Rather belatedly responding to this wonderful Feature, I want to say both
how even more impressively sophisticated and rigorous Waldrop's work seems
to me now and how insightful I find Randolph's description of her
"linguistic displacement" as what "not only made her into a translator, but
gave her a sense of writing as exploration of what happens between. Between
words, sentences, people, cultures."
Keeping this sense of the interval and the interstice in mind as I shifted
between the poems and the prose-poems in her selection enabled their
entrainment in my reading, which was all the richer and more resonant thanks
to Randolph's key insight. It also pulled Waldrop's Jabes translations in
the wake of these entrained poems and prose-poems so that, for all the
fragmented--slippaged--terrain of her "gap gardening," Waldrop's poetics
hung together as a whole for me--the way her "boxes" do as crackpots (if I
can put it like that!).
It made me wonder, too, about her relationship to surrealism as either de
facto or deliberate--or a mixture thereof--and maybe Randolph could say
something about this(?). I'd just been reading, coincidentally, a wonderful
interview with Mary Ann Caws ("We Haven't Left the Body") in the September
issue of _Mosaic_ (go to
http://www.umanitoba.ca/publications/mosaic/news/index.shtml and click on
volume 34.3), where she talks quite a bit about her book _The Surrealist
Look: An Erotics of Encounter_ in terms of Breton and Magritte specifically,
but also in the course of elaborating on her long relationship with
surrealism as of a piece with her work as a translator and her friendships
with such different poets as Rene Char and Ian Hamilton Finlay. (Caws says
something about Finlay's garden relative to his agoraphobia as informing his
philosophical and political stance toward the French Revolution which struck
me as quite interesting.) So much of what she has to say in this interview
about surrealism's way of looking and listening, of attending to parts of
the body as relational to one another (often disjunctively), and above all
its bringing the notions of _delay_ and _slippage_, the one temporal and the
other spatial, into dynamic play really resonated for me with what Waldrop
seems to be doing in her verbal mining of memory and absence in those cracks
through which sense often falls, as do the senses. There is a pleated
quality to her poems' organization that also lends them a fractaled air of
ideas held in manifold motion--and Waldrop's is very much a poetry of ideas,
I'd say.
I assume that Waldrop is familiar with Mary Ann Caws as at least the editor
of Cornell's diaries, letters, and source files (again, maybe Randolph can
tell us--?), but it would be interesting to know how much (if any)
acquaintance she has with Caws's translations and/or theoretical writings on
surrealism--not to mention how (or even if) Waldrop sees her own work as
surrealist.
Thanks again, Randolph, for a very stimulating Feature!
Candice
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