John Retallack's, Not a Cage. What's the setup here? Max? >> She's clearing off her bookshelf. She's moving or something. There's some books she needs to get rid of. >> I don't think we know. She's just making room for new books. She's culling her library. >> There's a little stack that she looking at and says, I'm going to try to write a poem based on some of the language that I find in here. >> Kristen, what language? >> It's, I believe the first and last line of the books. >> Mm-hm, or magazines or journals. >> And magazines. >> What usually happens, Anna, have you ever witnessed the culling of a personal library, people throwing books out? If not, we'll pass along. >> Yeah. >> You have? >> Yeah. >> What goes on there? >> You're going to have to go through, and you think like, you know, I haven't read that and- >> And I'm never going to. >> I'm never going to read it again. Maybe, I'll save this for my little cousin or something like that. Maybe you put that away or there's just stuff that you know you will just never read again. So you put it in a box and you put it away. >> Emily, what is our relationship to our books? Those of us who are readers. >> You love them. They're sort of memorial devices that we have to remind us of experiences that we remember. >> And you've given them away. You have given them away, sold them. Okay so what's the feeling that's being implicitly conjured here, Amarise? >> But these are also books that failed to capture her attention, so her relationship to them was different. >> Seemingly. We can tell by the language that they seem to be sort of obscure texts in a way, so- >> They are really books that she doesn't need. >> Yeah. >> They're not the kind of book Emily was describing, that she's read it a million times and it's time to get rid of it. As you know from the poem talk discussion, I'm one of those who thinks that it's important to know what the books are because I think of Joan Retallack and her place in the history of poetry and I think well, let's see the poet, A.I. is not a poet that she, I the poet, I is not going to be someone that she's going to read or Richard Howard is not a poet that she's going to be interested in. In a way, she's saying what she doesn't like. Why call this not a cage, Allie? Why not a cage? >> That's a reference to John Cage. >> It's a reference to John Cage, and Joan Retallack is Cagian, knew Cage, studied with Cage, cares about, and is Cagian in her mode. As well as McClovian, she's also McClovian. But what else does it refer? Not a cage would mean what in terms of John Cage? >> I mean this was mentioned in the poem talk. >> Yeah. >> That this is very similar to Cage but it's not actually one. Or if you take it in a more literal sense, not a cage, you're not trapped, there is a certain freedom that's kind of- >> You're not trapped by the procedure because? >> Because it leaves room. >> What does it leave room for, Amarise? >> I interpreted Not a Cage, literally, to mean that each of these sentences, being the first and last of books that she didn't want to get ensnared in, by using them in this poem, she's opening them up to her own means. They do have a usefulness for her in composition. >> She's liberated from having to read these awful books or books that she doesn't want to read. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And more literally, in the poem, what is not a cage? >> The phrase? >> Not a building this Earth, not a cage. >> It's a line from poems, I believe by Richard Howard. What do we do with this? What's good about it? What's the point? >> I don't know if this is the point, I wouldn't say that this is the point. But I just kind of thought, just a couple of minutes ago, for the first time, that when you're getting rid of books, if you ever pass someone who has just kind of put their books out on the street, and people come and kind of inspect them, and in a way, it's like one man's trash is another's treasure. And by making this a poem, she's offering bits of this to everyone who might want it, which is- >> So she's got an impulse to save something from it. An impulse to archive. An impulse toward not letting it go all the way. Kristen, this has a Cagian seriousness, an honesty, and holistic sensibility about it, doesn't it? >> It does. >> It's not a slap-your-knee funny poem. >> No, I mean even though she's choosing, she has a constraint on it in that she's only using the first and last lines of the books. It's not meant to be jokey that she says see foot 1957, also watermark 1906, chapter 8, chapter 13. That's not supposed to be funny. >> That's a documentary impulse. She's gotta get it down. >> Mm-hm. >> Just the way it was. This is very different in its tone from the Chapter 9.3 poets who are openly uncreative, and open as Kenneth Goldsmith would say, he's stealing stuff. He's stealing phrases. He's sampling. What does sampling mean? This is an easy question, but it's worth asking. Dave, what is sampling? >> As far as music goes? >> Yeah. >> It's when you take a short section of a song or a melody and repeat it over and over again. >> Or literally, in audio technology terms, what do you do when you sample? >> You lift it from one song and put it into another one. >> You steal it. You steal it, it doesn't belong, because I'm going to take it, and I'm going to rework it and make it my own. That's the sensibility where we're headed with the conceptual poets and the unoriginal poets. This has a cousin relationship to that. This takes the holistic sensibility and honesty and seriousness of the Cageian, of the somewhat utopian Cagian mode. In this case, document, preserve, that I almost want to say Whitmanian impulse to get it all down but to take it systematically and impersonally. Then there's a cousin relationship between that and the high hilarity of the uncreative writing of the Flarf people and of the Conceptualists. When we think about this poem now in the Internet age, we think about as Danny Snelson in the poem talk said, we think about this as giving us the possibility to find out what's out there, to find out where these books are. Jena Osman who's a Chapter 9.2 poet, who's dropping leaflets we discussed is a member of that poem talk crew, and what's her position, distinct from Danny Snelson's position? Do you remember what she