II—
Poet-Novelists

Jean Frémon

Jean Frémon was born in Asnières, outside Paris, in 1946. He has written art criticism, poetry, and fiction. Among his works of poetry are Echéance (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), Répétition (Le Muy: Editions Unes, 1988), Théâtre (Editions Unes, 1989), Silhouettes (Edition Unes, 1991), and Le Singe mendiant (Paris: P.O.L., 1991); his novels include Le Miroir, les alouettes (Paris: Seuil, 1969), L'Origine des légendes (Seuil, 1972), L'Envers (Paris: Maeght, 1978), Le Jardin botanique (P.O.L., 1988), and L'Ile des morts (P.O.L., 1994).

Selected Publications in English:

"Ceremony." Translated by Serge Gavronsky. In Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 86–88.

"Due." Excerpts translated by Serge Gavronsky and Lydia Davis. Série d'écriture , no. 3 (1989): 25–29.

"Withdrawal." Translated by Tom Mandel. Série d'écriture , no. 7 (1993): 23–28.

"Yet Another Story without End," from Le Singe mendiant . Translated by Serge Gavronsky. Lingo 2 (1993): 128–30.

Serge Gavronsky: In reading your book of poems Echéance , a series of thoughts comes to mind concerning the poet's task, the relation between your own work with and on language and the place of the world in your work, the relation between the self and the text—that is, the question of autobiography, its inscription in the text, as well as the impact of modern art on your vision of the world. These preliminary thoughts constitute for me a reading of the complex layers found in your work. For instance, in the opening sentence of the prose poem Echéance , a character appears, a first-person singular whom we shall follow, who is as much a way of seeing as he is a form, as if he were in a painting. He observes without penetrating the painting he sees, which he seems, at times, to be a part of. Thereafter, the painting "opens up," becomes multiple, and on the linguistic level, as well as in the layout of the pages, all sorts of things occur that beckon the reader and hold him or her, as if to say: "Proceed from page to page, from experience to experience; visualize the pages." This would then be a typesetter's painting, the page visualized as a canvas or a stage. Here, undoubtedly, games are being played out, so that on the one hand there's a movement from the exterior to the interior, and on the other there's that passion of yours for enumeration, repetition, cataloging—those same preoccupations that obsess and delight Umberto Eco. One might even consider these rhetorical positions as a kind of contemporary activity, since they derive from a need to define oneself on lists, constructing lists as an affirmation of being but appearing, all the while, to be playing with the idea of the catalog.

Jean Frémon: I think I work in the following manner: First of all, I really get started with a clear idea, at the beginning, in any case. I always have a project in mind that slowly takes shape, little by little, through a series of slight, progressive strokes spread out over many years, let's say five or six. The time it took to write books like Echéance and Le Jardin botanique doesn't only reflect the absence of material time—because I work on them in bits and pieces, on Sundays and during the month of August. Those are material questions, but in

fact I need this time to fabricate a thickness and return to a subject, indistinct at the start, which becomes more precise over time. What interests me is an attitude that might, at the outset, naively be described as poetic or musical or impressionistic, a period during which one must find lots of adjectives . . . That is, a thing touches me—or a word or a tone, a rhythm or a sentence, the beginning of a sentence first encountered, a fragment of a sentence—and then it becomes a matter of expressing it; and then it begins, and then it stops somewhere, like water that flows back. Well, the first contact with the world is like that: one is touched by something that comes from oneself, from the world, from the season or the year, the color of the sky changing—from anything, from a dream, a fleeting concern. All that shapes relations between the world and oneself.

That alone would seem to be enough. What I've described would be enough perhaps to write small texts, very dense ones called poems, but I don't like that; I'm not satisfied with the idea of leaving them that way, as a pure moment, the pure image of a moment, even if it's a powerful moment. I prefer to throw myself back into it, working them over again, taking them up again, carrying them elsewhere, and that's why it takes me up to five years, using bits and pieces of emotions, sentences, small fragments, little things like that. It takes that long to write a multiplicity of fragments, all the while trying to see where they're leading me and organizing them according to all possible parameters of meaning, of music, of rhythm, and then trying to arrange them so that the combination becomes, little by little, the least arbitrary, that is, so that they assume meaning, numerous meanings, aesthetic, rhythmic, or purely narrative—potentially, not necessarily but potentially. So much for contacts with the world! It is there in the first phase, total and immediate because that impression really does come from the world, from oneself-as-the-world. These are the stimuli, the points of departure; then afterward, in the actual fabrication of the book—which specifically has to do with the book and no longer the world—the book becomes a mental construct, a botanical garden, too. These are mental constructs that have nothing

to do with nature; nevertheless, in Le Jardin botanique , real trees grow! Therefore, between the world, the real, unknowable world, and the book, the mental construct acts as a mediator, just as an optical instrument allows one to see things that are either too small or too big to be seen with the naked eye.

SG: Your point of departure seems almost Oriental, though one can also easily associate it with European currents. There seems to be in your description of it a particular sensitivity, a receptiveness to initial moments . . .

JF: Yes, perhaps closer to the Poetic Journals^[*] than to the haiku . . .

SG: Or to the idea of the traveler?

JF: Travelers through seasons and states of being, absolutely. The beginning is absolutely like that, something that I work at a lot, which I like a great deal; a frame of mind I like to find myself in as soon as possible. But I feel that when I write something at that moment, it might be more or less banal, unsatisfactory. In the final analysis the initial jotting doesn't go very far, so that in questioning these fragments, in putting them together, in trying to build something that is readable—for example, in trying to create a rhythm, one can play for a moment with calm, retiring notes, and do it possibly before everybody falls asleep, and then perk things up with cymbals and move on. One can build things that form aggregates, that rise. In my own work, music plays a large role; it influences what I do. As I hear it, the end of Echéance , somewhat like the end of a Beethoven symphony, is marked by hammer blows, rather powerful ones. Whereas the end of Le Jardin botanique is completely different. It's a bit like the conclusion of The Song of the Earth or The Twilight of the Gods , with a very soft retreat. Well, as far as beginnings go, that's about it! In order for things to end like that, someone's got to pass away softly, and that's done by letting go of little sentences and then others, the narrator revealing his state of mind, his sadness at the same time. But that wasn't a conscious goal. The narration was led there by desire,

[*] Japanese texts written especially by women around the year 1000.

an inclination at that moment to imitate the conclusion of a musical piece. So there is indeed an opposition between those two books, even if it's an opposition in form. In fact, that may also bring them closer together. What they have in common is that both model their conclusions on a . . .

SG: Narration? You've defined your approach in ways that remind me not only of the haiku poet but also of the surrealists, who stressed the beginning of the text as a nonmediated affair, as a process of writing words that would, of necessity, bring their own logic into the game. In time you rework your patches of words, finding suggested images, threads of ideas, something that appears and disappears to suit your needs. When you've finished with this piecing together, this process of listening, seeing, imagining, do you reread from beginning to end, or are these stages final? Does the end, in other words, dictate the beginning and then the sequences that follow?

JF: Oh, that's quite simple! There's an initial phase in which fragments fall into place. In general, it rarely happens that I write more than a page at a time, and that means anything from two words to three lines, up to twelve lines, maximum, on a whole page—either one typewritten manuscript page or three handwritten pages, which amount to one typed one. That's the maximum for my average production. I'm able to write one per day, and no more than that, for three weeks. At times I'm able to write for three whole days, and then what I write forms a group, at least some of it does. Some pieces go in one direction, others in another, and then, little by little, they find their way into groups as the work proceeds. I then place them in various folders. It's as simple as that! And then the whole of the work proceeds in this manner.

Eventually, I feel that all the pieces will be grouped, and that usually occurs when I've got an entire month at my disposal, working every day from eight in the morning to eight at night, or sometimes until midnight if necessary, and doing nothing else. I do this once a year, taking up all my drafts and rereading and correcting them. "Wait a minute," I say to myself, "this might go with that!" And it takes me

there, and I place them next to each other, and I pare them down, and I remove the pieces I've cut, which go elsewhere. I cut and paste. I organize, and at the end of the month, in general, I've got a little collection thicker than the preceding year's. After a month I may have thirty pages that have been cut and then a set of pages that has been cut and has yet to be inserted. These pages may then be definitively eliminated or simply left in a corner and retrieved after a year, to be worked in the same way; meanwhile I continue to write bits and pieces as they occur to me. Then the thirty pages that form a group have an existence, a presence, so that I refer back to them mentally, and then small fragments immediately insert themselves within it, already knowing their places. Others do the same, and the next August I start all over again and usually end my month's work with a slightly more precise project, which then attracts other fragments, giving me perhaps fifty pages or so in all, and then I've got an even more precise project, which justifies the fragments and gets them going.

I go on this way for five years, or until I have the amount of material that seems to me necessary, and then I've got a better idea of the book. When I was writing Echéance , I knew it was the rhythm that had launched the project. In the last pages of that book, something similarly worked itself out; the pieces fell right into place. In the case of Le Jardin botanique , the process went on longer, because, well, the paths were more complex. It took longer for things to find their place, not so much in terms of the time for composition but of the time for reading. A longer time was required for the work to take on a certain meaning. Half of it wouldn't have had any meaning, because it would have been too light; it would have seemed to skim the surface. Things have to mix a number of times for them to achieve a certain density. Thus, every year I always ask the same question: "Should I reread everything?" And the answer is always, "Yes, naturally!" So each year I go over everything I've written, my little pile that contains all I've put in there. I work over my notes, I try to

integrate them, and when I finally arrive at something that is nearly finished, I usually reread the whole thing at least two or three times.

Well, I don't just read; I eventually reorder whole blocks, and in the end I insert new material. That can even be seen. Once a project attains a degree of precision, I may have an idea and then it's woven in. There are very visible places in Le Jardin botanique where I said to myself: "Wait a minute . . ." In fact the narrator is a sort of maniac, calculating, taking down measurements. I've got to say that. I've got to show him calculating, measuring, and so as the days pass, I write bits and pieces of sentences in which he calculates—anything—he's ridiculous and amiable at the same time. This is the type of information I slip in wherever it happens to fit between two paragraphs. "Zap!" I slide it in, and then at another time I say to myself, "Wait a minute! Since he's always figuring things out, wouldn't it be amusing to see him going over the measurements of animal genitalia which are . . ." It takes time to constitute this mass, and I've obviously slipped things in throughout the work, and that, practically speaking, signals the end of the novel. The threads have been woven, and if you pull them, the whole thing will fall apart, leaving only the pieces. That's almost a technical gimmick. Something that holds the pieces together because . . . that's exactly the function of "a plant for Mr. Jones" in Hellzapoppin '. Remember that? Every five minutes, somebody walks in and says, "There's a plant for Mr. Jones . . ." That's truly like a Dadaist film, with everything going off every which way, but every five minutes somebody pops in and says, "Paging Mr. Jones . . ."

SG: You've now published ten works, which range from pamphlet-length poems to books of poetry and a novel. There is a Jean Frémon out there with his reputation, his signature. When you write, are you conscious of that Frémon? Of the other rhythms, the other vocabularies, that particular vocabulary you use in your poetry? At the end, for instance, are you able to align the present text with your earlier work? Do you get a particular pleasure or disappointment out of that type of backward glance?

JF: Well, it's quite clear that I could never categorize new works with older ones, but on the other hand, they have a very precise relation with what I've done before, in that I always try, when something is finished and I'm about to start something new, I try systematically, of course, not to transform myself. I am who I am. I do what I can as best I can. But in any case, I make a conscious effort not to write the same book twice. The real difficulty is not to do the same one again once it's finished! One could easily carry it on. On the contrary, I try to distance myself from it, so that what is shared, what you see and what I can see—well, that's in spite of myself, like a given that's mine, it's my way of working, it's my common ground. But then I consciously try to do something different. I don't deny those past elements if you find them in the present work. But they're not there willfully; they're in my mode of being, in my temperament, and complicated by the fact that I am now wholly involved with them.

SG: Has botany played that role?

JF: Come to think of it, I would really like to let go; I could easily write a second volume, but I've got to resist that temptation! Something tells me, "No, you've got to move on to something else!" But still, they do come one after the other, which means that in Le Jardin botanique , chronologically, the oldest section and everything that describes the memories of the character named Clémence—well, the first pile, since we were just talking about those little packets of sheets, of pages, the first thirty pages or perhaps the first forty that went together, and were also scattered a bit everywhere, at least in the first half of the book—for me, this part was both different from and at the same time close to Echéance ; that is, roughly speaking, there's a similar concern with a childhood landscape.

SG: Parents, lights, interiors?

JF: That's it. I was trying to do something different, but I was still closest to the other one! The difference was accentuated by the introduction of a certain number of characters who came from elsewhere and others . . .

SG: And yet, on an associative level, there's a rather amazing relation

between the title Echéance , in which one can almost hear the word chute [as in the Camus novel The Fall ], and the name of your novel's main character, Clémence.

JF: I never thought of that!

SG: It may not be a question of the conceptual force of that name, reminiscent of Candide or of Flaubert's Félicité, but there's an echo at work!

JF: I hadn't thought about that either, and yet, if you will, in the case of Clémence, there's a rather precise model on which he's based. There are few others from that point of view who . . . well, the other characters in Le Jardin botanique are all composites, mixtures of things taken from here and there, more or less invented, whereas Clémence is nearly all himself; he's not at all fused with anyone else. He's about as faithful as he can be to memories that have come back little by little.

SG: Many years ago, in 1968, when I was preparing Poems and Texts , in an interview for that work Yves Bonnefoy told me he liked to introduce a fallow period between each of his poetic works to make sure he didn't repeat himself. In your case, do those interceding months nourish you with impressions or with calmness?

JF: Not really, since I've only got weekends and the month of August in which to work. But I wholly understand Bonnefoy's position. Mine is slightly similar, in the sense that I do not begin a new novel after having finished one. Part of this break is devoted to texts on painters and, from time to time, to smaller pieces—brief texts, poems, things like that, which have been published in booklets and which I hang on to, more or less in view of a possible collection. Then I plunge into them, I change a few things, I work on them a bit. They're for another project that will develop in the future, but it's not urgent, and it can always be done in between two books; and in fifteen years I get a collection of poetry out of it!

Or sometimes I write other things; for instance, last August, as I was near the end of my final reading of Jardin , I wrote a whole little book that really had nothing to do with it, which I've called Théâtre . It's in no way a novel; it's rather a sequence—I don't know—a poem,

perhaps. Let's say it's a set of forty small texts, rather short ones, from three to fifteen lines each, based on a group of individuals who are all in a meditative mood. On the other hand, there's no specifically "theatrical" text but rather an idea concerning a group of actors, and it isn't clear whether or not these actors are actually at work, bodily, vocally, mentally, or even in their imaginations. That's it. A slight work on the side, which as far as I'm concerned has nothing to do with Le Jardin botanique .

SG:Théâtre as a title is intriguing, since on the face of it, one of its essential aspects is the nature of the voice, of the spoken, the way it exists as a nonliterary artifact, as opposed to that other language, the poet's, which is always refashioned, striving for the essential—weekend after weekend, August after August—in which language is purified, its economy increasingly measured to achieve the strongest possible impression.

