AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writer's House, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems or some prose. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the writing to a few new possibilities. And, we hope, gain for some writing that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound Archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today Poem Talk has gone on the road along with Poem Talk's editor Zach Carduner, and our tech guru pal and audio meister, Chris Martin. Zach on video, Chris on audio. And we have driven up into the Hudson Valley, the Mid-Hudson, and landed at Annandale-on-Hudson, the home of Bard College, where we have decamped and are joined by Laynie Browne, who actually came along from Philadelphia with us, whose most recent publications include an anthology, A Forest of Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel published by Nightboat, an illustrated talk called The Poet's Novel as a Form of Defiance, Kin Press, love that book Laynie. And who has forthcoming collections of poetry. You exhaust us all Laynie, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists, Wave Books, and Apprentice to a Breathing Hand, Omnidawn. And who with us at Penn coordinates our massive open online course, ModPo, and teaches creative writing. And by erica kaufman, poet, teacher and teacher's teacher. That's really what you are, a teacher's teacher, whose books include Post Classic, Roof Books, 2019, and Instant Classic, Roof Books, 2013, and who was co-editor of No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of Kari Edwards, 2009. Who is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, and whose essay on Joan Retallack is part of a new book entitled, the Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. And inside this book, erica kaufman has an essay about Joan Retallack. Also joining us, the aforementioned Joan Retallack, eminent poet, critic theorist, multidisciplinary scholar and teacher's teacher also whose many books, to name just a few, include Memnoir, Afterrimages, Errata 5uite, and The Poethical Wager, who is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, professor emerita of Humanities right here at Bard College, where she directed the aforementioned Language and Thinking Program for ten years. And who in Spring 2023, I'm thrilled to say, will be visiting Philadelphia in early ’23 as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. Joan, it is a pleasure to see you after all this time here. And we're already very excited about your coming to Philadelphia.

JOAN RETALLACK:
As am I. Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
So glad that you joined us. erica.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
Hi, Al.

AL FILREIS:
Tell me something good.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
I am so excited that you all came here from Philadelphia.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, it was a fun ride. Laynie, anything about the ride worth mentioning?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
It's fantastic.

AL FILREIS:
What, you like this drive from Philly?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
I like it.

AL FILREIS:
I mean, we got a little stuck on the parkway in the New Jersey Parkway. And as soon as my automated voice thing in the car said, welcome to New York, we realized we had left New Jersey and now we were in perhaps a better state. And Poem Talk fans who just heard me say that about New Jersey are going to be writing in, lest you write in, I'm from New Jersey. So it's OK. Well, today, we four have gathered here at Bard to talk about two passages from the opening pages of Joan Retallack's essay, “The Poethical Wager,” in a collection of 13 essays, I guess 12 essays in an introduction that comprise a 279 page book, The Poethical Wager, published by the University of California Press in 2003. We have selected two passages from the beginning of the title essay to be specific and helpful, we hope for those following along in their copies of the book. The opening pages of the essay from pages 21 to 25, part of a conversation the author conducts with herself or a version of herself a self interview.

And second, a few paragraphs on pages 57 and 58 on Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and a few other topics. Every Poem Talk episode begins with a recording of the poet. And since in this unusual episode we have the subject of our discussion, if I may call you that, right here with us, we've asked Joan to read a portion of the passages we've chosen to discuss. Note that in the interest of time, we can't feature a reading of the entire passage, but we hope what you are about to hear will give you a sense. And we urge you to read the whole passage, indeed the whole essay. So here now is Joan Retallack reading from The Poethical Wager.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Thank you, Al, for staging this. And...

AL FILREIS:
You’re so welcome.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Saying those good things. I'm actually going to read a portion of an essay within The Poethical Wager titled “Wager as Essay.” And this section is about Gertrude Stein and her essay as a form. 

