Readings, Listenings, Viewings
The principal text for this week is the February edition of Poetry magazine (handed out in class last week; if you missed a copy, there are a couple in the mailbox outside Jeff’s office, McCosh 33; and you can get an awkward but complete version online.)
Reflections
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” from Image, Music, Text (pp. 179-89).
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. (pp. 1-23).
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Gay Science (§290).
Richard Wollheim, from “Pictorial Style: Two Views” (pp. 186-91).
Questions
This week, another sense of that Protean term voice, the voice of the author, the voice on the page. Another word for it: style. Our principal example is the latest issue of Poetry magazine, which strives to be ecumenical, and contains poems of many different schools, traditions, factions, fashions, etc. We’ll want to use some of our class time to think about the different voices we hear there, how to describe and distinguish them, what differences and what affinities we discover. Come prepared to propose a particular poem to the class, and to start a discussion about its characteristics and where it might be said to fit in the volume as a whole. (The rhetoric week might afford some vocabulary, though we’ll have to reach for other resources, too.) The secondary readings all one way or another approach the question of what counts as an individual voice. Nietzsche gives a full-throated defense of the importance of having a style of your own; Roland Barthes grounds the voice in a particular body; Richard Wollheim is talking about painting, but his discussion of individual style is a useful, philosophical approach to what we mean by such acts of recognition and singling out. The Derrida is more background for the discussion, and in furtherance of our interest in poststructuralism—you’ll see his affinities with Dolar and Chion and in back of them, Lacan. We can hope that the discussion will start to focus an area of interest in previous discussions, what it means to sound like yourself. (And of course, like other people.) Perhaps the individuality of voices and the individuality of faces will occupy us, too.
Exercise
In the spirit of last week’s ventriloquism, this week’s exercise asks you to produce one poet’s poem from the mouth (or pen) of another. What might this mean? Let’s take two poets encountered already in this class. Say that we wanted to rewrite Ovid in the voice of Gertrude Stein. To do so, we might first consider what elements of Ovid a poet like Stein might take to be quintessentially Ovidian—would she home in on the form of address, the length and organization of a line, the non-rhyme? Or is it the cool distance, what he gives and what he withholds that most interests her? Next, decide how Stein might then re-voice Ovid in her own Steinian idiom. You’ve had a bit of practice with this before! The exercise from Week 3 invited you to take an extant non-rhetorical text and make it rhetorical, which is one way of recasting one voice in the voice of an imagined other. This week, you should choose two poems you are interested in from our issue of Poetry, and rewrite one in the voice of the other. So, for example, take Petit Pascale’s “Sky Ladder” as your model; now write it in the voice of Monica Youn’s “Study of Two Figures,” which would mean expanding the short terse lines of the first into the long prose-blocks of the second, transforming and augmenting the language as necessary, catching the sound of Youn. You can choose any two poems. The more different they are, the better! As usual, your exercise should include a 200- to 300-word explanation of your inspiration and your methodology.