JF: I didn't carry that idea through in my text, though indeed it's called Théâtre . In fact it's not theater, it's rather a meditative description about characters who are looking for a type of concentration. It contains almost no dialogue.

SG: In your reaching to the outside world, you have not, at least not yet, played on orality. In your texts, Echéance for example, there are snapshots and angles of the sky, of a room; but the human voice . . .

JF: There are spoken passages in Le Jardin botanique !

SG: They seem to exist solely within quotation marks!

JF: Yes, yes! And even when they occur realistically, they are still there within the book; thus, it's not really a question of reality but of a simulacrum. What is "said" is more or less distant, even though it appears in the present. That's the first time I've had this happen, and what's more, it's the first time, in a specific project, that I've tried to be funny, to make the reader laugh.

SG: That's certainly quite rare in your texts!

JF: It was indeed a rarity, and in this instance I wanted to see if I could do it, just in order not to repeat the same thing. I had an urge to try to say something funny and see if . . . well, if it wouldn't be silly or

ridiculous. It was also fun to do. It was a risk I wanted to take, given my understanding of who my readers were.

SG: That must have been one of Flaubert's pleasures in writing Bouvard and Pécuchet !

JF: Absolutely, and I speak of that work, probably because I had recently reread it during the time when I was putting the final touches on Le Jardin . Unquestionably, that played a very important role in it.

SG: It has always fascinated me to note, at least in what's been written in the recent past, how the passion for being is minimalized, whereas in Bouvard , this passion is taken to humorous lengths. It becomes an expression not so much of the protagonists' projects as of Flaubert's own. Well, doesn't that open other fields, including musical ones, since humor has another pattern, another rhythm?

JF: That takes us in another direction! After all, the making of a book seems to me to involve a production situated outside of ourselves. A construction, a project. Of course, the more things you draw from yourself, from the world, the better it is. Both are necessary. If neither exists, nothing is left, but in the end one must arrive at something that is neither oneself nor the world, but the book.

SG: What I've called écriture?

JF: On that particular level, Bouvard and Pécuchet is a marvel, an absolute one!

SG: And that seems to be even truer for us today, since that book was never finished. It remains a project!

JF: It's a perfect illustration of a project.

SG: As a poet, as a reader of paintings at Galerie Lelong, which you codirect, it seems to me these readings have powerfully marked your work. Are you now able to spot changes in taking a long view of what you've written, from the earliest texts to the most recent ones? What, if any, may be the influence of these paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages that surround you and in a way call out to you? Would you also comment on the possible place in your poetry of the poetry of others whom you've read, either in French or in translation?

JF: I think that painters are more important for me than writers, even

though I do read a lot. I like a great many writers, and you can find them in my poetry, that's clear. There are affinities, allusions, homages, little nods in their direction, whatever you like! That's clear. If one is nourished by certain writers, their presence is evident. But contemporary painters . . . I'm very fond of all periods; I look at paintings, I'm interested in them. But contemporary painters have taught me the most, for in modern art there's really nothing that can't be done. Rather than use a brush, you can tear a piece of paper and glue it, and that piece of glued paper takes the place of brush strokes. Or you can cut a piece of wood and put it on a canvas, and it will be a sign. You can make a painting without paint, using everything, all kinds of objects and the very stuff of the earth: dust, sand. Or you can suggest one object by another—everything Picasso constantly did in his sculptures! At a Rebeyrolle exhibit I recently saw a character eating a plate of noodles; the plate was painted, and instead of noodles there were those little pieces of polyurethane that are used to fill boxes to protect things in shipping. Well, without altering them in any way, he glued them on his canvas and they became noodles! All he needed to do was paint a dish around them.

That sort of gimmick helped me considerably when I was composing my book. Now my perception has been shaped by that, so when I read a newspaper, I grab hold of a couple of words and "glue" them, putting them exactly on the same plane with my own writing. It either works or it doesn't. I no longer know if things come from me or from a newspaper, whether I got them from what I've read, heard, seen, or been told. Everything exists at the same level, and most important, I don't keep track of my references! Things must be integrated so that I no longer know whether they come from me or not; that's of no importance. That's what painters have taught me—that you can do anything you wish.

There's only one thing you can't do, because it would be immediately evident: namely, any form of trickery, of concealment beneath makeup—any form of cheating. You can borrow anything from anyone, as long as you do it with sincerity. That probably means you can

borrow only within certain limits or, in any case, with another idea in mind, a precise idea that is your own. You can't steal an entire concept from someone, but you can borrow from him; you can always borrow a green from Veronese in order to make another painting, saying, "His green would really go well in this spot!" And why not? It's there at your disposal. That's it. You can do anything you wish, using every possible means, but you can't cheat.

SG: This business of fraud is very interesting! Can you spot it as well in a poetic text? Are you able to say, as you read some of your contemporaries, "That doesn't work at all! There's something wholly fraudulent here!"

JF: It does happen! But that's an opinion on another's work, which is difficult, because you may feel that way one day and not the next. So you didn't understand or weren't in the right frame of mind to read that piece. Fortunately, there are texts that can't be read in the same way everyday. Just as you wouldn't want to hear the same piece of music every day, so I'm sensitive to that in my way of reading. I buy everything that interests me, everything I'd like to read. I buy books and put them in the corner, and then I let them come out by themselves! I have no priorities. I don't feel I have to read this or that book, even when a friend sends it to me. He will know my impressions the day I read it, even if it takes two years! And, to go back to your question, one shouldn't be presumptuous in detecting a degree of artifice in another's work, because what may appear as artifice today may very well be fully articulated in the text the next day, if the light changes.

SG: The collage technique you've discussed was practiced by Louis Zukofsky, as you know, and in France today there is a strong interest in the works of the Objectivists, the work of a generation that found its inspiration in publicity posters—Apollinaire, Aragon, and Desnos also come to mind. It seems this way of writing is back in style. To what might you ascribe this interest?

JF: Although I'm not one much given to trading recipes with my fellow French poets, nevertheless, it seems to me that among the poets you

and I know who are in their forties and fifties, that technique is rather prevalent, and there's no doubt that the most interesting of them are quite familiar with Pound and Zukofsky, especially in the group we both know. They understand how that writing is put together, and I don't believe that can pass unnoticed. Each is influenced in his or her own particular way. I don't think I can spot the influence with precision in the work of a given poet, but I'm quite sure it's there. But this way of writing is perhaps rarer in something that ends up calling itself a novel!

Due

The eye is there, steady blue, riveted to infinity, unbroken, accelerated muteness, hovers. Someone questions. The old question. Blue, steady into infinity, I don't know. We had been distracted for too long. Too long distracted. Infinity stretches out, summons us, a longing, the eye is riveted to it. Is it a bird passing by? I'll follow it if it plunges into this blue.

Impatience carried to its heights finds its resolution: blue eye, riveted, nothing left to believe or disbelieve, steady gaze, gratified impatience, by itself resolved, what dwelling? no image, the eye watches, founders, sinks, no image

no sign stands out
no accent no hold
in the vague and the undifferentiated
quietude with nostalgia

all hasn't yet been left, hidden, lost

cinders
crackling
in a multitude of grays

what never ceases to be consumed in it

Yet another miniature world in the mind, slight noises, slight smells, slight tensions, here and there, still slight resentments over old setbacks, a whole small world made up of pretty much the same things as the old one.

Back then. The throat tightens, great muffled cries, great gestures in

the void. Someone got up, back then, walked in the cold, moved away from signs and images. I stayed awhile with you, do not hold it against me, then I got up.

Searing, soft, with you, near the lamps, back then, I lingered for a long while, listening, talking, then I got up.

Without haste, accumulated refusals, clenched throat. What light over there, what glow? So many accumulated refusals.

I listened, a way of waiting among you. Your songs, your noises, I fell silent, got up.

The old conversation continued, the intimate reign, forgetting everything, the daily idleness, the invisible and tranquil boredom, a long, pure, sad song in an unknown tongue, what happiness to linger there awhile.

Already, but founded on a refusal. Then I got up. Toward a light. In the cold. Walked, walked. Far from signs and images. What a migration. Birds behind me and ahead, bird-memories, beak-memories. I left a coat behind, your songs, your noises, the light of lamps.

The slightest refusal bore me off, a light

toward the improbable
the curve of infinity

A set of question-memories followed, a cloud, a swarm, followed and questioned all around

a shadow on the canvas

All the questions went back to a former time, blessed time. We turned within time, planted.

The women spoke of the faces and the words of that time. They took on the shape of questions, sometimes of memories, but in fact they were very precise blocking maneuvers. And each time they stung the most sensitive points.

It happened at times that the questions fell silent, were almost forgotten, that was worse. I had barely begun to rejoice at being so ignored, barely free, ignored, embrace loosened, when their muted breathing returned, a strategy of absence, where are you, show yourself, or where are you taking me. They feigned indifference around me, they whistled other tunes, strange songs in place of familiar ones, and left you adrift, hobbled, facing the wrong way around.

Back then, the faces, the glances. Back then, the melodies. Daily noises. Shade and sun, very plain words. Leave even simple words, faces, fields, barns, storms.

Among numerous traps there were not only questions; also images; rare, but traps all the same. Back then, steeped in images, I pulled myself together, then got up.

The images: glances, gestures, faces, words spoken without care, motion of lips mouthing them in the evening, in the morning, near the lamps, vast shadows slightly blurred, on the wall and the ceiling, the pale halo above the table, the tablecloth still covered with crumbs, the smell of the floor (he counted the knots in the wood), the worn windowsill (on it a blue enameled jug); the images insinuate themselves to hold you back, to bring you back to them, they don't like to be left behind, to be relegated; like the power they have to hold you, to weaken you, like their secret, cunning strength. When questions prove ineffective, they join the fray and begin pulling you toward themselves, hindering your walk.

Large granite block crudely shapen, serving as a support for the window's transom and down the middle of which, after a while, a sort of

furrow or declivity had been formed where rainwater trickled down the panes (or perhaps the groove was not natural as I imagined it, but had been made for this very purpose), finally, on the ground, a complex labyrinth of tiles led this streamlet, quickly swollen as water from all the roofs flowed from the gutters, down to a hidden well, located at the end of the garden.

And I heard my slow voice, without stopping my walk, speaking, reacting against the questions with such and such a reply to which my whole body in motion might adhere. For the peculiarity of the questions was exactly that, a blade insinuated between flesh and bone and trying to separate the one from the other and leave them both, you can imagine this, quivering in the snow or on the ground, slowly rotting, nourishing other ambitions.

The images: on the ceiling, the pale yellow halo, the lampshade, a half-sphere fringed with black which two braided threads lower to the level of the forehead of whoever would be sitting there, elbows on the tablecloth, among the crumbs where there might still be a jelly stain which flies methodically reduce as they go through each movement of a ballet around the bulb, in the heat and the light.

The images: metallic clicking of the pendulum in the clock, high wooden monument whose door one would open, on rare occasions, in order to raise, by pulling on a little chain, the copper or brass weight which produced the energy put to the service of measuring time and propagating boredom.

songs, faces
who sewed to the rhythm of this noise?

Sitting under a ballet of flies
a light carried me

to the first buds

a refusal

gathered around the fire, holding a pipe or a needle, the face defined along a line joining the most salient points, from the brow to the chin, following the bridge of the nose, a violently glowing profile, turned toward the world, words, gestures and desires entangled in a tight web, recoiling, moving forward, inciting, restraining, parading and capering; the other, on the side of shadow and cold, of silence and solitude, of immobility and abstinence.

It would have been the fire's virtue to underscore and resolve this split in each one, no doubt one should have planned it so as to avoid causing a break in this delicate balance, social profile and inner profile.

The fire burned out, I got up.

Echéance

L'oeil^[*] est là, bleu fixe, rivé à l'infini, sans trêve, mutisme accéléré, plane. Quelqu'un questionne. L'ancienne question. Bleu, fixe à l'infini, j'ignore. Nous fûmes trop longtemps détournés. Trop longtemps détournés. L'infini s'étale, nous requiert, une aspiration, l'oeil^[*] s'y rive. Est-ce un oiseau qui passe? Je le suivrai s'il s'enfonce dans ce bleu.

L'impatience portée à son comble s'est résolue: oeil^[*] bleu, rivé, plus rien à croire ou ne pas croire, regard fixe, impatience comblée, d'elle-même résolue, quel séjour? pas d'image, l'oeil veille, sombre, chavire, pas d'image

aucun signe ne se détache
nul accent nulle prise
dans le vague et l'indifférencié
quiétude avec nostalgie

tout n'est pas encore laissé, enfoui, perdu

cendres
avec craquements
dans une multitude de gris

quoi n'en finit de s'y consumer

Encore un monde miniature en tête, petits bruits, petites odeurs, petites tensions, çà et lá, petites rancunes encore contre d'anciens échecs, tout un petit monde fait d'à peu près les mêmes choses que l'ancien.

Autrefois; la gorge se serre, grands cris muets, grands gestes dans le vide. Quelqu'un s'est levé, autrefois, a marché dans le froid, s'est éloigné

des signes et des images. Je me suis attardé parmi vous, ne m'en veuillez pas, puis je me suis levé.

Douleur, douceur, avec vous, près des lampes, autrefois, longtemps je me suis attardé, j'écoutais, je parlais, puis je me suis levé.

Sans hâte, refus accumulés, gorge serrée. Quelle lueur là-bas, quelle lueur? Tant de refus accumulés.

J'écoutais, manière d'attente, parmi vous. Vos chansons, vos bruits, je me suis tu, levé.

L'ancienne conversation, continuée, le règne intime, l'oubli de tout, le desoeuvrement^[*] quotidien, l'ennui invisible et tranquille, un long chant pur et triste dans une langue inconnue, quel bonheur de s'y attarder un peu.

Déjà, mais sur un refus. Puis levé. Vers une lueur. Dans le froid. Marché, marché. Loin des signes et des images. Quelle migration. Oiseaux, derrière et devant, oiseaux-souvenirs, becs-souvenirs. J'ai quitté un manteau, vos chansons, vos bruits, la lumière des lampes.

Un moindre refus me porta, une lueur

vers l'improbable
la courbure de l'infini

Un lot de questions-souvenirs suivait, un nuage, un essaim, suivait et questionnait alentour

une ombre au tableau

Les questions revenaient toutes à autrefois, le temps béni. On tournait dans le temps, on plantait.

Elles parlaient des visages et des paroles de ce temps-là. Elles prenaient la forme de questions, parfois de souvenirs, mais étaient en fait de très précises manoeuvres^[*] d'empêchement. Et elles piquaient chaque fois au point le plus sensible.

Il arrivait que les questions se taisent, se fassent presque oublier, c'était pire. A peine m'étais-je réjoui d'être ainsi ignoré, à peine libre, ignoré, étreinte desserrée, revenait leur souffle muet, la stratégie du manque, où êtes-vous, montrez-vous, où encore m'attirez-vous. Leur indifférence feinte autour de moi, elles sifflotaient d'autres airs, des chansons étranges en place des chansons familières, et vous laissaient perdu, entravé, sens devant derrière.

Autrefois, les visages, les regards. Autrefois les musiques. Le bruit quotidien. L'ombre et le soleil, des mots très simples. Quitter même les mots simples, les visages, les herbes, les granges, les orages.