“To get lost in the writing can be a way out of officially charted territory. Gertrude Stein says this, enacts this emphatically in her own essays—to act out of one’s unprecedented contemporariness is to be able to tolerate, even enjoy, not knowing where one is going even in sustained forays. Stein’s essays—in a tradition that continues through John Cage, Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and others—literally compose (live) their way through the necessary uncertainty that transforms language according to one’s sense of the active principles of change in one’s time. This is to enter the event of literature (as writer/reader) most directly as a “form of life” in Wittgenstein’s sense. The language game of the exploratory experimental essay is in dynamic intercourse with the cultural contexts that form the developing rims of one’s social world. If one sees change as the very definition of temporality, then the poesis of living that change is one in which the action of time is the action of composition. Stein puts it this way in “Composition as Explanation”: “

Now this is Stein:

“It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition…. The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. No one thinks these things when they are making, when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made.

“Stein’s explanation of composition.” And now that's me. You wouldn't know it, I'm sure. But. 

“Stein's explanation of composition as explanation is a fortuitous elucidation of just how the essay can elude official thought. The act of composition in the writing is radically preformulaic. Official thought but no existence except as formula. The essayist in Stein’s world is creating her composition in the transitional zones of the contemporary as unclassified temporal space. This is one way of understanding her phrase “continuous present.” In the poethics of an experimental activity with contemporary “use” as the guiding value, one must always have the courage of “an intention groping its way.” Stein again. 

“There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present…. Having naturally done this, I naturally was a little troubled with it when I read it…. When I reread it myself, I lost myself in it again. 

“Each period of living differs from any other period of living. Not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted, and that authentically speaking is composition. After life has been conducted in a certain way, everybody knows it but nobody knows it. Little by little, nobody knows it as long as nobody knows it. And one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either. They are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does…. And now to begin as if to begin. Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. 

“Nothing changes except composition, the composition and the time of and the time in the composition. 

“It is in the act of composing, and only in composing, that one notices and arranges memory, fully lives in making something of one’s contemporary experience. This has to do with the fact that being where one is—in the present as it is continuing to complicate history—is the one thing we are certain to not understand in advance. (Or perhaps we understand nothing in advance.) It takes everything we think we know along with everything noisily, silently unknowable to form the patterns that will eventually give visibility and meaning to things.”

AL FILREIS:
Thank you, Joan. I think we should start the following way. So I'm going to ask Laynie and erica, and then I'm going to offer it myself, to pick out a point passage sentence to add to the record. Say briefly what interests you about it. Then we'll invite Joan to respond to any of the three selections or remarks or anything like that. We can go from there. Erika, you got one?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
Sure. So mine is on page 23. The kind...

AL FILREIS:
This is in the dialogue with the “slef,” slef version of this.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
Yeah, this is in the…

JOAN RETALLACK:
Quinta Slef

AL FILREIS:
Quinta Slef, is a person, a personage.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
“The kind of agency that has a chance of mattering in today's world can thrive only in a culture of acknowledged complexity, only in contexts of long-range collaborative projects that bring together multiple modes of engagement, intuition, imagination, cognition.”

AL FILREIS:
And why did you pick that?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
This is one of the moments that I find to be incredibly helpful as far as thinking about the broader question of the wager of writing and the way in which to respond to the contemporary, one also needs to be engaging on a lot of different levels. So you're never only thinking about a single eye or a single moment, but there's a way in which everything around the moment becomes involved.

AL FILREIS:
Wonderful. Great. Glad that caught in. Laynie, you have a passage. There's so many. I see you're just all over the place.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
It's hard to choose. How about on 25? 

“Also in the dialogue and the response to the question. But what does all that necessarily have to do with art? Certain kinds of art help us to live with nourishment and pleasure in the real world, connect us with it in ways nothing else can, by shifting our attention to formally framed material conditions in ingenious ways.”

And I'm thinking about the phrases, nourishment and pleasure and questions of in the real world and how that resonates in this particular moment moving through time.

AL FILREIS:
Fabulous. OK, I'll add one and then Joan can pick any point and say anything she likes about this. I'm interested in the passage that we just heard. I just wanna point out a phrase at the beginning of that passage and a bit of Cage as quoted just after the passage, and then something a little after that. The first phrase we did here is referring to not knowing where one is going. That is to say, being either without direction or without an aggressive sense of direction or lost. And I've been reading a lot of Caroline Bergvall and Drift in particular. I think of Drift as a concept there, as a positive, not a negative. The second little version of that is the Cage quoted from Lecture on Nothing by John, just after the passage we heard Cage says, “I have the feeling that we are getting nowhere.” So it's another directionless, another lostness. And then just after that, Joan summarizing Cage's experiments, experiments in forms of living one's life that are ways of not wanting to be anywhere other than where one is.

