expériences poétiques), Vanesse Place (Les Figues Presse) and Susana Gardner (Dusie Press, based in Switzerland).
Supplemental questions were be posed to a handful of poets who have published with these presses and/or other small presses and who have also later had the opportunity (or wish to) to see their work taken by mainstream or wider-distribution presses, such as Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jacques Sivan, Vannina Maestri, Bhanu Kapil, Virginie Poitrasson, Frédéric Forte, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Marie-Céline Siffert, Martin Richet, Michelle Noteboom, Laura Mullen and to such publishers who have radicalized the accessibility of avant-garde poetries, such as Al Dante, POL, or Green Integer/Sun & Moon. This article asks and reflects on the question: Have such publishing practices created not only domestic webs of contacts in the USA, thus co-publishing opportunities and readership, but even international ones?
Pour mieux expliquer l’encadrement de cette proposition d’intervention : Decio Pignatari, Heraldo et Augusto De Campos expliquent qu’en portant une attention particulière à l’aspect visuel et fragmenté, James Joyce nous a fourni une « interprétation organique du temps et de l’espace » qui était un « appel à la communication non-verbale » à la e.e. cummings avec son « atomisation des mots » et son « valorisation expressionniste de l’espace ». Susan Howe reprend ces pratiques dans ses textes qui sont dynamiques dans leur distribution spatiale inédite, bien qu’ils ne soient pas seulement ou totalement optique dans leur déroulement structuro-typographique. Howe construit une poésie qui « bénéficie des avantages de la communication non-verbale, sans renoncer aux virtualités de la parole »[1]. Ainsi s’élève de cette poésie « un phénomène de métacommunication : coïncidence et simultanéité de la communication verbale et non verbale, avec ceci de particulier qu’il s’agit d’une communication de formes, d’une structure-contenu, non d’une simple communication de messages »[2]. Avec le mélange de techniques d’art plastique et de langage, Howe est dirigée par la dissipation de la frontière entre le moi et l’autre, l’usage spatial de la page, et le concept d’un « point du temps où la distinction passé-avenir se dissipe »[3]. Elle utilise des techniques de collage pour mieux exprimer une « Réalité » multiple et fragmentée peut-être née du besoin de retrouver (et / ou d’effacer) le Soi[4]. Howe introduit un espace sur la page et à travers le livre où le sens et la signifiance prennent une forme mobile pour faire d’après Krzysztof Ziarek une poésie évènementielle et trans-chronologique, sans l’illusion d’une stabilité ou d’une fixité dans un temps ou une expérience. Il explique que « Its challenge translates into a different understanding of meaning: meaning irreducible to signification, to the play of linguistic signs, but, instead, thought of in terms of opening the space for meaning »[5] et il cite Jean-Luc Nancy qui déclare : « La différence de l’être en lui-même, […] ne fait pas un sens disponible en tant que signification, mais elle est l’ouverture d’un espace nouveau pour le sens, d’un espacement, ou, si on ose dire, d’un ‘spaciosité’ de l’élément spacieux qui seul peut accueillir du sens. »[6] Pour les poètes contemporains comme Howe, leurs textes restent, « […] des mots à voir avant que d’en lire le sens, à répéter à des moments précis pour en vivre le processus phonématique interne »[7].
NOTES:
[1] Carlo Belloli, « Poésie Visuelle. 1944. », in Valetudo testi e pretesti visuali, Rome-Naples, Press editore, 1976, trad. Romanello Gordiani.
[2] Augusto De Campos, Harolodo De Campos et Decio Pignatari, « Plan Pilote pour la poésie concrète. 1958. », trad. Michel Riaudel, in Jacinto Lageira, éd., Du Mot à l’Image et du Son au Mot : Théories, manifeste, documents, une anthologie de 1897 à 2005, Marseilles, Le Mot et le Reste, 2006, (Coll. Formes), pp. 198.; orig. dans Noigrandes, n°4.
[3] Philippe Sollers, « Littérature et totalité », L’écriture et l’expérience des limites, Paris, Editions de Seuil, (Coll. Tel Quel), 1968, p. 69.
[4] Concept exprimé par Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice, Chicago et Londres, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
[5] Krzysztof Ziarek, « “A Sounding of Uncertainty” : Susan Howe’s Gendering of History », in The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, Evanston, Illinois, USA, Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 291.
[6] Jean-Luc Nancy, L’expérience de la liberté, Paris, Galilée, 1988, p. 23.
[7] Belloli, op. cit., Les italiques sont les miennes.