Au nombre des embûches, pas seulement les questions; aussi les images; rares, mais embûches tout de même. Autrefois, baigné d'images, je me suis rassemblé, puis levé.

Les images: regards, gestes, visages, paroles dites sans y penser, mouvement des lévres les disant, le soir, le matin près des lampes, grandes ombres un peu floues sur le mur et le plafond, l'auréole pâle au-dessus de la table, la nappe avec miettes encore, l'odeur du plancher (il comptait les noeuds^[*] dans le bois), le rebord usé de la fenêtre (on y remisait un broc en émail bleu); les images s'insinuent pour vous retenir, vous ramener à elles, elles n'aiment pas qu'on les quitte, qu'on les relègue; aiment ce pouvoir qu'elles ont de vous retenir, de vous amollir, aiment leur force secrète, sournoise. Quand les questions se révèlent sans effet, elles entrent en action et commencent à vous tirer vers elles, gênant votre marche.

Large bloc de granit grossièrement taillé, servant d'appui aux meneaux

de la fenêtre et au milieu duquel s'était formé à la longue une sorte de rigole ou de déclivité où confluait l'eau de pluie glissant sur les vitres (ou peut-être l'entaille n'était-elle pas naturelle comme je me l'imaginais, mais avait été tracée là justement dans ce but), enfin, sur le sol, un savant labyrinthe de tuiles conduisait ce ru, bientôt grossi à l'arrivée de gouttières de toute l'eau des toits, jusqu'à un puits perdu aménagé au fond du jardin.

Et j'entendais ma voix lente, sans cesser de marcher, parlant, éprouvant contre les questions telle ou telle assertion à laquelle adhérer de tout le corps en marche. Car le propre des questions c'était bien cela, une lame insinuée entre chair et os et tentant de séparer l'un de l'autre et les laisser tous deux, on imagine ça, pantelants dans la neige ou la terre, pourrir lentement ou nourrir d'autres ambitions.

Les images: au plafond, l'auréole jaune pâle, l'abat-jour en demi-sphère frangé de noir, qu'un cordon fait de deux fils tressés abaisse à hauteur du front de qui serait assis là, les coudes sur la nappe, parmi les miettes, où demeure peut-être une tache de confiture que les mouches réduisent méthodiquement entre chaque mouvement du ballet qu'elle mènent autour de l'ampoule, dans la chaleur et la lumière.

Les images: cliquetis métallique du balancier de l'horloge, haut monument de bois dont on ouvrait, mais rarement, la porte afin de remonter, en tirant sur une chaînette, le poids de cuivre ou de laiton qui fournissait l'énergie ainsi mise au service de la mesure du temps et de la propagation de l'ennui.

chansons, visages
qui cousait au rythme de ce bruit?

Assis sous le ballet des mouches
une lueur me porta

aux premiers bourgeons

un refus

réunis autour du feu, tenant une pipe ou une aiguille, le visage partagé selon une ligne reliant les points les plus saillants, de l'arcade au menton en suivant l'arête du nez, un profil violemment embrasé, tourné vers le monde, paroles, gestes et désirs enchevêtrés en une trame serrée, reculs, avancées, incitations, retenues, parades et cabrioles; l'autre, du côté de l'ombre et du froid, du silence et de la solitude, de l'immobilité et de l'abstinence.

Le feu aurait eu pour vertu d'accuser et de résoudre cette scission en chacun, il eût sans doute fallu faire en sorte d'éviter que se rompît ce délicat équilibre, profil social et profil intérieur.

Le feu éteint, je me suis levé.

Emmanuel Hocquard

Emmanuel Hocquard was born in 1940 in Tangier. His poetry includes Le Portefeuille , with serigraphs by Raquel (Paris: Orange Export, Ltd., 1973), Album d'images de la villa Harris (Paris: Hachette/P.O.L., 1978), Une Ville ou une petite île (Hachette/P.O.L., 1981), Deux étages avec terrasse et vue sur le détroit (Royaumont: Echo & Co. 1989), Les Elégies (P.O.L., 1990), and Théorie des tables (P.O.L., 1992); his fiction includes Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan (P.O.L., 1985; awarded the Prix France-Culture) and Un Privé à Tanger (P.O.L., 1987). He has cotranslated, with Claude Richard, Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music (P.O.L., 1986) and, with Philippe Mikriammos, Michael Palmer's Baudelaire Series (Royaumont: Cahiers de Royaumont, 1989). He has also coedited, with Claude Royet-Journoud, 21+1 poètes américains d'aujourd'hui (Montpellier: Delta, 1986) and 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains (Royaumont: Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique/Action poétique, 1992), and with Raquel, Orange Export, Ltd . (Paris: Flammarion, 1986).

Selected Publications in English:

Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance , sections 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18. Translated by Serge Gavronsky. Hot Bird MFG 2, no. 20 (Dec. 1993).

A Day in the Strait . Translated by Maryann De Julio and Jane Staw. New York: Red Dust, 1985.

Elegies and Other Poems . Translated by John A. Scott. Melbourne: Shearsman Books, 1990.

Late Additions . Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop and Connell McGrath. Série d'écriture , no. 2. (1988).

Theory of Tables , extracts. Translated by Michael Palmer. In Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 111–15. Further extracts appear in Hot Bird MFG 1, no. 21 (May 1991): 6–15; and Avec 6 (1993): 25–29.

"Elegy 6" and "Elegy 7." Translated by Geoffrey Young. o·blek^[*] 5 (Spring 1989): 101–11, and 9 (Spring 1991): 43–58.

"Elegy 7." Translated by Pam Rehm and Keith Waldrop. Série d'écriture , no. 7 (1993): 76–92.

"Of Foliage, Grammar, a Love." Translated by Connell McGrath. o·blek 1 (n.d.): 119–22.

Serge Gavronsky: I've been reading your work for many years, and it appears to me that your writing has gone through different stages; in any case, the attention to writing remains constant, even as the writing itself is divided into various genres. How do you consider your own writing, as it passes from one period to the next, from poetry to prose, if indeed it is a question of passages? Would you also comment on your readings of American poetry, as a translator of American poetry?

Emmanuel Hocquard: Unquestionably, I did begin with poetry, although my recent collection of short texts [Un Privé à Tanger ] is actually my first book. That is, I published later books before it, but it's the first one I wrote. Then I wrote Album d'images de la villa Harris , which contains those pieces of prose that I think you had in mind. You didn't mean the novel [Aerea ]? You must have been thinking of Album d'images . In fact, that's the second period. Following that was a story, Une Journée dans le détroit , which was translated in the U.S. [A Day in the Strait ]; there, without a doubt, it's really prose! Then came Une Ville ou une petite île , and I couldn't say myself whether that was prose or poetry, but I believe it was prose. There were no lines of poetry, so it must have been prose! Things decidedly shifted toward prose with the novel Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan . Then my desire to reconnect with poetry grew. It was a difficult transition, and I'm right in the middle of it now. But we can talk about that later, if you like. In the meantime, there was Un Privé à Tanger , which is rather peculiar, because it groups writings that had appeared over the last ten years in newspapers and magazines, as conference papers or contributions to colloquia, but it also included poems. It's a rather hybrid form but one that interests me, because this coming-and-going between prose and poetry has become something of a necessity for me.

The thing I'm working on now is poetry, and perhaps it might be interesting to start there, instead of going back to the very beginning—to start with what I hope will not be the end, though at this point in time it is: a narrative poem that breaks down into chapters

and songs, if you will, and you can read a couple of pages of it in Claude Royet-Journoud's daily broadsheet, L'In-Plano . The poem is called Allée de poivriers en Californie . As a matter of fact, that made me reconnect with poetry. After the novel, after four years of prose, I had a devil of a time getting back to a poetic line, a chord, and it came about because I was asked to write a poem. Sometimes a degree of constraint forces one to move ahead, whereas I might not have been able to do so on my own.

L'In-Plano is a single large sheet that prints on both sides and is not folded—whence its name [a printing term for an unfolded sheet]. It measures 21 by 29 centimeters; that is, it's a rather large page. And since it's produced by photo-offset, my poem had to be delivered to the printer the way it was meant to appear. I used both handwritten and typewritten material, and I always tried to work with a typewriter that had an elite font, since in a publication with so little space, placing two or three words on a page is not the thing to do! So I thought I'd write a full verse that used up the space I'd been given, making very long lines of poetry with small typographic characters. That's the way they came out! Very, very long lines. And that will pose some problems when the poem is finally set as a book, because either the format will have to be changed or all the lines will have to be cut!

That's the anecdote, but I did realize that this format, this constraint I had imposed on myself—that is, of writing long lines, and a series of tight stanzas without white spaces, without running into the margins—had led me, by virtue of the form, to write a type of poetry that is almost at the limits of prose. The lines are much longer than those we're accustomed to reading in French. Jacques Roubaud was right. The alexandrine remains the matrix, even when it only uses a ten-syllable line or exceeds its usual twelve syllables to include a fourteen-syllable line. Making such a long line forced me to skip over that implicit reference to a twelve-syllable line. Thus, I found before me a line that no longer referred back to the alexandrine and a poetic rhythm that wasn't rhythmic prose, since it depended on the presence

or the absence of enjambment. I realized that the long line allowed me at the same time to reconnect with elegies, a form of poetry I had written before, and I came to consider this long novelistic sentence a true acquisition.

SG: When you allude to this sort of mutual contamination—prose worked through in poetry and vice versa—do you believe that given your interest in narrative, the length corresponds, in part at least, not only to the end of the line but also to a certain oral function? In telling a story, one usually adheres to meaningful rhythmic structures. Would you say that today, taking your own work as an example, the insistence on écriture has partially given way to a vocal presence that allows a story to manifest itself, rather than having it split, cut up, and reduced in its form? In the work you're doing now, can the reader follow a story line, as, long ago, the audience of traditional oral poetry could? What in fact do you mean when you speak of narration, since that term lends itself to a number of definitions, ranging from our common understanding of it as the "telling of a story" to a focus on repetition, units of meaning?

EH: Your question has several facets, and I'll try to remember them all and answer them one by one. Does narration mean telling a story? I ask the question, but I can't answer it. I don't know. It's in the writing and in trying to say something—is that a story? In the doing I'll know. I'll know at the end. For the moment, there's a plan of action in place. I'm at the very beginning of this book. What amuses me . . . well, let me go back to this constraining element of being asked to write a poem; I think that has significance. Sometimes it allows one to discover paths one might not have followed otherwise; for me, it was the serial aspect of the project. The implicit contract required me to produce a two-sided page every ten days. Thus, it was far less interesting to write a single poem every two weeks than to do something that was going to be followed through. This setup already pushed me in the direction of story and, therefore, characters. From the start there were characters, and very quickly the work became a sort of TV serial—why not? One of the things that amused me was to try to

figure out how something like "Dallas" worked. Let's take the current fashion, the most kitschy one, but who cares! Isn't it interesting to see, on the level of form, how the thing is produced, even if it's totally without interest? Because formally, it's not without interest.

SG: From the point of view of structure?

EH: Of a structure that wasn't one, an extremely supple structure that allowed me to introduce characters, to have them evolve in relation to one another for a certain period of time, and then, depending on the readers' lassitude or the author's fancy, to have them disappear—killed off! Then to introduce others in order to "renew the staff" [said in English]. That's how it all began. I haven't gone far enough to know what they'll all do together, but I've introduced a certain number of characters. One day, after the sixth episode, something told me it was all well and good, but there were no women! And so I said, "No problem!" Two weeks later there was a woman. And then another! Though I may be joking, I don't think it's without interest to have been constrained to produce something in a lighter vein, as opposed to the usual situation of the writer staring at a white page. So it's not a structure; it's rather like a chest of drawers that you can open and then shut.

Now, as to the question of passages, of moving from one genre to another, from a puritanical Jansenist form to one that appears to be more relaxed, more popular in nature: I can't really say there's a shift. It wasn't that I was suddenly seized by regret or remorse, saying to myself, "No, that's no longer possible! Let's move on to something else, let's go back to something done in the past." It didn't happen that way. Let me return to what I was saying about this inevitable friction between prose and poetry which I don't try to avoid, between versification and novelistic narration. I think, and I don't believe I'm wrong, that when someone like myself—that is, basically a poet, more a poet than a prose writer—passes over to prose and even writes a novel, it's clear that that person won't write novels the way someone who has never written poetry does. It's not a question of content. Nor is it necessary that a poet's novel be poetic. Obviously that's not the

question. One can't say that Pierre Jean Jouve's Paulina is really that—a poetic novel—but I believe that the novelist who isn't a poet poses fewer problems concerning form than does the poet who is also a novelist. I imagine that for the novelist who hasn't written poetry, prose is almost natural, something like spoken language but written down with talent, with technique. Whereas for the poet—and even for a bad poet, even for a poet who writes sonnets in alexandrines that should be flushed down the toilet—there is, from the very beginning, a formal type of work. You've got to count the syllables; you've got to find the rhymes. There's an awareness that language is not spontaneous and that one doesn't write the way one pisses, and the poet, even a bad poet who has fashioned silly verses, has done a formal piece of work that the novelist may not have done, even a good novelist. A good poet will approach prose with certain preoccupations of a necessarily formal nature. I think that's it. That is the difference I would introduce: not one of content but of connotation, things like that.

Thus, there's no shift between what appears to be a more formalistic exercise and my current way of writing, which appears to be less formalistic. In the one as in the other, it's always a question of form. I'm not saying that form must take the upper hand; that's not it. But it is there, below the surface, absolutely present. And it's true that, from the very moment this concern, this desire for narration arises—whatever narration might mean, whether a single story or many stories, a false story, a counterstory . . . I don't know—but it's a fact that form induces something of a narrative pattern itself. When you write with minimal units, there is indeed a particularly demanding, rigorous spatialization. You can't do the same narration as you could were you to adopt a long form. And it's true that in order to tell the story I'm telling I need a very long line, but it may be that because I had decided on a very long line from the beginning, it allowed me to think about narration, which nevertheless comes out of form. Undoubtedly, the two are closely connected.

SG: In poems divisions exist in one way or another; they may be indi-

cated by a space, by numbers. The amplitude of this project evokes a particular preoccupation; on the one hand, you've just described the aspect founded on formal elements. But in writing, in rereading your writing, or in planning the next phase, haven't you already "framed" the content within this perspective? On the other hand, there would be the poet's choice of the word, the word and the rhythmic tonality found in the long line of verse. And here I wonder if, having passed through this consecration of the word, you might not have entered into another order of thought and found something amusing as you ventured into this serialization?