So those are three versions of something that is very counter to conventional aspiration, even to liberal democracy. Let's get somewhere, let's go somewhere, let's progress. And this is not going with that. This is trying something else. Well, you have three different ways you can go. What would you like to do?

JOAN RETALLACK:
Actually, I think those three passages are related in a way that is very central to this whole book. I mean, what I am valuing in the various essays and that is that in everything that one is doing, one is choosing a form of life that could be a pretty crappy form of life or could be something that invigorates you, invigorates others who may experience what you're doing in a way that is, as Cage liked to say, working toward being fully present and fully in touch with everything around one so that there's not a time when you are, quote, 'wasting your time doing things that are not vital to you.' I mean, our part of life as it should be led. So the very, the last thing that you quoted that he wants always to not be anywhere other than where he is.

AL FILREIS:
Exactly, yeah.

JOAN RETALLACK:
That, that's the crux of it, and for me as someone who writes essays which are difficult to write often, that is something that stops me periodically when I'm realizing I'm not enjoying what I'm doing and I have to figure out a way to get back into doing it in such a way, composing it, as Stein might say, so that in the composition, I have changed the nature of what it is that is being composed and how I am doing it.

AL FILREIS:
So composing is living, but is not easy necessarily.

JOAN RETALLACK:
True. True.

AL FILREIS:
There's a moment where, is it Quinta, Quinta Slef?

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yeah, Quinta.

AL FILREIS:
Quinta Slef says, “oh, um, this is daunting'.” And you say what's daunting if your primary concern is control. What we need is a robustly nuanced reasonableness, one that can operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty. That's the composing is living, but it's not necessarily easy.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yeah, well, easy is not actually a very positive part of the lexicon as far as I'm concerned, because difficulty, if it's worthwhile, is challenging and that is the most stimulating thing I can imagine. It's thrilling, actually, to be confronted with a complex puzzle or complex thought and to get to do the composing and the doing, that is the act of puzzling until, as Dr. Seuss put it, you puzzle and puzzle until your puzzler is sore. But it doesn't matter that it's sore (LAUGHS).

AL FILREIS:
I wanna turn to Laynie 'cause I know Lenny has something, some thought here about this, which is what we're talking about. Laynie and then erica, thoughts on where we are so far.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
I just wanna repeat a couple of things you just said that I'm just wow. Easy is not an important part of the lexicon and it's, and I'm not saying exactly your words, but it's thrilling to be confronted with complexity. And it's essential that the composition be pleasurable. So what I'm wondering is that we can't demystify the moment that allows us to make the pivot from, this is not pleasurable, how do I need to rethink it? Right, it's mysterious. But I'm curious if Slef, and Quinta, is one strategy to make that happen.

AL FILREIS:
You mean you need an, you need (CROSSTALK) interroator?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
In other words, how is that helpful? Was that part of the process in this particular composition.

JOAN RETALLACK:
To make it more pleasurable to write?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
To, right, in other words, I just wanna know about Slef and Quinta and if that's connected to this process that you're describing, which is the movement back and forth from, this is hard, oh, but this is pleasurable. This is right, that keeps happening.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Well, the most important thing about Quinta Slef is that she was willing to be in conversation with me. So the whole composition is a conversation, which is my favorite way of thinking, to have a thought and then have a response to that thought and so on. But she actually is there coming up with responses that I would not have come up with without her presence. And I mean that entirely seriously. The, there's something about and it's, it's not only with Quinta Slef that I've discovered this, having beginning to sense another geometry of attention that is part of another person's or another figure's way of thinking, and you know, people talk about alter egos and I think that's really what that's all about. That I you know, why would anyone require an alter ego or seek it out or notice it? It's because our minds, if they're not swerved from, you know, the neural pathway that they happen to be on by something that is necessarily external to what the mind has been doing, what the. you know, the composer has been composing, then there there are all sorts of possible dimensions that are never going to be explored.

