Weeks 9–10: Caroline Bergvall's "Meddle English" (2011)

Our next author is Caroline Bergvall, and as you can tell from how I've listed her on the schedule ("France/Norway/England") it's not exactly easy to pin her down to one country. Born in Germany in 1962 to parents of French and Norwegian ancestry, Bergvall would travel extensively throughout her life (living in Geneva, Paris, Oslo and New York) before settling in London. This peripatetic lifestyle  has played an important role in the development of Bergvall's poetics and her approach towards language as a whole — language is first and foremost a constructed thing, and a living construct at that, ripe for deconstruction, contradiction, reconfiguration and rediscovery. Specifically, in Bergvall's hands, the English language is a most malleable medium, which is brought into contact with its own roots (both Middle English and the Latinate and Germanic tongues that helped shape it), yielding spectacular results. Admittedly, this might seem a little daunting at first, but luckily Bergvall spells out many of her ideas regarding language in the talk "Middling English," which begins the collection.

One other idea to bear in mind is Bergvall's multidisciplinary approach to poetry. She bills herself as both a poet and a text-based artist, and the spirit of live performance, as well as a responsiveness to texts of various media (cf. "Untitled" [53] and "Fuses" [55], which respond to song and film, respectively) permeate her writings.  Keep this visual/aural influence in mind as you read through Meddle English, and certainly take advantage of the many recordings — of Bergvall reading her work, along with several interviews — that we're able to offer on PennSound (there's a link to Bergvall's author page below).

Unlike the rest of the books we'll be reading this term, Meddle English is not a standalone volume of poetry, but rather a collection of Bergvall's "new and selected"work; however, unlike the venerable poet with a long career publishing a volume of "greatest hits," Meddle English, which mines only three previously-published books, essentially serves as a concentration of the various aesthetic threads running through Bergvall's writing, making her unique perspective even clearer to readers.

Here's our reading schedule for Meddle English:

Thurs., October 23: "Heaps" through "Shorter Chaucer Tales" (3-52) + "Via: 48 Dante Variations" (available here, starts on pg. 55)
Tues., October 28: "Untitled" to "Goan Atom (Doll)" (53-122)
Thurs., October 30:  "Untitled" to "Cat in the Throat" (123-159)

And here are some supplemental links for our time with Bergvall:

• Bergvall's PennSound author page — hosts a great many recordings of readings and interviews with the poet from 2000 to the present.
• Bergvall's page at the Electronic Poetry Center 
• Bergvall's personal website
• a 2010 interview with Bergvall that we published at Jacket2 
• Sina Queyras on Bergvall at the Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet
• controversial excerpts from "Drift" published in Poetry — these led to many complaints from more traditionalist readers of the venerable journal about what constitutes poetry