EH: I've many things to say in response to your question. I'm not sure whether the word has ever been a basic unit for me. That is not a concern of mine. Nor is it one of my generation, for whom the problem was not to produce images; it was not a question of words butting up against each other. In my own case, I should add that my background wasn't in literature. Amusingly enough, it was in history, specifically ancient history. That is clear in my Elegies . Thus, my transition from the social sciences to French poetry was facilitated by Latin prose and, later, Latin verse. What allowed this move from history to poetry was essentially Latin syntax and how I rediscovered its articulation within French syntax. But the word was more something I weighed negatively in order to make room for syntactical articulation. Those nerves, those twists—I was very put off by words that shone too brightly, that were a bit too baroque! I was rather searching for a flatness of the word, a neutrality, almost an "objectivist" approach. Words are a pain in the ass, aren't they? It's true that little by little, both of us were domesticated. I now have a better relationship with words, but that doesn't mean that syntax no longer interests me. Far from it. Perhaps it sounds a bit too abstract to put it that way, but it's very concrete when you read it. That's what carries this very long line, a line that otherwise has nothing to do with classical sources, even if it may play on an octosyllabic or decasyllabic scheme, or even alexandrines. But what remains, the element sustaining the rhythm, is syntax.

It's also true that a long poem allows for greater liberty in the choice of words, and I quickly realized that that freedom arose through a narrative vein, because they're really long lines! That in turn gave rise to idiomatic expressions, which would have been unthinkable in another form. You can't, in what is commonly referred to as a puritanical form of poetry, introduce a sentence like "Grab the devil by the tail!"—whereas in a long verse you can insert three such expressions! Thus, there's a greater liberty, a great elasticity that becomes almost systematic. It's part of the formalist baggage of the new poem, which introduces as many idiomatic expressions as possible, typically French ones which, by the way, are being forgotten. You could say that the poem has become an index of idiomatic expressions, and that interests me for yet another reason. I've always been, like all those of my generation, allergic to everything metaphoric, even to metaphor itself, and I realized that when you take these French idioms, which are usually oral rather than written, you find that all those expressions were former metaphors that have been demetaphorized with use, a little bit like an old coin that's been demonetized. "To grab the devil by the tail"—well, nobody today thinks about the devil's tail or the devil himself. You simply think it means not having any money, being in tough straits, and that demonstrates that language has a degree of liveliness, of vigor. It gets its revenge and finds a way of bringing even metaphors to an end, metaphors that are usually of a literary kind. Usage removes this literary patina in order to transform them into something fluid, something that today can be reintroduced into a poem, as long as the poem has a form that can tolerate it.

SG: Don't you think these units of speech borrowed from colloquial expressions might not also shine too brightly?

EH: Perhaps, but that's no longer important, because the space is no longer the same, the context is no longer the same, the writing itself is no longer the same. That no longer bothers me at all; besides, such idiomatic expressions, which, let's say, belong more to a common than a literary level of language, can impart a slightly humorous colora-

tion, something that to a remarkable degree remains absent from French poetry. Or at least there's an immense difference between our poetry and what is being done in the U.S., where humor has always been a useful voice, expressed with elegance and effectiveness.

SG: As far as I can see, you're nearly alone, whether as a poet or a fiction writer, in showing a sense of humor, evoking situations that do not always fall back into metaphysics, the Tragic, or a deadening sense of sobriety . . .

EH: You mean seriousness?

SG: Right! And that, quite clearly, was something I had perhaps wrongly attributed, at least in part, to your considerable familiarity with American poetry, and American culture, too—to those texts you've translated. Of all French poets who have had close contact with the U.S., you may be the one who's learned the most. Would you agree?

EH: It doesn't fit chronologically! I discovered contemporary American poetry relatively late, in the eighties, and by that time I had already written three books, the Elegies among them. But I don't mean to sidestep your question or make light of it. I've always regarded the literary world, and by that I mean the French scene, with great suspicion. It has always appeared to me very sober, or when humor did reveal itself, it was just that—a calculated effort to make some people laugh, which is a serious endeavor! Configured with a serious word here, a funny one there, and so on . . .

This view comes from my wariness of literature, from my origins, which weren't literary. I prefer Chandler to Chateaubriand, and if that doesn't make everybody happy, tough! My sources are as much Latin historians as pre-Socratic philosophers, or pulp novelists or cookbooks or books on botany. For me all of that is language, and I think I've tried to listen in on language. I don't see why poetry should be some sort of sieve that retains only the serious part of language and filters out the rest. That's a rather monstrous selection to undertake, and what gives one the right? So I would say that when I really came into contact with American poetry, I felt in league with it, I

found myself body and soul in it, and I was really delighted because I discovered people who were not humorists but writers by profession, yet they had humor as one of their dimensions. Even in Ezra Pound there's humor!

SG: In detective novels?

EH: Yes—in Ezra Pound's detective novels! But especially in Raymond Chandler, and that's when you really understand he's a writer. He didn't play with puns to make people laugh. It was in the language itself. He didn't invent idiomatic expressions. He didn't finagle it, but it's there.

SG: What about Pound?

EH: Not as funny!

SG: But he may also have been one of the poets most open to the multiple levels of language. This metaphoric sieve, characteristic of a great deal of French poetry, has resulted, at least partially, I'm sure, in isolating French poetry in an elitist club. It's almost unattainable to common mortals, though it's not as dulling as what some of our American academic poets write. What I'm getting at is that, for American readers of French poetry, after the early and "great" poets of the beginning to the middle of the century, like Apollinaire, Cendrars, Claudel, Eluard, and Saint-John Perse, the stage now seems vacant, with a few exceptions—let's say Char, Ponge, and Bonnefoy. Might this feeling of alienation on the part of American readers vis-à-vis contemporary French poetry be caused by too much attention being paid to écriture? And furthermore, as Bernard Noël has indicated about his own poetry, by the fact that écriture has become an illusive subject itself? On the other hand, your own poetry has begun rebuilding those downed bridges of nostalgia founded on a story line. Now one can have fun with your playfulness as well as your manipulation of language.

EH: Readers can now have fun with language! My aim isn't to insist explicitly on this aspect of poetry, but I think it results from the fact that we don't have the same traditions. That's why, as you've said, I've gained a lot from the U.S.—although I don't know if a French poet

can actually gain a lot from the U.S.; still, there may be an intellectual pleasure in exchanging ideas, in speaking to the poets themselves. I've traveled widely in the U.S., and that's a country where you can have an intelligent conversation with poets who are not of your own language. Elsewhere it's even worse than in France—I mean the degree of seriousness!

I think this difference stems from our two different traditions, and when I say traditions, I mean linguistic ones, not historical ones—they're connected, of course, but I'm underlining the part of language. Well, I'm not about to start a comparison between British and American English! I don't know enough to do that. However, I do know something about the French language. It's very rigid, and its structures don't allow for any syntactical or grammatical playfulness. Even in its vocabulary, you can see how French is so totally allergic to external influences, and even allergic to any innovation! It's very, very difficult to introduce neologisms into French. They're not fashionable; they last two or three years, and then we don't use them anymore. Even when certain dictionaries do introduce them, two or three years later, they take them out! It's very interesting to note the new additions and those terms that have been discarded from the Petit Larousse . It's a static language! It's a language that doesn't move, as a result of that linguistic tradition I'm not about to discuss!

I also believe it's a very serious tradition. French poetry, whether you talk about Claudel or René Char . . . they ain't no jokers! And contemporary French poets ain't no jokers, either! Because, first of all, we write in a writerly language; we don't use spoken language, and for an American this must be difficult to understand. But we cannot, except in an overly literary effort, transpose spoken language into written language. There are objective conditions that stand in the way, and they're not easy to get around. And then what remains? You can't make the language budge, so it's with great difficulty that you can introduce spoken language. I try to do it by using this long line, which to a certain extent allows it because of its length. It's curious that a problem of form—I'm now coming to the heart of the mat-

ter!—explains, even if it doesn't always justify, the Jansenist-puritanical excesses of one generation. It also explains why the only way of slightly changing something, of giving it a novel touch, is through a formal problem. It really is a question of changing forms, suggesting other forms, other spatializations, because at that time, we had no other choice. That explains a lot. Perhaps, through our American contacts, we've become a bit suppler. We take greater risks, we dare to do more things: that's perfectly possible.

SG: How about your own work as a translator, as well as that other experience, with Claude Royet-Journoud, of putting together a twovolume anthology of American poetry, 21 + 1 poètes américains d'aujourd'hui ? Could you say something about what you both had in mind when you selected your poets? And, as a side issue, do you think there's a possibility that by an unexpected turn of events this anthology may even have a certain impact in the U.S?

EH: There's nothing I can say about the possibility of this work having an impact in the U.S.; I'm too far away, and I've only gone to a few places since the book came out. It's even a bit too early to say anything about what's going to happen in France. But on the one hand I hope this book will encourage a certain number of French poets to read American poetry, not only in translation but, if they can, directly, in the original. The Atlantic is not unbridgeable, and it's ultimately less of an obstacle than the Alps. My real wish is that New York would come closer to Paris than to Munich, Brussels, or Rome, and that is in fact what's happening.

The second effect I'm hoping for is that this will be only the beginning of something. As to the selection, it was partly subjective, and besides, it was done in collaboration, so that, as they say in Spain, we've cut the compromise in two! They were the poets we were reading, and we did want to give a rather open sample of different ways of writing, so that no single school or group might dominate.^[*] What I

[*] Among the poets represented are Rae Armantrout, Paul Auster, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Gustaf Sobin, and Diane Ward.

think both of us expect is that many other anthologies will come out.^[*]21 + 1 is a sort of prod, a stimulus, and what follows need not be a major anthology, since it's time-consuming to put one together. Ours took too long to come out; it should have appeared earlier. We hope that many individuals, all revved up, will very quickly contribute a large number of translations of a great many people, so now that the motor is churning, the poets won't necessarily be the same—and they won't be dead ones, as is so often the case in anthologies! Yes, the press gave us good reviews in France, and younger poets did appreciate our work.

SG: Do you remember what the students chanted in 1968? "It's only the beginning . . ."

EH: That's it. "It's only the beginning, let's go on with the fight!"

SG: Together with the painter Raquel, you put out a collection containing all the contributors published by Orange Export, Ltd. It's a weighty book, offering a formidable representation of French poetry over a period of twenty years. Is that small press still in operation?

EH: It's all over! If we ever do anything else in the future, it'll have another name. That Flammarion book constitutes the end.

SG: Do you find in that collection a certain identifiable preoccupation with écriture?

EH: We chose from what was around!

SG: From the end of the sixties to the beginning of the eighties, can you spot something that corresponds to what you've just said about the development within your own work?

EH: I wouldn't be as confident as that! I have the illusion that I can more easily talk about my own work than about other people's. So I can only give you a noncommittal response or, as we say, "hedge like a Norman"! It won't be perfectly frank, but when I have to talk about Orange Export, I feel a bit like that weaver who's sitting behind his loom and can't really see what's coming out! Rereading those works today, I don't even have enough perspective to answer that question.

[*] Their second anthology did in fact appear in 1992: 49 + 1 nouveaux poèts américains .

But were I to answer straight off, without giving it much thought, I'd say there wasn't much of an evolution.

SG: I see a certain coherence of taste . . .

EH: That was the coherence of the seventies, which in no way excludes a diversity of écritures. There was no grid. Orange Export was neither Change nor Tel Quel . Options weren't limited so that you were either in or out. No, I really don't think so. There was diversity, but it was sustained by a number of shared concerns that were often in the negative—that is, a rejection of something else, of what preceded, for example, rather than a desire to affirm a set of principles to be applied or defined. I have a feeling, and I wonder if it comes from the object itself, that despite such écritures, this volume, which gathers ten years of small-press book publishing, appears monolithic.

SG: Harmonious, in any case!

EH: I hope so! I hope it doesn't appear cacophonous. But it is monolithic to an extent. That reflects rather well the reality of the times and what is still, in a certain way, French écriture, what characterized it as of the end of the sixties. I can't all at once be judge, jury, and defense attorney, but sometimes I too have the urge to shake things up a bit! Not that I have the least regret, nor does that urge diminish the great admiration I have for what was done, but it's true that there is a dominant strain—except at the end, with Olivier Cadiot, and he really constitutes a break. The rest is indeed dominated by something of a more serious kind, of a graver nature—and I say that with no intent to criticize—something sober rather than amusing or funny.

SG: Or of a narrative kind?

EH: There is narration, but it's a serious narration, and also perhaps repetitive, but that too belongs to a narrative dimension. That's not necessarily a defect. And the feeling that I have about that generation, which is my own (I don't exclude myself in any way, but I'm trying to introduce a slight distance, a perspective), is that it's very difficult for people coming afterward to do something different. Either they do the same thing—well, not quite, but they're on a path of continuity—or it's difficult to know how they might exist. We're not responsible!

After all, we did what we had to do, and we did it at that time. But I don't know if we helped the next group. They'll have lots of difficulties. And one thing that strikes me is that, at the time when we were publishing books, week after week, month after month, we were really in the midst of something alive, absolutely enthusiastic, and now, at times, rereading, I find that . . . I don't mean to imply that it appears in a harsher light, that's not at all what I want to say, but that it's become terribly literary, and that's what I mean when I say we haven't given the next generation a gift, because in fact a twenty-five-year-old writer, if he puts himself in step with what should be done, then he's already a little old man, a little old man writing literature. Those who are now writing really have to make things a bit suppler! Let them work on something else. Let them de-literize the thing! It's become overly literary. I would even say, and this might relieve my generation, that those who come after us will be able to do something else.

SG: In any case, by reaction?

EH: Perhaps by reaction . . .

SG: Isn't that a rather traditional French practice?

EH: A rather time-honored, repetitive one! Well, perhaps there will have to be a partial reaction to some of the work, but I don't believe in smashing things up and starting from scratch. I can imagine that those who are now making their way can take off from what has been acquired, at least part of it, without throwing everything out the window in an effort to shake up what appears to be slightly rigid, slightly tense, slightly puritanical, if you will. I certainly won't dissociate myself from that experience, that would be . . . But rather than leaving it to others to criticize us, we might as well do it ourselves!

SG: According to some, there are new young novelists in France who don't necessarily write commercial novels, people who, on the other hand, seem to exploit their autobiographies almost exclusively. The critic Michel Nuridsany called that a return to "personal myths"—in any case, a reinvestment in a reading of one's own past. Young writers like Eugène Savitskaya, Jean Rubin, and Martine Aballéa are

reliving an anterior moment. They might have been poets; perhaps they are in a certain way, since they poeticize the past, and their language is refined, elegant. Their novels are quite short; I've read a couple, and they really don't go beyond 120 pages. One wonders why they should even be called novels; why not call them novellas or stories? Do you think these authors are discovering a new space and, rather than expressing themselves through poetry, are tackling, or at least finding inspiration in, another form?

EH: Listen, it's impossible to assume they might have been poets if they're not! They're novelists or prose writers. The fact of telling one's life story at eighteen or ninety is not a fault in itself, but neither is it a virtue. I'm wary of these things. Is that what's called postmodernism in France? You know that better than I do. I really don't know the French novel well; it interests me infinitely less than the American novel of the same generation. I don't read French ones because they bore me silly! A few years ago there was this rather questionable return to the biographical, but the fashion wasn't launched by toddlers! It was created by the old guard trying to make a comeback, having exhausted the charms of the short sentence and the fast description. They felt they had to look elsewhere, to tell the story of their families, their own lives. That seems to me totally uninteresting, except—and this has nothing to do with biographies or narratives—except where, once again (placing myself in the French context, which is not the American one), it is sustained by a formal invention. At the present time, I really don't know what else can be done. We have no choice; we're in a highly rigid framework. We can only try to find new formal approaches. Whether you're then going to tell your grocer's life story, your boss's, or your own, that's of no account at all! The fact of telling your life story doesn't renew literature, it really doesn't!

