Maria Damon, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 13, 2014

Drawing from potter and writer M. C. Richards, who taught at Black Mountain College, Damon takes Richards' statement, "Poets are not the only poets" as a starting point and as the title of her talk. After citing Guy Debord's statement "We must multiply poetic subjects and objects," she notes Debord's surname — as Karl Marx's — designates a marginal zone.

Noting how the creative and creativity have generally been regarded as the realm of the few and the gifted, Damon cites her longtime interest in micropoetries ("especially poetries considered sub-par, that nonetheless fill us with delight") and macropoetries (e.g., "social movements as a poetics...[or] the travel of a particular sound and image across time and space").

Following etymological and "Derridean false etymologies," Damon takes up Allen Ginsberg's signal poem "Howl" and the "animal cry" of the poet-become-wolf crying "who..." This repeated monosyllable opens to related sounds bearing divine echoes (Eliahu...Elohim) that find analogies in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's ecstatic Qawwali Sufi song practice, and, more directly linked to Ginsberg, in Amiri Baraka's poem "Somebody Blew Up America."

Damon speaks to the affinity and fusing of animal and beast in recent poetry, remarking on Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal and Anne Waldman's Manatee / Humanity.

"The micro and the macro oscillate," Damon notes, under consideration of "the raw matierals, the things of poetry...what happens to them after they take their place in poems."

Damon comes to an impasse, saying her paper is ending sooner than she planned. She notes that she wanted to show works from the "street-art practices" of David-Baptiste Charot, and speaks briefly to that work before closing her talk.

Maria Damon returns to the mircrophone for questions from the audience.

Steve Dickison asks "So where else would it [the talk if extended] go?" This kind of inquiry and study, Damon suggests, should be more akin to "mass collaborative projects that involve a lot of pooled knowledge." 

Nathaniel Dorsky objects that "It should be a work on George Oppen." Damon replies that she didn't feel equipped to speak in that direction.

Michael Palmer suggests that ways in which Oppen's poems "don't stress their object nature" but rather their being part of a process, and how he and Louis Zukofsky were "allowing the poem to open toward the non-poetic" could move Oppen's work toward the zone Damon's exploring.

Stephen Vincent tells of a choreographer using the lacunae in the Wikileaks documents as the basis for "filling in" the redacted passages by dancing the blacked-out parts.

Eleni Stecopoulos asks if there's more to say on Nusrat Ali Fateh Khan, and on repetition. Damon brings up an instance of "mechanical...gestural repetition" that brought her to a recognition of the repeated "who" soundings of Ginsberg's poem as "bridges from 'Howl' to 'holy'" that ends his poem. 

Jocelyn Saidenberg introduces the "hymnal-relative" of ancient Greek poetry (e.g., "Dionysus who...") and Greek epigraphs where the object becomes the speaker of the poem (as if it's "the stone speaking to the passerby" on behalf of the silenced mouth of the dead).

Stecopoulos brings up the movement between close-sounding words in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems, coming back to Nusrat and his ecstatic Qawwali soundings. Damon speaks of "taking it to exercises in sound...out of the realm of the semantic." 

Kevin Killian asks for clarification on the ways Damon located the crossing of "creatures of the earth" with humans in liminal spaces. Damon notes how, in ecological study, "It's at those border places where there's the most variety of life."