says? She's not happy about what Danny says. >> She's against bringing in those outside references. She'd rather read it as words on a page divorced from the biographical context. >> She's more purely Cagian, so now we have an opportunity, finally, and I don't know how this is going to work out. You'll help me here, we have a chance to say something. Embodied in Jena Osman's concern about more pure Cagianism, we have a Chapter 9.2 sensibility. Embodied in Danny Snelson, who's more of a Chapter 9.3 guy, we have a chance to talk about some distinctions between these two versions of this version of postmodernism. Who wants to give it a try, give it a start? Kristin, I know you can start us off on this. >> I mean it kind of goes along with what you were just saying, that it's the difference between a new critical type of reading, >> A close reading. >> A close reading where you don't take in any outside sources and you just focus on the text. This is taken from outside sources but we're not going to look up what they were. We're just going to read it as a text, versus I'm just going to sample from everyone and it's kind of funny because it's kind of playing a joke on what this is, in a way. >> If this is less of a joke, why? What's it mean? What's the significance, Max? >> If this is less than a joke? >> Yeah, not a cage. This is serious. If it's serious, what is it? Think about cages in the closed concept of doing this. If we could do this across society, the world would be better. >> If we do challenge our ideas of who owns language and those ideas of control, then I think that does, in the Maclovian sense, push us towards some kind of utopian place or society. >> Which would be fabulously ironic in that this utopia is arrived at by discarding, or I guess, it's recycling rather than discarding. Does anybody want to say anything? We've covered the Osmanian side [LAUGH] of this. Somebody want to talk about the other side of it, where we're headed? >> This isn't really the other side, it's kind of just in between them. I guess it includes both of them, but I think it points to the nature of language in general, in that you really can't anchor it. Ultimately, it's always going to be free depending on the time you're reading it and who's reading it. This language originally came from many different books and now it's being taken into the poem. And then depending on when you read it, if you read it in the time or era of 9.2, you might get something different out of it than if you read it in 9.- >> In Google books era. >> Exactly. I think it just emphasizes just the fluidity of making meaning from language. It doesn’t have to be set. >> What was moderate about you just said? It's okay in 9.2 and it's also okay in 9.3. That's a nice moderate statement. Let's wrap up by considering the last line. First of all, do we know that Joan Retallack did this in the order in which she took notes on a yellow legal pad as she was getting rid of her books? That these are delivered in that order, do we know that? One way or the other? >> No. >> We don't. Should we assume that that fabulous last line simply was the last book that she discarded? >> No. Not necessarily. >> I don't think so. She said she made lists of sentences and phrases from beginnings and endings of books, culling a lot so there were many more beginnings and endings on the yellow pads that ultimately, went into the poem. That implies that she did some, at least, excluding. I didn't change words or orders of words within the units, but did decide the length of each. We're getting a hint at what Jackson refers to when he talks about not really knowing what he's doing, but still doing a certain revision on the Stein. Here's the last line, you tell me it's significance, the most obscure things have already been said. What does it actually mean to put something like that in this poem, to find it? First question is what does it mean if you encounter this in a poem in which the writer actually wrote the words? What does it mean when you encounter it as the last line of a poem for which the writer found the line. Either one, the most obscure things have already been said. Perfect for this part of the course. Amarise? >> My first thought is that the incomprehensible has already occurred and been done away with. Here she's combining pieces of text from various text books, it feels like to me, which would be very much ingrained in their specific genre and their system of language. It feels to me like the Bernadette Mayer experiment of inserting the psychology textbook after a piece of your own writing and saying, why are they separated into these two different genres? Why is there journalistic writing. Why is there poetic writing? Combining them in that way, the most obscure things have already been said, in the sense of dividing language into these kind of words. >> Very good. Who wants to take another crack at this? Ana? >> To me, what she's saying is that the most obscure things have already been said means that everything has already been said? Even the most obscure things? Even though it's obscure, it's still been said and you just have to find the language, like nothing new under the sun, everything is already out there. >> All you have to do is just dip into some books, even those you're discarding- >> And there it is. >> There's plenty of obscurity there. Emily, you didn't know I was going to do this but I'm going to give you the final word. >> Boy. >> Give it a shot, the most obscure things have already been said. >> This is a poem of things that have already been said and all of them in their removal from their context are obscure, and it seems just a concluding statement that, this poem, in and of itself, isn't original. The things it consists of isn't original, and maybe that's okay. >> You love books, and the next time, you discard them, because you will have to discard them. You're going to move at some point, get some new books. What will you do to preserve that you owned them? >> To preserve that I owned them? >> Yeah. Don't just get rid of them now that you've read Not a Cage and been through Chapter 9.2. >> Maybe I'll write a poem about it in which the most obscure things have already been said. >> I think that was probably the right answer. >> [LAUGH] >> Thank you so much, Emily.