Alley of Pepperplants in California

I

Pisa Groy-Conte split her time between San Francisco and Trieste where I had met her shortly before she and Tony Proges broke up. Pisa's mother was American and her father, Venetian.

Pisa was blond, spoke Italian flawlessly (except with Tony Proges: together they spoke French), so that she could have passed for a Triestine in Trieste, despite her given name, a memento, she claimed, of the place her parents had conceived her.

It was she who introduced me to Tony Proges of Tony Proges and Co.

I loved her and she loved me too, I think, even though she never said so.

Then she stopped loving me, I think, even though she never said that either. And she went back to Tony Proges.

And she continued to split her time between Tony Proges and San Francisco. At the time we separated, I was moving. I immediately had problems with my windows. A number of panes were cracked. They broke with the first cold spell. It even snowed that winter, and flakes fell inside the house.

At a bus terminal, I saw people who didn't know each other speak to each other, because of the snow. What's so special about snow that it should make people who don't know each other speak to each other getting off the bus?

Perhaps I should have spoken to Pisa while there was still time to talk to her? But my name's Pyr! And even snow cannot unclench my teeth.

Another time, a heavy steel frame fell from the top of a window and broke on the floor, barely missing me.

There were pieces of broken glass everywhere. Picking them up, I thought of that other Pyrrhus who couldn't avoid, in that tiny street in Argos, the slate an old woman threw down at him from the top of her house.

Pisa always took her bath (white bubbles, steam on the mirror) listening to music.

I replaced the window panes which had to be replaced, replacing a piece of glass with a new piece of glass in order to protect myself and insulate myself.

At times when it rained, I'd trace flowers on the steamy panes, as you once had drawn with the tips of your fingers on the steamy panes and mirrors in the bathroom.

"The empty house also has a story to tell: On April 8,19——: sound of water & on the mirror a flower (analogia)."

II

"Signore Copeyton, I've never, in all my life, read a book from cover to cover. Only sections given in schoolbooks.

And I liked that. When I think about it, that may have been the reason I became a salesman.

Today all I read, in newspapers, are ephemeral stock market figures, unaffected by either states of mind or the seasons. Nevertheless, I imagine that a library looks a bit like a huge perfume warehouse . . ."

"Signore Typoce," Regis Copeyton said, tapping his fingernails on the marble tabletop in front of the salesman,

"have you ever noticed (even from a distance, from a train window,

even moving at great speeds) that the water in a canal running alongside a river is not the same water as the water in the river?

The water in the canal is higher, straight, fuller,

of an indistinct color, and always the same, come rain or shine; home to oily rats who live with the watchmen who regulate the flow of water at the sluices,

the silent stream of a canal moves without flowing: tiny falls reticent in the reach between the rusty water gates.

Just like books in a library, Signore Typoce, the object-water of a canal rolls in slabs: quantities which come and go, labels, rubber stamps, schedules,

loans, and credits accorded from day to day in registers; nothing to do with perfumes, business, and water in the river!" "One day," says Signore Typoce, "I saw the body of a drowned man on the grassy bank along a hauling path. Firemen had fished him out.

In the unfriendly morning fog, a little group looked on. A worker, shaking his head, was saying: 'At noon, when his ol' lady finds out, that'll sure ruin her appetite!'

He repeated that sentence many times, but nobody listened to him."

Signore Typoce stopped talking and Regis Copeyton lit a cigarette. A bunch of young boys walked by the open door of the Caffe San Marco, beating the sidewalk with their soles.

The year after the end of the war, every Thursday afternoon, I would see passing under the windows of my house (a silent column of skinny little boys, black shorts, knock-kneed shaven heads inclined toward the pavement, shoes too large, and loud) kids from an orphanage being taken for a walk.

"The words which most frequently came up in the report," Regis Copeyton said, "were frame and framing ."

Allée De Poivriers En Californie

I

Pise Groy-Conte partageait son temps entre San Francisco et Trieste où j'avais fait sa connaissance peu avant qu'elle et Tony Proges se séparent. La mère de Pise était américaine et son père vénitien.

Pise était blonde, parlait couramment l'italien (sauf avec Tony Proges: entre eux ils parlaient français), si bien qu'elle pouvait passer pour une Triestine à Trieste, malgré son prénom, souvenir, prétendait-elle, du lieu où ses parents l'avaient conçue.

Ce fut elle qui me présenta Tony Proges de la Cie Tony Proges.

Je l'ai aimée et elle aussi m'a aimé, je crois, bien qu'elle ne me l'ait jamais dit.

Puis elle a cessé de m'aimer, je crois, bien qu'elle ne me l'ait jamais dit non plus. Et elle revint vers Tony Proges.

Et elle continua de partager son temps entre Tony Proges et San Francisco. A l'époque où nous nous quittâmes, je changeai de maison. J'eus tout de suite des problèmes de fenêtres. Plusieurs vitres étaient fêlées. Elles éclatèrent avec les premiers froids. Il neigea même, cet hiver-là, et les flocons tombaient à l'intérieur.

A la sortie d'un autobus, je vis des gens qui ne se connaissaient pas se parler, à cause de la neige. Qu'a donc la neige de si particulier qu'elle fait que se parlent entre eux, à la sortie d'un autobus, des gens qui ne se connaissent pas?

Peut-être aurais-je dû parler à Pise lorsqu'il était encore temps de lui parler? Mais je suis Pyr! Et même la neige ne peut me faire desserrer les dents.

Une autre fois, un lourd cadre de fer se détacha du haut d'une fenêtre et s'écrasa sur le sol après m'avoir manqué de peu.

Il y eut partout des éclats de verre brisé. En les ramassant, je pensais à l'autre Pyrrhus que n'avait pas manqué dans cette ruelle d'Argos, la tuile qu'une vieille femme jeta sur lui du haut de sa maison.

Pise prenait toujours son bain (mousse blanche, buée sur le miroir) en écoutant de la musique.

Je remplaçai les vitres de la verrière qui devaient être remplacées, remplaçant une couche de verre par une nouvelle couche de verre afin de me protéger et de m'isoler.

Il m'arrivait, les jours de pluie, de tracer des fleurs sur les vitres embuées, comme autrefois vous dessiniez du bout des doigts dans la buée des vitres et des miroirs de la salle de bains.

«La maison vide est aussi une histoire: ce 8 avril 19——: bruit d'eau & sur la glace une fleur (analogia).»

II

—Signore Copeyton, je n'ai, de ma vie, jamais lu un livre tout entier. Seulement des échantillons, dans les livres de classe.

Et cela me plaisait. Il est possible, quand j'y réfléchis, que cela ait joué un rôle dans ma vocation de marchand.

Aujourd'hui, ma seule lecture, dans les colonnes des journaux, est celle des cours éphémères, indépendants des états d'âme et des saisons. J'imagine pourtant qu'une bibliothèque ressemble à un gigantesque entrepôt de parfum . . .

—Signore Typoce, dit Régis Copeyton en tapotant du bout des ongles le marbre de la table devant le commerçant,

avez-vous déjà observé (même de loin, depuis la fenêtre d'un train,

même à grande vitesse) que l'eau d'un canal qui longe une rivière n'est pas la même eau que l'eau de la rivière?

L'eau du canal est plus haute, droite, plus épaisse, de couleur incertaine et toujours identique sous le soleil et sous la pluie; demeure des rats huileux

compagnons des gardiens d'écluses préposés aux écoulements réguliers, l'eau silencieuse d'un canal s'évacue sans couler: petites chutes réticentes entre les vannes rouillées des biefs.

Comme les livres d'une bibliothèque, Signore Typoce, l'objet-eau d'un canal se débite par tranches: des quantités qui entrent et qui sortent, étiquettes, tampons, horaires,

emprunts et prêts consignés, au jour le jour, dans les registres; rien à voir avec les parfums, le commerce et l'eau d'une rivière!

—Un jour, dit Signore Typoce, j'ai vu le corps d'un noyé, sur l'herbe du talus, au bord d'un chemin de halage. Les pompiers l'avaient repêché.

Dans la brume inhospitalière du matin, un petit groupe regardait. Un ouvrier disait, en secouant la tête: «A midi, quand sa femme saura, sûr qu' ça lui coup'ra l'appétit!»

Il répéta cette phrase plusieurs fois, mais personne ne l'écoutait.

Signore Typoce se tut et Régis Copeyton alluma une cigarette. Une troupe de jeunes garçons passa devant la porte ouverte du Caffè San Marco en faisant claquer leurs semelles sur le trottoir.

L'année qui suivit la guerre, tous les jeudis après-midi, je voyais passer sous les fenêtres de la maison (colonne muette de maigres garçonnets, culottes noires, genoux cagneux, têtes rasées inclinées
vers le sol, chaussures trop grandes et bruyantes) les pensionnaires d'un orphelinat qu'on menait à la promenade.

—Les mots qui revenaient le plus souvent dans le rapport, dit Régis Copeyton, étaient ceux de cadre et d'encadrement.

Marcelin Pleynet

Marcelin Pleynet was born in Lyon in 1933. From 1962 to 1982 he was associate editor of the magazine Tel Quel , a position he now occupies at L'Infini . He also presently holds the chair of aesthetics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His books of poetry include Comme (Paris: Seuil, 1965), Stanze (Seuil, 1973), Rime (Seuil, 1981), Fragments de choeur^[*] (Paris: Denoël, 1984), Les Trois Livres (Seuil, 1984; a collection of three previously published volumes), and La Méthode (Paris: Collectif génération, 1990); his novels are Prise d'otage (Denoël, 1986) and La Vie à deux à trois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Among his critical works are Lautréamont par lui-même (Seuil, 1967), L'Enseignement de la peinture (Seuil, 1971), and Les Modernes et la tradition (Gallimard, 1990).

Selected Publications in English:

Painting and System . Translated by Sima Godfrey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Robert Motherwell . Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Paris: D. Papierski, 1990.

"Again," "She Loves Me," "Jewel Box," "Dialogue," "Tender." Translated by Serge Gavronsky. In Serge Gavronsky, "Ecriture: The French Mind." New Observations , Jan.-Feb. 1988.

"Behind the Window Pane," "A Palace," "The Tree in Prose," "It's Always the Same Word," "Then If We Turn Around," "These Mornings," "To Speak," "Our Words Will Not Be Blind." Translated by Serge Gavronsky. In Serge Gavronsky, Poems and Texts , 198–211. New York: October House, 1969.

"Black," "Of Coal," and "The New Republic," translated by John Ashbery; "These Mornings" and "Where the Light," translated by Harry Mathews; "It's Always the Same Word," translated by Serge Gavronsky. In The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry , edited by Paul Auster, 525–31. New York: Random House, 1982.

"The Method." Translated by Serge Gavronsky. In Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 146–63.

Serge Gavronsky: In reading your work, one is immediately struck by the multiple identities of yours as poet, novelist, art critic, professor of aesthetics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and associate editor at L'Infini . You're also a traveler and a specialist on postmodernism. When you look at your wide-ranging work, do you see it as a series of fragments or rather as a continuity? Is there one or are there many Pleynets under the same signature?

Marcelin Pleynet: I believe there's only one! I feel absolutely no division between my various activities, and I would rather think they all make up a keyboard on which I can play. My writings on art, for instance, are determined by my poetic language, as well as by a literary language that characterizes these particular writings. Lectures, speeches, lessons all play on a certain oral function that, as far as I can see, is extremely useful to refine, to develop, in order to exercise the many possibilities of language itself. As for taking trips, we all know how they educate the young, and I hope to go on many more!

SG: Would you care to expand on this concept of orality, which Paul Zumthor has mined and which has a distinct identity when you consider its presence in American poetics? In your own poetry, there seems to be an evident trajectory, from Comme to Rime , for example, in which the content has become increasingly frank, I might even say autocritical and autobiographical, and in which the writing too has forsaken a certain cultural paradigm characteristic of the sixties. Now, in your latest work, you seem to be more aware of an oral presence, which allows you to make explicit a particular problematic using spoken language in opposition to that denser, literary écriture found in Comme .

MP: For a long time I think I confused, and was confused about, the relationship between parole and écriture. I am now working on this subject in a very elaborate manner, since I'm looking at Homer, a poet solely of the voice, in whose work writing is nonexistent. When I refer to my own works—going back to Provisoire amant des nègres , and even prior to that—when I reread them now, écriture, though

it wasn't always clear to me then, was always secondary to parole and orality. Always secondary, always. If what I've written has an identity (a quality), that's solely and entirely where it lies. It's much more in the way the writing is carried by the voice than the manner in which writing becomes a norm, an authority; in fact, I'm drawn to all that's founded on particularly elliptical forms of language, on especially fragmented syntactical forms that lack "respect." Quite obviously, écriture cannot tolerate this sort of intervention, one of invention. Only an oral composition can allow it. That seems to me to be something that inhabits what I have been writing from the very beginning.

From a different perspective, I would even say that in my essays, and in texts of a purely speculative nature, parole has always given quality and dimension to an endeavor that for me has always been one of meaning. If there's one thing that characterizes what I've been trying to do as opposed to what was being done at the same time, it's that I took as my starting point the difficulty of establishing meaning, faced with a will to do so, whereas in the poetry written by my contemporaries, the project was quite often just the reverse: they took off from an explicit meaning, faced with a will to suppress meaning. If I look back at the trajectory I may have followed, I believe that this will to manifest meaning, which wasn't clear at the outset, tends to clarify itself over time and becomes, in fact, more and more explicit. I recently observed—two or three years ago, when my first three books of poetry were republished—that one of my primary concerns had been to divorce myself from surrealism, that is, from the particular decision to evacuate meaning in a sort of surrealism, idealism . . . an esoterism. I was made aware of that in my first three books and even in those that followed. There I still hadn't quite succeeded. That poetry was still marked by certain surrealist elements. The next book of poetry I publish will definitely put an end to that! Let's say that in many of the poems I've published, there lingered traces of a surrealist rhetoric. The next book leaves all that far behind. It is, by contrast, extremely explicit, extremely clear, and I think it will be rather unexpected!

SG: This is particularly interesting since both then in France and now in the U.S., through a mimetic effect, there's a tendency to insist on écriture as a way of expelling voice in the play of orality. This tendency corresponds to a cultural direction in France aimed at rediscovering the subject, a nongrammatical, real I , and an admission that if writing does not tolerate infractions, giving voice a body does.

MP: The situation is slightly more complicated. It goes back to a point of view that could perhaps be defined like this: at the end of the war, that part of French culture—the dominant strain, if you will—was perhaps more than ever a truly nineteenth-century culture, and it has remained essentially so for many subsequent generations. One might say that the nineteenth century is the French cultural referent. That particular outlook is at odds with an ideology of science, of philosophic knowledge, which quite evidently confronts and resists the problem of voice, with its effects of irrationality borne by language; so the result is, on the one hand, a sort of neoromantic logorrhea and, on the other, an increasingly evident retention of the rational. I would roughly place that emphasis on rationality under the heading of Mallarmé, in that what is significant for Mallarmé is the coming of Hegel, Hegel having reached France only in the latter part of the last century. Thus, we are now confronting a particular resistance to a great part of French culture.