Taking back the self, exploring ancestry, origins and histories that are rich with variants from the known American History, this paper will compare and contrast two contemporary authors, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro and Pacific Rim author of [Saina] and other works) and Myung Mi Kim (Korean-American author of Dura, Under Flag and other works). I will attempt to demonstrate how their making of a new English within their poetry collections seeks to account for the experience of the multicultural and polyvalent self, for lost or vanishing cultures, but also ends up speaking for an inclusive "we" by allowing a space for that which cannot be expressed—that of the past and the present, of the Other and the foreigness in each of us. What will be explored is how these two authors, like many others at the end of the 20th century, have come to reassess the place of self and difference ON and VIA the page of the book. This presentation will conclude by trying to account for the explorations and demands made on readers of this new American poetics. As Craig Santos Perez writes: “redressed let our history be seen through watermarks heard /thru no one speech…” (from [Saina])
Deuxièmement, cette conférence a exploré un mouvement inverse (en utilisant comme examples les compagnes de publicités de Hallmark, de SwissLife Insurance, de Nike et de Levis Jeans). On a examiné comment la culture de masse commence à favoriser une singularité et comment elle tente de reconnecter avec l’individu au lieu de traiter ce dernier comme un élément isolé de la masse. En d’autres termes, va-t-on vers un commerce de masse qui touche à la singularité de chaque être grâce à l’utilisation des techniques poétiques ? Allant encore plus loin, la publicité peut-elle être une forme d’art poétique, ou même une forme de poésie engagée ?
This continuum between divide and connection is at the heart of all metaphor, but is newly explored with the subtle visual gesture of adding the punctuation mark to interrupt the natural sentence flow in the 36 poems in Anne Carson’s The Life of Towns. Take for example this extract from Emily Town:
[…]
Snow or a library.
Or a band of angels.
With a message is.
Not what.
It meant to.
Her.
As in the theoretical reflections and the artwork of Kandinsky, the space for the punctum, the pause, the rift and the halt or that of the flow, the line endlessly going on as geometry tells us it must once in motion do, get discombobulated in Carson’s poem. We find ourselves juggling in a world which interrupts itself, stuttering in the staccato blocks, unable to find the natural flow of the sentence. The eye is drawn forward and pauses. In her preamble to The Life of Towns, Carson writes “A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible.” What might those lines be? Are they the life of towns which connect by proximity, by being encircled within a set boundary—“My pear, your winter”—as she states? Or is Carson’s work reminding us that the end stop is a wall, and that though we may feel all words of a sentence make it a whole, there is something divisive in the very nature of language. This short talk will attempt to use Kandinsky and Carson’s writings to discuss the connective and disconnective uses of the period as seen in Carson’s Life of Towns. The formal uses of circle and line in Kandinsky’s abstract paintings will serve as a visual parallel to demonstrate the kinetic confusions in these poems.
I) PURPOSE I: For “expression ecrite”/ creative writing or writing in lit classes:
** To learn about the techniques of fiction (writing)
** To study elements of form (recognizing and analyzing these separately)
II) PURPOSE II: For “commentaire” classes:
** To learn to read closely via writing imitations, responses, versions of Faulkner, pastiches, etc.
II) PURPOSE III: Back to language basics—for Grammar and Phonetics courses, with a focus on syntax as well:
** To recognize normative / proper American English vs Southern American English, dialects, regional slang, etc.
** To explore sound vs spelling (as aspect of voice)
** “Dick and Jane” vs. the Faulkner sentence
the open space beyond the horizon. And, finally, the horizon of the work itself: the poem as its own horizon of expectation, forever opening out onto its own possibilities, its own beginnings and endings: its own entelechy." I spoke of works by visual artists and by poets at the end of the 20th century.
Publisher-authors included Lyn Hejinian (Atelos and Tuumba Press), Julie Carr (Counterpath Press—with Tim Roberts), Jérôme Mauche (Les Petits Matins), Cole Swensen (La Presse—publishing only translations from the French), Pascal Poyet (contrat maint), Charles Alexander (Chax Press), Brenda Iijima (Yo-yo labs), Tracey Grinnell (Litmus Press), Joshua Clover (**), Dan Machlin (Futurepoem Books), Michaël Batalla (éditions du Clou dans le Fer, collection expériences poétiques), Vanesse Place (Les Figues Presse) and Susana Gardner (Dusie Press, based in Switzerland).
Supplemental questions were be posed to a handful of poets who have published with these presses and/or other small presses and who have also later had the opportunity (or wish to) to see their work taken by mainstream or wider-distribution presses, such as Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jacques Sivan, Vannina Maestri, Bhanu Kapil, Virginie Poitrasson, Frédéric Forte, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Marie-Céline Siffert, Martin Richet, Michelle Noteboom, Laura Mullen and to such publishers who have radicalized the accessibility of avant-garde poetries, such as Al Dante, POL, or Green Integer/Sun & Moon. This talk concluded by asking and reflecting on the question: Have such publishing practices created not only domestic webs of contacts in the USA, thus co-publishing opportunities and readership, but even international ones?
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