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| image retrieved from events.stanford.edu |
We first discussed Dr.
Javadizadeh’s lecture at the Stanford Center for Poetics, which describes
itself as “a home for research in poetics across periods, languages, and
methods.” His talk, which took place on April 23rd, was titled "Making
Contact: Jack Spicer and Phatic Poetics." Dr. Javadizadeh borrows the
concept of “phatic language” from the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, a
concept which Dr. Javadizadeh describes as a variety of language in which
“you’re not communicating, so much as you’re calling attention to the channel along
which you are about to be communicating.” Some examples might include small
talk (“When you see someone, you say, ‘hey, how you doing?’ You're not really
asking them how they're doing”), or stepping up to a microphone and saying ‘Is
this thing on?’”
Although phatic communication was
not an idea that Jakobson associated with poetry, Dr. Javadizadeh stated that
he has a “kind of perverse, but counterintuitive, maybe, idea” that the phatic
function of language is an important facet of poetry, and he has tried to “give
different versions of it using different poets as examples.” Dr. Javadizadeh
felt it would be interesting to use the poet Jack Spicer at Stanford in part because
he was a Bay Area poet, but also because he was himself “quite interested in linguistics”
and had some “bizarre ideas about poetry” (although Dr. Javadizadeh noted that
it’s hard to know quite how seriously to take everything Spicer wrote about
poetry).
“Spicer came to think,” said Dr.
Javadizadeh, “that, poetry was, not something that came from inside of him, but
that it was something that came from the outside, sort of through him, that
poetry was dictated to him. Sometimes he described it as Martians using him to
create poetry… Sometimes he compared poets to radios that receive
transmissions.”
Dr. Javadizadeh went on to state
that another reason he felt Spicer and the phatic function of language would be
interesting to talk about in the Bay Area was that it provides “a kind of
answer to what it is that we might object to--without knowing why we're
objecting to it--when the topic of AI-generated poetry comes up.”
“I'm willing to stipulate,” said
Dr. Javadizadeh, “that an AI could produce a better poem than what I've seen so
far, but I think I still wouldn't care very much about it,” because the phatic
function would be missing—in other words, the sense that “somebody’s on the
other end of the line.”
Therefore, Dr. Javadizadeh chose
“Making Contact” as a title for this talk: “The idea that what poetry might be
making is not the artifact that is the poem, but the contact itself--that is,
the connection between the poet and the reader as the real thing that's being
made by poetry--is an interesting idea to me.”
In addition to his talk on Jack
Spicer, Dr. Javadizadeh also participated in a so-called “sushi salon” (a
lunchtime talk) with Stanford students taking part in that university’s
Structured Liberal Education program. Dr. Javadizadeh was in conversation with
Dr. Elias Kleinbock, who, inspired in part by Dr. Javadizadeh’s podcast, Close
Readings, chose to center their talk around one poem—in this case, Solmaz
Sharif’s “The Master’s House.”
Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he had
wanted to choose something contemporary, and that Sharif is one of his favorite
contemporary poets (you can read his review of Sharif’s collection Customs
in The
New York Review of Books). In addition, with the talk taking place in
the early days of the American and Israeli bombing of Iran, Dr. Javadizadeh
felt the poem would provide a way to “bring some attention to Iran in ways that
are not what people were typically hearing or reading about in the early stages
of this war, at the time.”
The poem’s title quotes a famous
line from Audre Lorde (“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house”).
“So what,” said Dr. Javadizadeh,
“does Sharif mean by ‘the master’s house’ here? Maybe the United States, or
maybe it’s English—as a language, an academic discipline, a poetic tradition…
There’s this very touching moment at the end of the poem where, she seems to be
sharing a memory about her father, who had a shotgun held to his chest by a
Texan.”
Sharif writes:
To recall the Texan that held
the shotgun to your father’s chest, sending him falling backward, pleading, and
the words came to him in Farsi
To be jealous of this, his most
desperate language
To lament the fact of your
lamentations in English, English being your first defeat
Dr. Javadizadeh discussed those
lines in length at Stanford, analyzing how, “for people who are in any measure
bilingual or polylingual, there might come the question, alright, if you’re
suddenly in a desperate situation… what language comes to your lips? And for
Sharif’s father, it’s Farsi, or Persian. But for Sharif, clearly it’s English.”
According to Dr. Javadizadeh, “In a
sort of typical kind of immigrant narrative,” Sharif’s default use of English
might feel like assimilation or achievement, but in her poem she describes it
as a defeat, as if “English has mastered her,” or she has, “in some sense, been
colonized by it. And she can’t help but speak it.”
Dr. Javadizadeh described this as
“a position that I identify pretty strongly with, as somebody whose first
language was Persian, but I’ve made my whole life out of English.”
Overall, Dr. Javadizadeh noted that
he had a wonderful time and received a warm reception at Stanford. Interested
readers of this blog can read Solmaz Sharif’s “The Master’s House” in full on
the Poetry
Foundation’s website, and you can hear more reflections on poems from Dr.
Javadizadeh on his podcast.