When I first began writing I struggled against that part of French culture, as did everybody, and so I looked more in the direction of eccentricity—as in the case of Lautréamont, on the one hand, who took on science through a humorous critique, or of Baudelaire, on the other. As I began to understand the contradictions on that nineteenth-century horizon, contradictions within it, with people like Baudelaire, whole options from earlier periods opened up, and with them, possibilities of discovering a linguistic invention borne by the human voice, syntactical as well as lexical inventions, extremely rich ones. This new direction also allowed me to shed a philosophical inhibition found in French classics, to play with a certain strain going back to Bossuet, continuing with Chateaubriand, and culminating in

Proust—that magnificent prose—and in terms of poetry, as I see it, going back to poets like Rabelais and Villon. Theirs is a poetry borne more by the voice than by a scriptural norm, and all the more, if I may say so, because it was expressed in a preclassical language. This is the French that was thrown out, a language rich in virtualities, all the richer given the fact that, in tracing this development back in time, one can see that French has tended to expel all sexual connotations, of the voice too, and to employ a quasi-philosophical poetic language, taking the pre-Socratics as its source, that is, going back to find a source in Greek volumes whose very makeup we know little about.

This seems to be the road traveled, as I see it today, up to the book of poems I hope to publish within the coming year.

SG: You've offered a number of clarifications, and they point to at least two further links: first, a Hegelianized Mallarmé, which unquestionably marks a redefinition of écriture in France; second, one that may be closer to your own evolution, namely, Russian Formalism, something that may have been too loosely categorized as structuralist, and a preeminence accorded to linguistics, one effect of which has been the exclusion of the body from the text. Structural linguistics was so interested in the analysis of an almost surrational mind, at times perceived as the unconscious, that it imposed a rhetorical stance on a whole generation of French poets, who came to see in it the very definition of poetry. One of the consequences of that view was a veiling of the erotic, the body in orality. No sexuality through syntagmatic consciousness! And I think people who were attracted by that . . .

MP: Certainly. And yet I believe this passage through Formalism was very useful for us and is still extremely useful; it's indispensable, and I'm not at all embarrassed by the reign of what was then called theoretism in France, whether we're talking about Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis through Freud and Lacan, or a certain Marxist approach, certain Marxist analyses. The issue that comes out of all this is never to place any discipline, whatever it may be, in a dominating position vis-à-vis literature and literary writing itself. If that

principle is observed, all disciplines are very useful, and I can easily exploit any one of them, alongside my own activities, as part of the keyboard. As long as I remain master of the keyboard and there's no superego telling me how to play it, then all these disciplines are extremely useful.

Psychoanalysis is unquestionably useful, as long as it isn't allowed to rule over literature. It's literally impossible to do without it! I cannot see how a contemporary, a fortiori an artist, could do without it, could bypass it as an instrument at his disposal. As I see it, the only problem is how it's going to be used. If the artist submits to its authority, well, quite clearly, that authority will speak on his behalf. If he uses what he sees, and not necessarily as an artist but as a human being, then all will turn out properly. Let's not forget, the subjective constitution of the individual who writes is the determining fact. Thus, all disciplines must exist in a practice that is totally free and subject to the least amount of fear.

SG: In your first published novel, Prise d'otage (1986), one can find some of these elements you've just named. They figure there with a vengeance, whereas in your poetry, at least up to Rime , there has always been a degree of restraint. What was hushed in the poetic text is here rendered explicit . . .

MP: Implicitly inexplicit, though heavily charged with autobiographical elements! As far as the novel goes, it holds to the same perspective I've described, since the novelist must also make use of the full keyboard. In its discursive manner, the novel allows for the treatment of certain trivialities of biography that poetry can only treat elliptically, unless one were to revive the great tradition of classical rhetoric. But I don't believe our century lends itself to such long rhetorical movements, those extended musical movements. We live in a society where the consumption of discourse involves speed of action. Poetry, as a result, can't make it. However, the novel can, and it's a way of situating one's position as a writer in our time. It may be our only option today for doing what Dante did in the Divine Comedy , that is, to put certain of his contemporaries in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise.

Today there may be no other possibilities outside the novel for that. I cannot see poetry doing that today, given that it can't enter into those lengthy rhetorical developments that were its proper nature during certain periods in the past.

Thus, I believe the novel has a dual responsibility: to take into consideration both biographical material and the place of the artist within that biographical material. In the case of my own novel, it clarifies certain misunderstandings about me—for example, the belief that I was at one time a Communist, at another a Maoist, and that today, as I've heard some young critics assert, I'm a Catholic! The novel makes my identity clear: I'm an anarchist. And I believe that there's no other position for the artist, for the creator.

SG: Is it impossible for this anecdotal, biographical, narrative material to enter poetry after Villon without falling into the style of a SaintJohn Perse?

MP: Yes, unless one were to reestablish a rhetorical pattern . . .

SG: According to what you've just said, the advantage of a novelistic narrative is that it allows the inscription of the body in prose, whereas it had been made elliptical in poetry.

MP: There's that and, in connection with Villon or Dante, the manifestation of the place of the creator, in his biography as well as in his story. Situating the creator in the work is an experience transcended by a religious experience. For Dante, that's perfectly explicit. Dante arranged his story, and himself in his story, on the basis of a theological grid. That's obviously impossible for us to do today. And later, in our time, something else appears that we also cannot take into consideration, namely, a belief in the psyche, in a psyche of sorts—that is, in the importance of psychology. Freud's contribution was the language of the psyche; we're no longer within the psyche. From that point of view, novelistic narrativity allows one to remove oneself from the reductionism of psychology and to treat, through narration, that logic peculiar to the psyche. For me, this is the decisive feature of the novel today because that logic of the psyche, which is also the logic of the writer, my logic, my own logic, has now found a grid, however

different from the theological one, that can act as a substitute. It allows for a distribution of the order of values within a logical determination.

SG: Don't you think that such an enterprise has been facilitated today by the reinscription of the subject in the text? Not long ago, with Lacan, the identity of the subject was other than the one now defined novelistically. Today, at least, we have that particular advantage . . .

MP: Absolutely . . .

SG: The filling out of the absent subject allows us to express ourselves in a different manner.

MP: It allows the writer to assume his own identity.

The Method

The correct method of teaching poetry,
that art is limited to the propositions
of established sciences, with all possible clarity
and exactitude, leaving poetic
enunciations to the student and proving to him,
at every turn, that they are
meaningless.

Distressing reduction of the vocabulary
of modern poetry
syntaxic retention
galloping schizoid
exploitation
dissimulation
mental misery.

                Misery of Poetry.
                Poetry of Misery.

Mallarmé:
"The boorishness of Men of Letters . . . is perfect,
I'm still furious,
even though I'm hardly one of them."

At best
contemporary poets
make literature (men of letters).
When one knows that literature in France
means the 19th century!

The 19th century once and for all . . .?
What a bore!

Mallarmé

    today required detour via Villon (Céline)

Mallarmé

    too intelligent for poets
    he immediately convinced them

"What comes from teaching must go back to it."

Break the Mallarmean lock:
esoteric pulp.
Pick up Villon—classical rhetoric—
experience:
         Racine-Baudelaire.
         Exoteric Rimbaud
         ("Gelding? Not an inch.")

Living language. Spoken language
(Written language is a bureaucratic language)

Quality of language: Quality of a body
Experience quantity
Experience the quantity of a body

Living tradition: Logic of experience.

The qualities of the French language
are inseparable from the science of language:
rhetoric, a new science,
the cornerstone of our own practice.
Guillaume de Saint Amour
the first to have used this new science.
Guillaume de Machaut
"the great rhetorician of this new form."
La Fontaine.
Bossuet: oratory art

Baudelaire:
        "Unless you've studied rhetoric
        With Satan, that clever master,
        Junk it! You haven't learned a thing."

                Lautréamont:
                The phenomenon passes, I look for laws.

Necessity of maintaining everything.
Precipitation of actions.
Precipitation of information:

                    diversity
                    practical truth
                    volume of languages
                    as quality
                    and as quantity
                    (everything as it was in  Stanze )

"materialism is in itself a grandiose poetry"
Against that miserable idealism of contemporary poetry
Stupid idealism . . . how sad!

Mallarmé: "You'll note that one cannot write
luminously on a dark field . . .
man pursues black on white."

Black on white: "I should not fail to seed
             In your field when the fruit is fine
             God commands I fertilize the field
             That being the reason you are mine."
             Villon.

             "and the preacher became a man corrupted
             by nature's way, unable to define

             nature's corruption."
             Sade.

A man corrupted by nature is
a man who fails to acknowledge
the corrupt nature of man,
a sort of plant

cf. a plant or mineral poetry.

Lucette Destouche on Céline:

        "He can be compared to those Hindus who
        don't come. They can stop on their way
        to an orgasm. Same for him.
        It was his matter,  his instrument ."

         Rime, Venetian love, The Women and he
        (clearer). Experience never
        assures quantity but variation:
        keyboard . . . volume.

        "Joyously, that's what lovers sign
        Love writes it in his volume
        That being the reason you are mine."
        Villon.

Keyboard: the body of thought.
         If indeed as Diderot writes:
         "My thoughts are my whores."
Daily exercises.
Quite agreeable to say the least:

eroticization of vocabulary
quantity
enraptured by quantity
quality
    without waiting for
                the practice
                the exercise of the sexual body
                (right?)
                thought active on the keyboard
                energy
                action
                swiftness of decision
                fusion of reasoning
                breath
                rhythm
                time
                eternity
                vital force.

                              One cannot be short of breath!

When the queen of Sheba met Solomon

        "no  rûah  was left in her"
        (it took her breath away
        she was transported
        her animation and her vitality were as if suspended
        by an extraordinary spectacle:
        loss of  rûah  (breath)
       diminution of vitality
       entry into the sphere of death)

II Kings 2

       Elisha wishes to have a double share
       of Elijah's  rûah
       "Might I inherit a double share of your spirit."
       Truly a question of Elijah's vitality, removed and transmitted
       at the end of his life. Elisha will first make use
       of it to cross the Jordan (miracle)
       then to render fertile (gift of progeniture)
       the earth, watered by Elisha's Fountain or spring of water.

                            Needless to say, it's as you wish.

Poetry, however, must say everything.

La Méthode

La méthode juste pour enseigner la poésie,
l'art se limite aux propositions
des sciences établies, avec toute la clarté
et l'exactitude possibles, laissant les énoncés
poétiques à l'élève et lui prouvant,
chaque fois qu'il y a recours, qu'ils sont
sans signification.

Affligeant amaigrissement du vocabulaire
de la poésie moderne
rétention syntaxique
schizoïde galopante
exploitation
dissimulation
misère mentale.

                Misère de la poésie.
                Poésie de la misère.

Mallarmé:
«La goujaterie des Gens de lettres . . . est parfaite,
je n'en décolère pas,
encore que je sois si peu un d'entre eux.»

Au mieux
les poètes contemporains
font de la littérature (gens de lettres).
Quand on sait que littérature en France
signifie XIXe siècle!

Le XIXe siècle une fois pour toutes . . .?
Quel ennui!

Mallarmé

    aujourd'hui détour obligé par Villon (Céline)

Mallarmé

    trop intelligent pour les poètes
    il les a tout de suite convaincus

«Ce qui vient de l'enseignement doit y retourner.»

Faire sauter le verrou mallarméen:
bouillie ésotérique.
Reprendre Villon—rhétorique classique—
expérience:
        Racine-Baudelaire.
        Rimbaud exotérique
        («pas hongre pour un sou»)

Langue vivante. Langue parlée
(La langue écrite est une langue de fonctionnaire)

Qualité d'une langue: Qualité d'un corps
Faire l'expérience de la quantité
Faire l'expérience de la quantité d'un corps

Tradition vivante: Logique de l'expérience.

Les qualités de la langue française
sont indissociables de la science du langage:
la rhétorique, la nouvelle science,
celle qui pose les fondations de notre pratique.
Guillaume de Saint Amour
le premier qui traita la nouvelle science.
Guillaume de Machaut
«le grand rhétorique de la nouvelle forme.»
La Fontaine.
Bossuet: l'art oratoire

Baudelaire:
        «Si tu n'as fait ta rhétorique
        Chez Satan, le rusé doyen,
        Jette! Tu n'y comprendrais rien»

                Lautréamont:
                Le phénomène passe, je cherche les lois.

Nécessité de tout maintenir.
Précipitation des actions.
Précipitation des informations:

                    diversité
                    vérité pratique
                    volume de langues
                    comme qualité
                    et comme quantité
                    (tout en l'état dans Stanze)

«le matérialisme est en soi une poésie grandiose»
Contre l'idéalisme malheureux de la poésie contemporaine
L'idéalisme bête . . . quelle tristesse!

Mallarmé: «Tu remarqueras, on n'écrit pas
lumineusement sur champ obscur . . .
l'homme poursuit noir sur blanc.»

Noir sur blanc: «Si ne perds pas la graine que je sume
            En votre champ quand le fruit me ressemble
            Dieu m'ordonne que le fouisse et fume
            Et c'est la fin pourquoi sommes ensemble.»
            Villon.

            «et le prédicant devint un homme corrompu
            par la nature faute d'avoir pu expliquer

            ce qu'était la nature corrompue.»
            Sade.

Un homme corrompu par la nature est
un homme qui ne veut rien savoir
de la nature corrompue de l'homme,
une sorte de végétal

cf. poésie du végétal, ou du minéral.

Lucette Destouche, à propos de Céline:

        «On peut le comparer à ces Hindous qui
        ne jouissent pas. Ils peuvent s'arrêter sur
        le chemin de l'orgasme. Lui c'était pareil.
        C'était sa matière,  son instrument .»

         Rime, l'Amour vénitien, Elles et lui
        (plus clair). L'expérience ne fait
        jamais quantité mais variation:
        clavier . . . volume.

        «Joyeusement ce qu'aux amants bon semble
        Sachez qu'amour l'écrit en son volume
        Et c'est la fin pourquoi nous sommes ensemble.»
        Villon.

Clavier: le corps de la pensée.
        Si en effet comme l'écrit Diderot:
        «Mes pensées ce sont mes catins.»
Exercices quotidiens.
Fort agréables au demeurant:

érotisation du vocabulaire
quantité
emportement de la quantité
qualité
    sans attendre
                  la pratique
                  l'exercice du corps sexué
                  (n'est-ce pas?)
                  la pensée active en clavier
                  énergie
                  action
                  rapidité de décision
                  fusion du raisonnement
                  souffle
                  rythme
                  temps
                  éternité
                  force vitale.

                              Il ne faut pas manquer de souffle!

Lorsque la reine de Saba rencontra Salomon

       «il n'y eu plus en elle de  rûah »
        (elle en perdit le souffle
        elle fut ravie
        son animation et sa vitalité furent comme suspendues
        par un spectacle extraordinaire:
        perte de la  rûah  (le souffle)
        diminution de la vitalité
        entrée dans la sphère de la mort)

Livre des Rois II, 2

        Elisée souhaite avoir double part de la
        Rûah  d'Elie
        «Puisse-je avoir double part de ton esprit.»
        Il s'agit bien de la vitalité d'Elie, ôtée et transmise
        quand sa vie est finie. Elisée s'en servira
        d'abord pour traverser le Jourdain (miracle)
        puis pour rendre fertile (douée de progéniture)
        la terre qu'arrose la source ou Fontaine d'Elisée.