AL FILREIS:
I took two notes, and the first thing I said is, sometimes Gertrude's Alice will serve that purpose. That's wrong, ultimately, but there's something about when Stein includes Alice in the conversation things like that happen. But the better one was this, a Recollection of Civilization and its Discontents, which is the only, well, it's an essay, it's finally an essay where the doubtful voice or the curious voice. Whilst each chapter begins, 'I hear a dissenter. I hear a doubtful person say the following. Now it's stagey. Freud is stagey in making his argument, but it's so much better than the Ego and the Id and some of these other things where he's just marching forward.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And this is a Slef-like moment for him, I think simply and it's a, that's a hard argument to make. erica kaufman, what's, what are you thinking about?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
I'm thinking about the role of like the actual act of writing in all of this and how, you know, for me, what happens in the Slef interview is something crystallizes for me as somebody who thinks about writing a whole lot, and that is that so, you know, so much of what is important is learning, learning to enjoy the act that one is pursuing. And, you know, I was really struck by what Joan was saying about having to step away and figuring out a new process or procedure if something is no longer pleasurable. And I mean, it's just such a radically different way from, I think, normative ways of thinking about composing where, you know, like what, if one is working towards a deadline or one has a particular purpose or audience in mind, you get stuck. You know, my students asked me about writer's block a lot, and it strikes me that for me at least, it's reminding me of what Dewey says about the importance of experience and learning by doing and how central to the composition process through the composing process or the wager is the actual act of being willing to keep going and to allow oneself to be fully present in the work and challenging oneself to figure out a way to enjoy it.

JOAN RETALLACK:
You know, I do want to interject one thing. I started to get a little concerned about the word pleasure throughout because a lot of what we tackle is difficult because of what other people are going through, let's just put it that way or what the, you know, the earth right now is going through. It's, but it's what I think is it's like the serious, the idea of serious play. Play can be just, you know, pure delight. Serious play can be not so delightful, but totally engaging and enlivening of all of one's senses and so on. And the same thing goes for the, you know, the difficulties in, with some of the the subjects that we're working on. And I think that you can still feel, I feel good about how I am working on this. So that may not be pleasurable. You may be even in tears at times, but you just feel that you are you're doing the right thing with that, with composing in the way you're composing.

AL FILREIS:
I wanna switch gears slightly and get to what is for me the most radical statement in the piece, in this section. It's just two sentences. The act of composition in the writing is radically pre formulaic. Official thought has no existence except as formula. To me, this is and we can go a long way with this because this is a political stance that is seeking an alternative to ideology or formulaic thinking. So and I say anti ideological with a tremendous amount of hesitation because there's really no such thing as anti ideological. But the radical pre formulaic composing is the living you seek and official thought has no existence except this formula, so we need to avoid that. And the one, one of the ways to understand what Stein means by continuous present is a way of finding an alternative to formulaic thought. That is genius. I mean, it's a genius idea, Stein's yours, and I would love for you to comment on the political implications of that, which you don't, you're not exploring that here, but official thought is not where we wanna go.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Oh, definitely not. I.

AL FILREIS:
So is poetry, the poetic radically pre formulaic, that's what we seek.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yeah. Yeah well, that, it's interesting to me that you, you've focused on that because I'm, it's something I'm working on right now in another project that I'm doing and. In doing some research that has to do with the way our brain works in relation to the known and the unknown and the way in which we move language through our physiology, our biological neural networks. And one of the things that he points out is that when we're speaking in ad hoc ways, like we are now, that often, we are using suites of words - he doesn't use that term exactly. (CROSSTALK)

AL FILREIS:
(CROSSTALK) But that's a favorite word of yours.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yes, there's a suite of words that just go together. And they float around in the atmosphere that everyone is breathing into and out of, and that saves time. It saves the kind of time trying to figure out what you're saying the way we all are. And I'm very aware of, you know, I have no ready formulations. I've got to struggle to get these ideas together. That is a major part of the speech act, the performance of speech of everyone in the culture. And what I realized is that just in that, we know why it is so important to have playful language with young children, to have poetry, because the serious play or the pleasurable play, I mean, starting with Mother Goose and rhymes and all of that sort of stuff, but into what we all have been doing is absolutely necessary to keep us out of habits in which we become automatons. The language is speaking us, in other words.

