Johannes adds some interesting points on the topic of poetic tourism.
I added this:
Well, my remarks re: tourism have more to do with one's practices, really. In terms of translation, I'd see Robert Bly as a tourist, that is to say someone who comes for a visit, see the things he reads from [the] perspective [of the obnoxious American tourist].1
[The tourist-translator goes into the foreign with one of those fancy travel guides from Lonely Planet/Fodor's/Frommers and a phrasebook.]
On the other hand, Pierre Joris would be more like "the bacteria carried by the immigrant [and] rejuvenating the traumadrome," someone for whom the act of translation is fundamental in the way it shapes the way he writes.
1 Isn't "obnoxious American tourist" somewhat redundant? I confuse myself.
I added this:
Well, my remarks re: tourism have more to do with one's practices, really. In terms of translation, I'd see Robert Bly as a tourist, that is to say someone who comes for a visit, see the things he reads from [the] perspective [of the obnoxious American tourist].1
[The tourist-translator goes into the foreign with one of those fancy travel guides from Lonely Planet/Fodor's/Frommers and a phrasebook.]
On the other hand, Pierre Joris would be more like "the bacteria carried by the immigrant [and] rejuvenating the traumadrome," someone for whom the act of translation is fundamental in the way it shapes the way he writes.
1 Isn't "obnoxious American tourist" somewhat redundant? I confuse myself.
Comments
What I am getting at here is that perhaps poetry as tourism can be reflected in the exploitation of (new) formalism? Does not the return to poetics of 'classics' remind us of the Dead Poet's Society's fusty, conservative boarding school classroom, right before Robin Williams makes poetry into an adventure? Better still, Francois, it might return us to your conundrum of using the spectrum. Does not a simple glimpse of Oppen's life as piquaresque traveler provide a phenomenal example of the poet, far from being tourist, as truly free. Culture in Oppen's poetry is not an interpolation of a decentralized ideology so much as it is a limit of power never fully reached.
In his "Penobscot", which is named after a Native American tribe, Oppen finds children whose time hearkens beyond classical civilization. "Anti-classical," he labels the situation, elaborating that:
"I think we will not breach the world
these small worlds least
of all with secret names
- unexpected phrases
Penobscot"
The point of the poetry of Oppen then is not to build classical totality, but to create a "breach." Is not Oppen's breach in spite of formalism and the procrustean 'culture' that tourists flock to? Even further, Francois, is your struggle against the formulaic 'spectrum' of your poetry class an Oppenesque 'breach' in and of itself?
Charles Bernstein wrote of Oppen that "Oppen's achievement has little to do with speech or sight, but for speech as sight, site of the social." The importance of Oppen's words lie not in the cultural value of exchange whose apotheosis is touristic lucre, but rather insight into society itself. Bernstein goes on: "Sight in Oppen's work is not a passive looking onto the world but a means of touching that invests the world with particular, site-specific (historical, material) meanings." Again, the passivity of the touristic gaze - a reference to Foucault's panopticon here - is replaced by a much more Lacanian agency. The gaze becomes effective within the Real as object a, filling the void with substance or meaning. Oppen's "orchestration of lacunae," as Bernstein puts it, refers us back to the Oppenesque breach, where he finds clarity, as he himself put it, "in the sense of transparence." Heidegger's "Poetry, Language, and Thought" ought to be mentioned for its emphasis on opening and clearing, both of which are accomplished in Oppen's poetry with his semantic technique of 'hinge' and through the exposing of the symbolic field with the gaze.
Anyway, I gotta go.
Read Pierre Joris' Toward A Nomadic Poetics or the Action Books manifesto.
Or read Johannes' comments in the entry below, or on his blog.