                                  C'est bien entendu comme vous voulez.

La poésie, pourtant, doit tout dire.

Jacques Roubaud

Jacques Roubaud was born in Caluire-et-Cuire, outside Lyon, in 1932 and teaches mathematics at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He has published S (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), Mono no aware: Le Sentiment des choses (Gallimard, 1970; 143 poems from the Japanese), Renga , with Octavio Paz, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson (Gallimard, 1971), Autobiographie, Chap. X (Gallimard, 1977), Graal Théâtre (Gallimard, 1977), Graal Fiction (Gallimard, 1978), La Vieillesse d'Alexandre, essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (Paris: François Maspero, 1978), Dors, précédé de Dire la poésie (Gallimard, 1981), Le Roi Arthur au temps des chevaliers et des enchanteurs (Paris: Hachette, 1983), Quelque chose noir (Gallimard, 1986), La Belle Hortense (Paris: Ramsay, 1985), L'Enlèvement d'Hortense (Ramsay, 1987), Le Grand Incendie de Londres (Seuil, 1989), and L'Exil d'Hortense (Paris: Seghers, 1990); he has edited Les Troubadours, anthologie bilingue (Seghers, 1971), Vingt poètes américains (Gallimard, 1980), and Soleil du soleil: Le Sonnet français de Marot à Malherbe, Anthologie (Paris: P.O.L., 1990).

Selected Publications in English:

Great Fire of London . Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991.

Hortense in Exile . Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992.

Hortense Is Abducted . Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989.

Our Beautiful Heroine . Translated by David Kornacker. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1987.

La Pluralité des mondes de Lewis , sections i-xv. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Long News in the Short Century 4 (1993): 55–69.

The Princess Hoppy, or the Tale of Labrador . Translated by Bernard Hoepfner. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993.

Renga . A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson. Translated by Charles Tomlinson. New York: Braziller, 1971.

Some Thing Black . Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989.

Poems from Quelque chose noir . Translated by Robert Kelly. In Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 181–82.

"The Best Thing," "Small Sieve," and "Oakland Rose Garden," translated by Neil Baldwin; "Sun Noise," "You Are Safe," "Time," "I Dream," and "(Drowning)," translated by Robert Kelly. In The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry , edited by Paul Auster, 514–23. New York: Random House, 1982.

"I Cannot Write About You," "The Idea of This Place," "This Very Thing, Your Death and the Poem," "Dialogue," "Tone," "You Escape Me," "Universe," "Naive World," and "Aphasia." Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Série d'écriture , no.3 (1989): 52–60.

"Is Le Pen French?" Translated by Norma Cole. Série d'écriture , no.7 (1993): 7.

Serge Gavronsky: You are a poet, one of the key representatives of the Oulipo group,^[*] as well as a playwright, novelist, critic, and professor of mathematics at the University of Paris. How do you see yourself in the midst of this universe that contains almost every form of writing, including mathematics?

Jacques Roubaud: For me mathematics is a form of writing because, for one thing, that's truly what it is, materially speaking, in the sense that although I do not type out my mathematics, I do write it down by hand, on paper or on a blackboard; it's a habit formed over many years, representing an enormous amount of writing. Besides, it's a mode of writing that is unifying for me, a sort of paradigm for all the others put together. There is something in mathematical activity, specifically, fundamentally, that directs and organizes what I may do elsewhere. While that's perfectly true, it doesn't mean that there are no differences for me between these types of activities. On the contrary, I'm someone who rather likes separations; that is, when I write poetry, it's not prose, it's not fiction, it's not a story. Even within fiction, I try to establish rather strong stylistic separations between fiction, which is of a novelistic nature, and the tale, which is closer to a medieval inspiration. I'm able to separate these various forms of writing in a formal manner, as I'm used to doing in mathematics.

It's all organized around mathematics: that discovery marked a decisive moment for me, since it gave me the very possibility of writing. I'd always had the intention of writing poetry, novels, or anything else, but it was only after a rather lengthy passage through the exemplary practice of mathematics that I really found a unifying thread. In mathematics I found myself in front of an element of both originality and isolation. I discovered after the fact that this approach had already been taken by Raymond Queneau's Oulipo school, which I didn't know about when I started writing. But let's say that Oulipo is only one piece of this relation between mathematics and all the other forms of writing, since the paths it follows are severely limiting. For

[*] For more on the Oulipo group, see my Introduction, note I and pages 28–29.

me, then, they are not the only ones to follow; thus, in taking mathematics as a model, I see it not only as an object to be transposed but also as a strategic aim. That's what is essential, after all: this way of driving a text, of leading it forward, based on nonobservable evidence, with a certain type of pretextual control over the writing that belongs wholly to a mental discipline and is not necessarily subject to explicit constraints. In this fashion, mathematics plays perhaps an even greater role than in the Oulipian concept.

SG: When you speak about mathematics in this way, two interpretations come to mind. Mathematics is, first of all, a practice that follows specific rules, axioms, a certain mechanization, a certain language, even a certain conduct—a predictability that can nonetheless culminate in surprise. And second, as a historical discipline, it is well ordered, classified, with roots that go far back, yet from this perspective as well, an individual work may lead to an explosive surprise. Would you, then, consider poetry in a similar vein? Would you say that work on language begins with equal precision but can also contain the unpredictable, an element of surprise—pleasure, in a word? Wouldn't that, at least in part, define the pleasure of writing?

JR: You've got two questions here. If I maintain the analogy on the same strategic level, then the analogy would go very far—even though mathematical writing has its own specificity, the procedure is the same. In mathematical work specifically, the part of the unpredictable and of the surprise is perhaps equally important. Here I would have to indicate that I'm a certain kind of mathematician. Put simply, there are mathematicians who try to resolve problems that have been put forth. Those are the ones who are most appreciated in the mathematical community, and with good reason! They are the great Lords of Mathematics. And then there are mathematicians who write mathematics without in fact ever resolving a specific problem that exists in the tradition, so that it's left in suspension. That's the case with me, for obvious reasons, since I'm not a full-time mathematician, and I'm less so now than I've ever been. And one essentially needs to be full-time!

Well, I don't belong to that first category, and in the second instance, mathematics is bound with the very definition of the object one is looking for. No one can tell where such inquiries may lead! From that point of view, I have before me a type of mathematical work that rather resembles poetic work, with one further connection: In mathematical work, there is in all hypotheses something cumulative. At least if one doesn't change fields, if one sticks to the same one, there are things one acquires, whereby one achieves certain results and depends on these results in order to go elsewhere and beyond. In a certain way I do the same thing when I write poetry. I never start from zero every time, and thus there exists a set of problems that I've posed for myself and that I attempt to solve. Thus I would be tempted to affirm that a unity does exist between the two and that separations are introduced only on the formal level.

SG: Readers of what you've written as a poet might perceive, if not jumps, at least distinctive types of écritures, starting with your work with Oulipo, the renga [a chain of poems], and culminating with Quelque chose noir . Perhaps in your own mind all that constitutes a single forward movement, but to the common reader, it might easily seem like a series of moments, ones that have been worked through but aren't necessarily connected.

JR: It's true that all the questions asked of a mathematical object are extremely distant one from the other. To the extent that I do a lot of work on rules, on strategies, projects, that may have an influence. Had my work been a single entity from the beginning—and there are illustrious examples of that, of people who set out with a long view, and everything constitutes a sort of life that evolves right to the end . . . I am not like that. Probably because I don't have the capacity to see that far ahead; as a result there's a certain unity, that of the book, and I work on a particular book according to a specific strategy, a formal strategy that's not independent of the others but doesn't resemble them. It is strongly autonomous; it separates itself from the others and, despite everything—and it's not easy to tell straight out, simply; one would have to look at it in a technical manner—I think

that I can see a certain unity, that unity remaining, more or less, an axiomatic procedure.

SG: When one looks over the whole of your writing, that strategy does not seem to precede the subject. It becomes, all the while, a perceptible aspect of the work, but in retrospect one can still be surprised in going from one collection to the other, from one text to the other, and seeing in each something new. I have in mind, for example, the place of politics, the part that affection plays, and the place of travel; as a result one might find it difficult to affirm, axiomatically, that a strategy precedes the invention of the text.

JR: True, and that, I believe, also applies to the way I conceive of my mathematical work. And if I can come up with a reference on this subject, which is a rather difficult one, I would probably mention Wittgenstein. That is, in each case it is a game of language, and the modes of apprehension are very close. What Wittgenstein says about mathematics is more profound than what one usually hears. People haven't really understood, because it doesn't really resemble what had been said about mathematics in the past, but for me, specifically, it's a very important aspect. It reveals a powerful analogical connection between two types of activity; for him mathematics is not only a game of language but a form of life. Thus, quite evidently, not everything is present right from the moment of departure. What one finds at the beginning are some of the rules of the game: a certain directing strategy, certain stylistic elements that in mathematics are very present, much more so than is commonly believed.

SG: Visual elements, too?

JR: Oh, yes. The way of placing things, of arranging them on the page, the way one is going to frame arguments. All that gives a particular style to each mathematician, and that's very evident. Thus, the part of the predetermined is not overly important. It is a formal piece of the work, and the form is a measured form.

SG: One might then say that within the order of signs there is a semiotized evolution: something is happening. When one reads a book that consecrates you, that is, when you become part of the Poètes d'au -

jourd'hui series published by Seghers, you acquire a name akin to that of those writers and poets buried at Père Lachaise cemetery! To find oneself in that Seghers group is a sign that Jacques Roubaud is part of French poetry. But what equally interests me, having seen your Perceval at the Avignon theater festival in 1986, is your passion for the Middle Ages. And on top of that, your equally strong interest in foreign poetry, let's say, Japanese and American poetry. Would you say something about what you have done to adapt texts from the Middle Ages and how you've translated poetry from other languages into French?

JR: The central model for me is troubadour poetry. Thus, my interest in foreign poetry, whether distant in time or space, linguistically or not, is only a variant, an exploration of the same type of connection, which is a relation to a past model: original, prestigious, nostalgizing. I don't deny any of that! It's perfectly true for troubadour poetry, since that is the paradigmatic illustration of the privileged relation between what is said and the form within which poetry is inscribed. But there's a second aspect to this choice, an aspect of refusal. The writer's situation—is it modernist? postmodernist? I don't know. The situation of the individual writing in the twentieth century is somewhat characterized by solitude. The poet is alone before the problem; thus, not wanting to be, unconsciously, a follower, I prefer to choose rather distant models, with which my relation is relatively simpler on the affective level! In other words, the medieval reference or the one to Japan, to a foreign poetry, is a reflection of the difficulty of finding a ready position in what is being written today. I think that's true for practically everybody.

SG: In the case of troubadour poetry, which today seems to be gaining favor, one can appreciate an eroticization of language. The woman, as many have observed, is simultaneously real and the secret object of desire of écriture itself. Does this model, which plays—to pick up your notion of the game and Wittgenstein's—with the real, equally apply to contemporary American poetry? Do you feel the same distance? The same relation?

JR: Not as great.

SG: Then where does this desire come from? Would you place yourself in line with American poetry from the fifties on?

JR: There is a certain identification . . .

SG: Doesn't that connection suppose, in an immediate manner, nearly everything you've just said about troubadour poetics and the poetics of mathematics?

JR: True. My appreciation of American poetry was more evident before than it is now, because—and this is of course my own reading— a great American poetry arose essentially during the sixties, and since then things have slowed down, weakened. That's how I feel about it now. In any case, I'm not as interested in it as I once was. But clearly it was for me a form of deracination, since I wasn't in my "system," not at all! Undoubtedly there is a general relation between mathematical discipline, the linguistic conception of troubadour poets, and even medieval Japanese poetry, insofar as I can gather. What I notice is that they're all written along the same lines; thus, American poetry doesn't really concern me, except for Zukofsky, whose concerns were close to mine. But that's something else. Outside of that, for the most part those American poets who did interest me have nothing whatsoever to do with what I've just said. On my part, then, my interest in American poetry was an attempt not to close myself off.

But here again there's something I must note, and that is my particular relation to language itself. I have a false paternal language— to oversimplify things!—which is Provençal, since my father spoke it when he was a child. And I've got a false maternal language, since my mother was a professor of English. Thus, when you talk about the relation an individual may have to language, it's much more complicated than one ordinarily assumes. French is the language I learned and that I speak and use to write, but I've got, at least on the imaginal level, two other languages: Provençal and English. Since contemporary English poetry doesn't thrill me, I turned to American poetry. I like that language very much. My readings are practically all in English.

SG: What about translation? There, too, there's a system with which one can play: elements that can be controlled much like a scientific formula. As a translator, are you conscious of a prior theoretical mechanism that permits you to apprehend the multiplicity of American poetry? Or is translation just a pleasurable enterprise that takes up your time?

JR: In fact those two things do not connect. I have thought to introduce the translational idea into a system I work in, but I've never attained this in practice. For example, I haven't translated troubadour poetry. In my troubadour anthology, I provide translations of an informational nature. But I haven't gone beyond that. I have a certain difficulty . . . it may be too intense an investment. So I translate American poetry, through a form of appropriation that follows no real principles. I translate texts I like!

SG: Can't it be said that your play Perceval is in a sense a translation? And perhaps more than a translation, since it joins a number of contemporary political issues to those of a venerated past? Doesn't this lexical ambivalence play on a theory of translation?

JR: Absolutely.

SG: What made you want to go beyond the language of those original texts (texts by Robert de Boron and Chrétien de Troyes, but none by troubadour poets) and, extending their lexical identities, introduce words, associations—in a way, introduce elements that disturb the audience?

JR: The decisive role troubadour poetry plays for me is in the end theoretical, formal. That is probably why I keep the substance of the text, the object of the poetry, within those bounds. I didn't really attempt to translate troubadour texts, because had I done so there would have been a double register. I haven't yet translated the troubadours, and I don't know if I'm ever going to, but I was far less concerned in dealing with other medieval texts. That's a particular way of approaching the problem of translation; it's a spontaneous decision: I'm not working toward a restitution.

SG: In accordance with Pound?

JR: Yes, that's it. "Make it New!" But all the while keeping elements of rhyme, that is, keeping a necessary distance, so that it remains readable.

SG: I enjoyed reading the trobairitz , the women troubadour poets, and as I read them I was trying to figure out if there was a possibility of recognizing the gender distinction—in a difference in imagery, in the use of pronouns. When you speak about troubadour poets, do you acknowledge a difference, a male/female distinction?

JR: On the one hand, there's a disequilibrium, to the extent that the tradition has been blotted out. It's quite likely that there were many more texts, but not many have come down to us. What is interesting in those that remain is their indisputable originality and, therefore, a connection to sexual difference. However, it's not as one imagines. To take the best-known example, the comtesse de Die, it isn't a question of seeing her place herself as a woman speaking to her lover, as the tradition supposes. It is a question of the troubadour speaking to his lady. This provides a sort of redoubling, which indisputably gives these trobairitz texts something that's not to be found in the others and that has a specific emotional impact. I believe it is very great poetry.