AL FILREIS:
Imagine non-habitual language as a way for children to learn how to live, how to compose their living, imagine that. I mean, Dewey got mentioned that learner-centered learning is relevant. I just wanna quote a sentence that's in that passage that I skipped when I went to the continuous present, "The essayist," so we're getting to an unclassified temporal space, right? A space where you can compose or to live. "The essayist in Stein's world is creating her composition in the transitional zones of the contemporary as unclassified," non-formulaic, "temporal space." Laynie, over to you. What are you thinking?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Well, this connects to a section in the middle of 58 about unknowing. "It takes everything we think we know along with everything noisily/silently unknowable to form the patterns that will eventually give visibility and meaning," to, "things." So, I'm tangled in the syntax there, but I'm thinking about something that you just said about the willingness to be in the indeterminate space as part of the process which enables this continuous present, this composing as we go, unknowing where we're going as an essential part of that aliveness. (CROSSTALK)

AL FILREIS:
(CROSSTALK) Everything noisily, silently, slash unknowable?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
(CROSSTALK) I mean, I think that the simultaneity of the opposites is part of the unknowable.

AL FILREIS:
It's so interesting to be reading a piece that is so devoted in response to Slef, Miss Slef. So, devoted to a kind of, forgive me for this phrase, but a utopian kind of pragmatism that leads to valuing unknowability. That's hard -

LAYNIE BROWNE:
That it takes everything we know to get to the willingness to unknow.

JOAN RETALLACK:
(CHUCKLES) Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, for me, not knowing is all over all the time. That's why I started using the phrase geometries of attention because there's just so much going on that will always be unknowable, unknown - unnoticed, actually. If there isn't a way of isolating some values that lead you to what you think is essential to be noticed if there is going to be a healthy way of living together among ourselves, etc. But also I realized I never did directly say anything about your question that featured official thought or...

AL FILREIS:
I thought it was a great response, but please say more.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Well, I just wanted to put a word in for Adorno because his wonderful essay, which is titled 'The Essay as Form' is entirely about the necessity to counter official thought. And he says, and I actually quoted it somewhere, and I think on the edges of the chosen pages - it wasn't in there. But that the innermost character of the essay is heresy. It must be heresy. And the heresy must be directed at official thought. So, in that, he's really bringing together all of the various kinds of official thought we have, from religions to oligarchies and so on.

AL FILREIS:
A little above that, you refer to actually a specific essay, Waldrop's essay, but this could be a set of general essays. "Despite all the precautions against it, this essay does in fact turn out to be a kind of utopian enactment—a playful movement through the safety zone the essay genre provides, constructing something instructive out of the inability to make decisions," which is Montaigne, "or to conclude (like Adorno)," the inability to conclude, "or to make a systematic whole out of the notes (like Wittgenstein) while rearranging the residue of history in an unmistakably contemporary manner (like Stein and Cage)." You've done a lot of summarizing there brilliantly. But the thing that's so amazing is this idea of constructing something instructive out of the inability to decide. That's what an essay should do.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Which means that you always are not getting anywhere in certain ways. I think of all essay as being essentially conversational, whether you've got the explicit form of the conversation or not. And I think the really important goal of the essay is to have shifted a few things in that conversation so that you have new territory to explore, new possibilities, not that you've solved any of the problems.

AL FILREIS:
erica, no doubt you've taught this. So, you know, you quoted Dewey earlier, I mentioned the learner-centered learning, this is a meta-essay for learning and teaching. Can you just say a little bit about why it works to be taught and how people respond to it, knowing that it's actually talking to them about how they can write and compose and live? You would think that would go over pretty well, but what's it like?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
(CHUCKLES) I wanna read a sentence that I think will help us to speak to that, that is also perhaps what Joan was referring to before when mentioning Adorno, and it's at the bottom of 56. "The essayist, by virtue of peculiar means, may project new geometries of attention, oblique vectors ricocheting between authoritative generic poles, describing unforeseen patterns. Writer and reader wander in lush untranslatability, surveying new territory as they go." And that's a moment that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. But -

AL FILREIS:
Writer, reader, teacher, student?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
All of it, yeah. And when I've taught this essay with undergraduate students, that tends to actually be a strange aha moment, largely because I think that a lot of what's happening in this essay as a reader, writer, teacher is meta, so it's enacting what it's talking about, right? So when I'm working on this text with students, we might spend an entire class session on those two sentences because there's so much there, but there's also a way in which it's countering everything that students have learned before college.

