According to his WikiPedia page: George Quasha is an American poet from Barrytown, New York in the United States. On top of poems, he also explores the intricacies of language through visual, aural, and kinesthetic mediums of media. More popular, however, is his art. In particular, the page notes a sculpture he created (one of many), his Axial series of works (including drawings, drumming, and poems), as well as a video art installation he did called Speaking Portraits.

He has also done some other endeavors. For example, there are his artistic collaborations, his linguistic endeavors on preverbs, and the publishing house he co-runs with his wife Susan, Barrytown/Station Hall Press. Additionally, according to Symposium of the Whole, he has been an editor/co-editor on many poetics and ethnopoetics-based journals and magazines, as well as authored many works of his own.

The section of this work within Symposium of the Whole is broken into three parts: Part I: Frame (p. 462), Part II: Object at a Distance (pp. 462-72), and Part III: A Further Part (pp. 472-4).

This section of the reading begins with Quasha quoting various authors, critics, and notable literary figures in their respected spaces talking about how perceiving something (i.e., a certain concept or person) in a certain way changes the thing being perceived. He notes this and applauds that we can analyze ourselves in this way. He states the following, well-said quote: “The conversation between investigator and investigated is not a means to an end or a necessary evil, but the Object itself in the process of projection.” (p. 462, italics added to replace quotation mark collision in formatting).

Ultimately, Quasha argue, that as science is the act of us studying ourselves (through our perception and observation of it), and this practice has a long history as a dialogical process, the study of poetics, too, must become a dialogical process of studying not only the writing of poetry, but also the perception and conceptualization of said poetry by poets, critics, and readers who engage with this scientific and linguistic process.

This section of the reading begins by rejecting the dichotomy of oral vs. written work, stating that this is a false, socially constructed one that figures such as Blake and Heidegger dismantled. He (Quasha) states we are now at a period of time again where we can choose to change from this dichotomy, and he proposes we spend more time in the middle of these two ideas, observing the intersection between written and oral work. He argues that language is currently in the process of aligning and we can tell because we are in this moment of change: “ The issue, I gather from the evidence of a new or, rather, emergent language), is not the choice of oral or written modalities, but the problematic of alignment within language itself. And this problematic is rendered visible and audible in the event of poetic transformation in our time.” (p. 462)

The history of Western poetry, according to Quasha, only begins this development of Oral vs. Written work very recently. He uses historical evidence, recent academic work, recent publications and transcriptions, as well as the self-identification of poets to prove this claim. On page 463, we receive the goal of this work: “My approach here is to take the poets’ discussion as primary to the event of what I will call reoralization and further textualization and to view it within the context of a renewed meaning for the dialogical.”

The issue with traditional criticism is that it does not deal with a fundamental aspect of poetry, the act of creating itself and being language in motion. Traditional criticism only focuses on the concepts and ideas that a poetry introduces in a line-by-line analysis of the literal or perceived metaphorical words and meanings of said words. It does not deal with the emotion or the performance aspect or the gift of creation itself which poetry has. To deal with this, Quasha and the poet Charles Stein came up with a new method of criticism, DiaLogos (Dialogical Criticism) (p. 463).

Citing Olsen, Heidegger, and Barfield, Quasha calls for a return to this middle ground, truly the rejection of this false dichotomy rather than the both-sidesing that this term usually implies, in order to satisfy the transformation that the English language is currenty (as of the time of writing) undergoing, which poetry is the forefront of (p. 464)

In this part of Quasha's text, he self-quotes “autoskreelik” (“writing about writing about what you're writing about”), in which he tries to get to the bottom of the purpose of criticism, i.e. self-awareness.He brings up John Cage's experimentation with poetry as “musically structured language” and an openness for “uncertainty” in discourse. He talks of both clarity that comes with writing a lot and finding usefulness in uncertainty from “listening to one’s own speech as guide to the sayable.” (472) He emphasizes how listening to oneself causes discourse to change again and again and again, it has a self-renewing quality to it. Basically, no form of interpretation should be fixed, it does not need to always make sense. The goal of “reoralization” is to “free reader-listener from the anxiety of right interpretation.” (472) This is interesting because I could not make sense of half of the thing Quasha was trying to say in this essay.

He discusses the implications of “tuning” in to alignment or psychic adjustment to “enter the work” - whether or not done orally or through the page. These are the themes he mentions (472-3):

• self-awareness (auto-exegesis/ta wit)
• uncertainty as practice (Negative Capability)
• altered states of discourse (Parapoetics)
• the difficulty of the text (uninterpretable complexity)
• processual and open alignment (“ resonance’’/“ tuning” )
• reoralization/further textualization (DiaLogos)

Moreover, he wants to stay in the betweenness with poetics (oral and written) and dialogical discourse, without settling on a side - thus he brings up “parapoetics.” It creates a sense of openness for the unknown and uncertain. (473) His final words are important:

What we are experiencing, then, is not only the reoralization of poetry but of poetics and of discourse in general, the bringing out, as it were, of the logos in theologies. And their further textualization, because the principal way we know of these things is through texts. When the “ talkers” — Antin or Fuller or Kamin, et al.— are going about their talking, it is clear that they are weaving text, that their experience as makers of texts fundamentally conditions the oral emergence. So that, again, it is not a matter of oral vs. written but of the way their continuous remarriage creates discourse and takes it beyond itself…. (473-4)