Notes: AWP Panels

Notes: AWP Panels

I found my notes/fragments from the AWP panels "The Disabled Body Poetic" and "Writing as Translation."  They are far--very far--from being extensive or coherent.

from "THE DISABLED BODY POETIC"

Gregory Fraser

--brother had spina bifida
--"to strike poses on the page"
--poetry's "obsession with the material nature of language"
--"hyper-material"

William Carlos Williams--focuses on the thing of language

FORM: Hugo's choice of villanelle
      meter
      terminal rhyme

--using orderly form (ironically) to encase the representation or voice of disorderly bodies
--playing on expectations of how poems should look and behave

Paul Guest

--to rest on a bag of sand
--"the brain left to believe that something has vanished"
--"the rest of me floating away"
--spinal fluid coming out of the nose

Susannah B. Mintz

--"poems as representations of self experiencing can be though of as happening randomly"
on Fraser--brothers hips are "where his knees should be"
--loving what is wild, even in one's mind
--poetry not redemptive--writing doesn't repair, heal--rather it represents this intensity, this wildness

Jim Ferris

--how is disability useful--for a poet?
--structure of rhythm of body on the poem
--tides, sun, season--rhythmic workings that are ubiquitous ("waxing and waning of the desert")--the pacemaker, metronome
--the novel is always about disability, the breaking of norms (didn't catch the source he quoted)
-- promote a "disability aesthetics"--that isn't apologetic

from "WRITING AS TRANSLATION"

--"the tentacular relationships between all of our cultures" (Hugh Ferrer)
--lyric poetry is a translation ("one doesn't go around walking or humming in meter"--not sure who said this)

Comments

[K]

I attended that session too & my notes were just as cryptic. I just remember being so blown away by Paul Guest. It seemed like everyone was talking about him and that book deal he had just gotten so it was weird to see him in that panel. He seemed uncomfortable at first but when he read the excerpt he became more relaxed. Anyway, I wish I would have had a tape recorder or something.