AL FILREIS:
Can you read it again?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
Yeah. "The essayist, by virtue of peculiar means, may project new geometries of attention, oblique vectors ricocheting between authoritative generic poles, describing unforeseen patterns. Writer and reader wander in lush untranslatability, surveying new territory as they go." And this is a sentence that's coming just after a bit on the swerve. So something that I talk a lot about with students, which is language that I think I've gotten from this book and from Joan, is the idea of... of the essay as absolutely needing to have something at stake that's driving it. And what that often means for students is that they don't know where they're going, right? They have this thing that they care a lot about that they want to explore. But figuring out how to do that exploration in a way that's quite serious and playful - to kind of borrow language that you were using before, Joan - you know, the how of actually learning to enact that is really, really hard. And it's certainly the polar opposite from anything like a five-paragraph essay type thing.

AL FILREIS:
To be sure. And the version of a class session that is like the five-paragraph essay is exactly equivalent to the formulaic language that is going to subvert any effort to move through those lush spaces that you described. So the course, the class, must be as lush and wandery. So earlier you said one of the reasons we admire what Joan Retallack is doing here is that it always, Joan's writing always does what it is saying. It doesn't exempt itself from the doing because that would be unethical. That would be wrong. So, this is an essay that does -

JOAN RETALLACK:
And wouldn't be fun.

AL FILREIS:
And wouldn't be fun, and wouldn't have been so hard for Slef to go all the way with it. Slef has to resist. Laynie, what are you thinking? I'm glad (CROSSTALK).

JOAN RETALLACK:
I have to say something.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Please.

JOAN RETALLACK:
This conversation is so much fun. I'm enjoying you so much.

AL FILREIS:
Let's keep going. This is really, I hope that this 'Poem Talk,' which is an unusual one 'cause we're dealing with an essay and we're dealing with big ideas. We are dealing with anesthetics here. Absolutely, it goes along with 'Poem Talks,' but it's a chance for us to be with someone who's written this quite a while ago and really get it. I mean, I think this could be instructive. And, by the way, speaking of the doing what we're saying, as Joan pointed out, this conversation itself has to be wandering around in those lush transitional spaces, just as it has been. So, I say things like 'Laynie, what are you thinking?' (LAUGHTER) I don't think I've asked a question yet.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
I'm thinking how your comment about your favorite way of thinking is being in conversation is so anthemic to exactly what we're doing. And I also just wanna hang out a little longer in this magnificent sentence, "Writer and reader wander in lush untranslatability, surveying new territory as they go," because I think it's so illustrative of what we're talking about. We can even go further. It's like we set out on a path through the woods and we just took a few steps. I'm like, but wait, let's keep going into that sentence. So, I mean, the first part is the writer and the reader are both implicated in the process. It's not the writer saying, let me tell you something so reader, you can learn. It's the collaborative creation of meaning and the writer and the reader are both implicated. And then wander.

That's open in lush untranslatability so that juxtaposition, untranslatability would be conventionally thought of oh problem, oh obstacle but no, it's the opposite. It's lush, that is the capacious space where we can wander in the productive unknowing and lossness. Lush, untranslatability, unknowability is lush. It's a place to hang out and explore.

AL FILREIS:
And it's not arid and it's not,

LAYNIE BROWNE:
No, it's not a desert.

AL FILREIS:
The kind of desert of high, high theory. Lush, (CROSSTALK).

LAYNIE BROWNE:
It's back to that nourishing, sustaining serious play, pleasurable like in other words there is sustenance in the untranslatable. It's not wilderness or it's wild but there's a lot of vividness there.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
And the word surveying is totally fascinating too because surveying is different than noticing. And so I'm imagining the act of surveying to kind of be taking in the lushness and figuring out what's actually there that one is noticing in that moment.

AL FILREIS:
Well, I keep thinking about Quinta Slef wanting, for the best of reasons, wanting a chance. This is the bottom of 22, a chance of charting some kind of predictable trajectory, you know? I mean, that's a reasonable position and then JR says, and this is, you're being pretty tough here. There's a bit of finger-wagging at the sciences, that's the probabilistic approach of the sciences. I think it's just what we have to relinquish in the arts, that illusion of predictable trajectories. Think of how narrow a trajectory must be in order for it to remain predictable and here's my favorite part. An obsession with the predictable is what leads people to confuse ethics with censorship in relation to the arts.

JOAN RETALLACK:
An ethos is something that each of us has to compose for ourselves. I mean, in conversation with the culture that we're in and with the things that we value and so on, being told what you must do for reasons that you may not agree with but must comply with has nothing to do with ethics. It has to do with rules given by someone who has too much power and it's problematic. I think they're at opposite ends of not even the same spectrum actually, they have nothing to do with each other.

AL FILREIS:
And in writing this translates into the opposite of a predictable trajectory must be a dubious prototype of a difficult process, that is the alternative. OK, so what we're going to do, we could talk forever about this, in fact, we should, I think but we might run out of tape and we might run out of listeners and viewers. So,

JOAN RETALLACK:
That's true. May I just actually interject one thing?

AL FILREIS:
Oh, please.

JOAN RETALLACK:
I would not be so hard on the sciences now and I was actually surprised by that.

AL FILREIS:
To see that, yeah.

JOAN RETALLACK:
So I, you know.

AL FILREIS:
Well, I think this is the dialogue with Quinta Slef that you're working out so everybody has to overstate a little in order to keep the dialogue going.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Oh, I don't want to be taken off the hook. I think,

AL FILREIS:
OK.

JOAN RETALLACK:
That was not, that's not something I stand by.

AL FILREIS:
Let the records show. Well, what we're going to do now is offer final thoughts. It doesn't have to be summarizing in fact that would be wrong, I think, for this conversation. Just another point, passage, idea, thought that we didn't say yet.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Just to point to a tiny part of the dialogue that I really love on page 26, Quinta Slef says, let's return to poetics and JR says, when did we leave? And I find this such a useful reminder of this kind of seamlessness and simultaneity of poetry and also this sentence is so important. A poetics can only take you so far without an H.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you, Laynie, that was perfect. erica, final thought.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
Yeah, I wanted to draw attention to the exchange between Slef and Retallack just above what we were talking about before with censorship in relation to the arts. So the moment that feels important to kind of say out loud is to launch our hopes into the unknown, the future by engaging positively with otherness and unintelligible. Like that seems to just really in quite a beautiful way say something that we've been talking about as far as the wager of the essay and you know, the essay is an act of figuring things out and also an act of serious conversation.

AL FILREIS:
Wonderful, thank you. Joan, do you have a final thought?

JOAN RETALLACK:
Well, I have some thoughts but I would rather this end with,

AL FILREIS:
Non-final thoughts.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Your thoughts?

AL FILREIS:
OK, fair enough. You are really a guru because that is the first time anybody has ever done that. You know, that's great. That's totally in line with your mode. Thank you. Well OK, I'll get a final thought. So I had in my head. The sound of Joan Retallack, it's in pen sound. It's some recorder or another reading Stein on composition, I believe it must have been at an event at the writer's house at some point. I think it might have been, I arranged a nine poets write themselves through another poet and you chose Stein. I may be wrong about the occasion, but anyway, the audio is in pen sound and I also teach that. I have excerpted that and teach that when I teach Stein. So I have your reading in my ear of that Stein and it is like in the blood, you know, it is just inside my ear. It's an earworm in the best sense. Hearing you read it since the passage I asked you to read at the beginning included reading, it's like a happy anti-traumatic non-stress order to hear it again and I just want to read it back into the record in my voice which is definitely not your voice because it reminds me of, I've been reading a lot of people writing in the 60s, counterculture, non-famous people writing letters, talking to people, recording their voices and this Steien sound sort of sounds like what people were saying later at a point when they wanted to press the reset button on what life is and that's what I hear in here.

The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing. They are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. That is so, you see countercultural is an understatement and I just wanted to honor the fact that that idea is associated with you and this work, this particular work that we chose to talk about today. Well, I forgot to warn you guys. We like to end poem talk with a minute or two of gathering Paradise which is a chance for us to just mention a book, a poet, a film, a piece of music, something that we have been reading or taking in that we want to recommend to other people. And I did forget to remind you so I wonder who's got one. Laynie remembers always.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
I'm really excited. There's a new book by Renee Gladman from Wave Books that has both writing and drawing, it's called Plans for Sentences and I have just one sentence I want to read which really connects to this conversation which is not too surprising. She writes, “These sentences will ache a massive threading of forms and will not know knowing.”

AL FILREIS:
I love that. Would you read that again?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Can you get it quickly?

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Yes. “These sentences will ache a massive threading of forms and will not know knowing.”

AL FILREIS:
Lovely. erica, do you have a gathering paradise?

ERICA KAUFMAN:
I do. I have fallen in love with this book that I learned about the last time I was in Philadelphia by your colleague Ahmad Al Mallah and the book is called Bitter English which is just an extraordinary book of poetry that thinks about language and translatability in very serious and really powerful ways.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. Bitter English, Ahmad Al Mallah. Joan, do you have a recommendation?

JOAN RETALLACK:
Yeah, I do. It's a book by Miranda Mehlis whom I think a lot of us here know and it's called Demystification and it's out from solid objects press and it's a composition of her writing and the writing of others, particularly aphorisms with a lot of space in between them and the way she chooses to put things together by other people don't have any sort of immediate logic to them and I love that. I am actually feeling, I have it right now on my bedside table and I often wake up at around three, 3 a.m and my mind is just going too fast and I've been reading that, it slows me down. It actually draws me into a space that is definitely not prefigured or any of the things that we were talking about.

AL FILREIS:
Not formulaic.

JOAN RETALLACK:
Not formulaic. So and I'm amazed, it's like nothing that she's done before. It's out of the blue.

AL FILREIS:
Well, we have not had enough recommendations for what to do in your sleepless on poem talk. Seriously, and I guess that 50% of our audience is probably getting up at 3 am and thinking about a lot of things because we're thinking too much. My gathering paradise is this book which is a bit of a puff self-promotion because I'm the co-editor, but whatever, I don't usually do this. The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems edited with our pal Anna Strong Safford and there are 50 essays and one of them is an essay by erica kaufman and it's about Joan Retallack and it's about a piece that we talk about in ModPo a lot, “Not a Cage,” and it's wonderful. It's a wonderful piece. You're getting nervous just my mentioning it but I just want to I want to quote just a little bit of it, OK? Of course erica is talking about this, what we do when we read this poem, “Not a Cage,” we push ourselves to try to make our own paths from line to line as our eyes notice enjambment closely and then what is at stake? It's the discovery of new kinds of sense-making. One might describe this experience as making live and conscious history in common. The idea that content is alive and transient and conscious history becomes something to be made. That's so aligns with what we've been talking about today. 

Well, that's all the composing one's way through necessary uncertainty, we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and the Poetry Foundation poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guest, Laynie Browne for coming all this way up to the Hudson Valley. erica kaufman, thank you for walking a few feet from your office for joining us and Joan Retallack, it is such a pleasure in all senses to see you again and to have you in conversation and to Poem Talk’s directors and engineers today who came all the way from Philly as well, lugging a lot of equipment. Zach Carduner doing video and Chris Martin doing audio and a shout out to the wonderful, talented audio, graphically brilliant, technically superb Chris Funkhouser who was hanging around with us today who's also a delight to see. And the Poem Talk's editor, the same Zach Carduner and a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Light for their very generous support of Poem Talk. Next time on Poem Talk, we'll be back at the Writers House in Philly where I'll be convening Carlos Dossena, Dag Wupchet and Hamid Arvos to talk about a much already discussed poem written by a then 20-year-old Harvard student, John Ashbery. The poem is “Some Trees.” This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us next month for that or another episode of Poem Talk.