SG: To what extent does your reaction depend on the fact of the signature, on what Gérard Genette calls the paratext? Besides the comtesse de Die, would you be able to recognize their femininity even in those "anonymous" texts? Would they be different from works written by the troubadours?

JR: The question is important for the troubadours, since for them proper names were essential! There is thus the surface text and the concealed one. The name intervenes with all its philosophic aspects, as well as other aspects . . .

SG: Speaking of signatures, would you be able to characterize current French poetry?

JR: Remember that I myself write and that I'm published, though I'm not associated with any publishing house, nor am I a professional journalist; thus, these two traditional fields do not apply in my case. I have worked with a number of magazines, in a more or less intense

fashion, depending on the moment, and now essentially with Po&Sie , and that allows me to see a part of what's now being done. But it's rather difficult to get a coherent view of the whole. I once had such a view, back when I was working on a formal project on the subject; I studied the state of poetry in the seventies for a book that later came out in 1978. At that time I did read more or less everything of significance that had been published in the previous twenty-five years. Then I did have a rather clear idea of what was going on. But when one writes oneself and possibly also reads literary submissions to magazines and discusses them with the editors, one really has a narrower view—though my view is not all that narrow, since I'm on the poetry commission of the Centre national des lettres, where many things do pass before my eyes, whether texts for which financial support is requested by publishers or those put forward for grants by poets themselves. Given all that, I'm relatively well informed about what's going on. What, then, are my feelings?

Well, many things are being done. There is a vast and rather rich activity in writing and publishing. There are many magazines and small presses that do absolutely remarkable things, in both the quality of the texts and their presentation. These projects develop even though the content is often inaccessible to a large public. I've been told there's a boom in poetry in England; I was reading an article on that subject in PM Review . It does seem that according to sales figures the situation in publishing and in bookstores is more favorable there than it is here, but since in general I have a rather unfavorable opinion of contemporary British poetry—that's quite a global statement!—I don't really know what that means. Does it mean that what French poets are writing is of no interest and that they merit their fate Many take that view. French poets are not read because that's what they merit! That's not at all my view. But perhaps that's it. I'm not quite sure. One might suppose that it's a latent situation, and something may yet develop. But that's not evident.

SG: What I've become aware of in speaking to poets is that there is today a degree of freedom from what I've considered a formal rigidity that

typified earlier works, where in fact the "work" predominated, so that to an uninitiated reader, one who was outside the group, that production was nearly unintelligible. Work itself became a source of both pleasure and tactical positioning. Today it seems to me there's greater flexibility, and among those between forty and fifty years old, a more subjective element, in some cases even a humorous one, appearing in their work, and this without their necessarily rejecting previous attitudes, previous modes of conceiving the poetic text. I too would then say that things are changing. A literary critic and a former series editor at Flammarion to whom I asked the same question insisted that this was a period of uncertainty. I am not wholly convinced of that. Those traditional readers of poetry who bemoan the loss of Apollinaire or Prévert are no doubt disappointed today. Perhaps it is only their inability to applaud their generation's poetry! But I wouldn't say that because of this shift toward subjectivity and a return to the narrative I , writing itself is in a state of malaise.

JR: I don't believe that either. One can compare this change to what took place fifteen to twenty years ago, in the sixties; seen in a rather optimistic light, the extreme theorizing tension or violent and rapid modes of conceiving écriture were completely different from what had been done before. One would then expect a degree of relief, a certain laughter that becomes possible in this effort to expand into the space thus opened up. That would be an optimistic reading of the situation.

Apart from that, what actually has happened? Here we owe a considerable debt to Americans, for in the U.S., a tradition of public readings has developed. In my own case, though I didn't want to go this past March, I received thirty-nine invitations to places as unbelievable as Bar-le-Duc, Clermont l'Hérault . . . everywhere! There are more and more readings in France these days. Many among the post-sixties generation have entered the field and enlisted in cultural activities: they've organized readings, meetings. Today there's a possibility for readings and exchanges that never existed fifteen years ago. In that sense, things are much better. But this activity has not

extended beyond a group of amateurs, a group of between one thousand and ten thousand who are interested in poetry. I don't know if things are going to change, but if it doesn't fill you with anxiety not to have a hundred thousand readers—that's the novelist's anxiety, since I believe the situation for a novelist is much more difficult—you can listen to poetry. Things aren't really that bad!

SG: In conversations with editors of small presses in France, I was struck by the fact that bookstores in university neighborhoods don't seem to order their books, which are printed on exquisite paper and often include artwork. Thinking of the American model, I found that quite surprising, especially now that so many poets go around reading to more and more listeners. Would this state of affairs have anything to do with the way French professors teach contemporary French poetry?

JR: To tell the truth, there's an unbreachable barrier in France between academic and creative life, and it's been that way for a long time. That's how it was in the sixteenth century, and nothing has changed! It is indeed very different from what's happening both in the U.S. and in England. I believe a considerable number of British poets do read in universities and do attract a large audience of students. That doesn't mean that in France there isn't a strong interest in poetry among students and younger members of the faculty. But these are parallel lives; they do not cross.

In my own case it was always a deliberate decision to live within the system; at Nanterre, where I teach, what I'm doing on the outside is entirely ignored. I don't try to bring it in at all  . . . because the proper conditions are not there—neither mental nor material. Let's not forget that readings can be organized on an American campus, whereas in France there are only a few universities outside Paris at which the same can be done. In Paris there's really no place to hold a reading within the university. Where I teach, for instance, there's no place where students might come to hear a poet read. The classrooms are impossible. The setting is impossible. Because of that there are no opportunities. But even in certain universities outside Paris, such as

Grenoble, where there are more campus-like conditions, things like that still don't take place. There are no bridges. That's the university's problem! It's not poetry's problem. And there are other problems with the university; for instance, there are no good university presses. They don't really know how to go about it.

SG: If it's a text on linguistics, then they'll take it! If it's poetry, then nothing happens?

JR: What I have in mind are strong, independent institutions like Cambridge University Press. There's absolutely no equivalent in France. Here, for the most part, what's important is put out by commercial presses. There aren't any great publishing houses coming out of universities, and I believe that shouldn't be seen as separate from that other question pertaining to poetry itself.

A Body and Its Shadow (i)[fn*]A Body and Its Shadow (i)^[*]

        A body and its shadow shared a world

        The shadow's Shadow spread over the body

        This world was the fusion of possible shadows

        And the shadow of every part of this world was itself the fusion
of this world, and of it only

         The shadow, the fusion of the shadow assured the life of this
world

        When the shadow and the shadow's shadow were no longer
united in one world, that world was dead.

[*] The parenthetical numbers in this title and the following ones correspond to sections in the long poem La Pluralité des mondes de Lewis .

One Might Object (ii)

         One might object that there might be nothing rather than
something

         And that if a world is the maximal fusion of all the shadows it
contains, through invisible reflection as by involution, it then might be
possible for an absolutely empty world to exist

         But a world is not a bottle out of which light escapes like smoke

         A world is a necessary truth, not an explanation

         There are no empty worlds, a world is not even empty when it
closes in upon an indiscernible point,

         Disappearing, homogeneous, and unoccupied.

Transworld (iii)

        There is no transworld voyage

        Nor a transworld voyager who might bring his world along
with him

        There is neither privation of continuum nor awakening ahead of
time, nor a special survival of an instantaneous indirection

        I wake up at night, I see the other side of the world

        still, that's not the way I'll reach you

Clean World, Clean World (vi)[fn*]Clean World, Clean World (vi)^[*]

        · Clean world, clean world, not deceptive, but absent

        · if it is absent, it is nowhere, you are nowhere, and that's that.

        · in a clean world you were, you could be: not here but there; or
not there but here; or here then there; there

        · in a clean world there were countless ways to be

        · all other worlds are "rubbishy."

        · this world: infinitely rubbishy; in absence made mine; but you

        · may be, in a clean world, indiscernible from it, and I

        · looking, through an infinity of worlds,

        · for one

[*] This translation is by Jacques Roubaud; the version that follows ("Clean, Clean World [vi-a]") is by Serge Gavronsky.

Clean, Clean World (vi-a)

        · clean, clean world which doesn't deceive, doesn't absent itself,

        · and when absent, then from nowhere; you are nowhere and
that's all.

        · in a clean world you were, you would be, a clean world; if not
here, there; if not there, here; here, then there; there

        · in a clean world there are innumerable ways of existing

        · all other worlds are made of waste.

        · this world: of infinite waste; mine in its absence, you

        · perhaps, in this clean world, indiscernible from mine, but I

        · seeking, out of an infinity of worlds,

        · the one

Similar up to a Point (ix)

1. similar up to a point, they diverged.

2. you would explain it thus (you would have explained it thus)

3. we were two segments of a world, each one the 'double' of the
other; doppelgänger , in a biipsist relation.

4. maximal segments of a world, such as there are no greater ones
and still similar: "I similar to you."

5. up to a certain moment.

6. up to a certain moment (you would have explained it thus), in
reciprocal replies: centuries, weeks, towns, galaxies, nights and rooms:
we had all that.

7. simultaneous worlds more than similar ones, in their interweaving.

8. it's not really, you would have said, that they diverge but

9. the transworld relation stopped, as soon as one world ceased

as soon as a world ceased, when that instant of separation began to
back away.

Identity (xxx)

What identity might be yours at your death?

you are, some would say, the tomb and its interior,
    and the tombstone with your name

but that isn't saying more than:

alive, you were that body dressed and not dressed,
    this body which contained your thought (or your soul)
    and that body also carried that name, yours

identity only persists in the world due to this analogy

you are, others would say, such as you remain
    in their memories, if they remember, those
    who, even for an instant, knew you

thus you would be, but divided, changing, contradictory,
    dependent, by eclipses,

and when each of those others shall die, you would no longer be.

and yet, still here, the idea of an afterlife derives from
the very traits of the world of your life

    as for me, I think of it very differently:

    every time I think of you, you cease to be.

Dream of August 17

I'm in a café; a Parisian café, similar to the one not far from the Liège metro where, every morning, I come to read a newspaper and eat breakfast. It's early (a young blonde passes a damp mop between the tables, under the feet of clients and under my own), but it isn't dark. I spread out the paper in front of me: the owner comes and places a cup of coffee on the table and two slices of buttered bread; he takes the two ten-franc pieces I've drawn from my pocket and gives me back a franc and twenty centimes. Someone enters.

Dream of February 11

I'm in a café; a Parisian café, similar to the one not far from the Liège metro where, every morning, I come to read a newspaper and eat breakfast. It's morning (a young blonde passes a damp mop between the tables, under the feet of clients and under my own), but it's still dark. I spread out the paper in front of me; the owner comes and places a cup of coffee on the table and two slices of buttered bread; he takes the two ten-franc pieces I've drawn from my pocket and gives me back a franc and eighty centimes. Someone enters.

Sometimes, after So Many Years

    Sometimes, after so many years, I ask myself
    Going up and down the street, I ask myself

    Closing the shutters, low clouds, I ask myself
    In the grass, my book turned over, lines against the ground, I ask
myself

    From the landing to the steps, I ask myself
    No longer speaking, I ask myself

    Without understanding, I ask myself
    Separated, I ask myself

    Staring at the egg, the broken shell, I ask myself

    After so many years,
    Why

What This Poem Said

                          for l.d.

what this poem said, I've forgotten

:I knew what this poem said, but I've forgotten it

the poem said that , but that  which the poem said, I've forgotten

that the poem said that , was it that  which the poem said? If  that's  what
the poem said, I've forgotten it

perhaps without knowing what the poem said, as I was reciting the
poem (during the time I was reciting the poem),
I had already forgotten it
but if that's  what the poem said, I've forgotten it

now, when I recite this poem, I don't know if I'm reciting  this  poem,
since what this poem said, I've forgotten

that's why what this  poem says isn't really what the poem said anymore

and what I've forgotten

Un Corps Et Son Ombre (i)

         Un corps et son ombre partageaient un monde

         L'ombre de l'Ombre s'étendait sur le corps

         Ce monde était la fusion des ombres possibles

         Et l'ombre de toute partie de ce monde était elle-même fusion de
ce monde, et de lui seul

         L'ombre, la fusion de l'ombre garantissaient la vie de ce monde

         Quand l'ombre et l'ombre de l'ombre ne s'unirent plus en un
monde, ce monde fut mort.

On Objectera (ii)

        On objectera qu'il se pourrait qu'il n'y ait rien plutôt que
quelque chose

        Et que si un monde est la fusion maximale de toutes les ombres
qu'il contient, par réflexion invisible comme par involution, il se
pourrait qu'il y ait alors un monde vide absolument

        Mais un monde n'est pas une bouteille d'où s'évade une lumière,
telle de la fumée

        Un monde est une vérité nécessaire, pas une explication

        Il n'y a pas de monde vide, un monde même n'est pas vide qui se
referme sur un point indescriptible,

        Disparaissant, homogène, et inoccupé.

Trans-monde (iii)

         Il n'y a pas de voyage trans-monde

         Pas plus de voyageur trans-monde qui entraînerait son monde
avec lui

        Il n'y a ni privation de la durée, ni éveil à l'avant du temps, ni
survivance spéciale à l'indirection instantanée

        Je m'éveille dans la nuit, je vois au revers du monde

        pourtant, ce n'est pas ainsi que je t'atteindrai

Monde Propre, Propre (vi-a)

      · monde propre, propre, qui ne trompe pas, qui ne s'absente,

      · et si absent, alors de nulle part; tu es nulle part, voilà tout.

      · dans un monde propre tu étais, tu serais, propre monde;
sinon ici, là; sinon là, ici; ici, puis là; là

      · dans un monde propre, il y a d'innombrables manières
d'exister

      · tous les autres mondes sont de rebut.

      · ce monde: infiniment au rebut; par absence mien, toi

      · peut-être, dans ce monde propre, indiscernable du mien,
 mais moi

      · cherchant, d'une infinité de mondes

      · l'un

Semblables Jusqu'à Un Certain Moment (ix)

1. semblables jusqu'à un certain moment, ils divergèrent.

2. tu l'expliquerais ainsi (tu l'aurais expliqué ainsi)

3. nous étions deux segments de monde, chacun le 'double' de l'autre;
doppelgänger , dans la relation biipsiste.

4. segments maximaux de monde, tels qu'il n'y en ait pas de plus
grands, encore semblables: «moi, semblable à toi.»

5. jusqu'à un certain moment.

6. jusqu'à un certain moment (tu l'aurais expliqué ainsi), en répliques
réciproques: siècles, semaines, villes, galaxies, nuits et chambres: nous
avions tout cela.

7. les mondes simultanés plus que semblables, dans l'entrelacement.

8. ce n'est pas, vraiment, aurais-tu dit, qu'ils divergèrent mais

9. la relation trans-monde s'interrompit, dès qu'un monde cessa

dès qu'un monde cessa, quand se mit à reculer l'instant de la
séparation.

Identité (xxx)

Quelle identité serait tienne, de ta mort?

tu es, diraient certains, la tombe et son dedans,
    et la pierre tombale avec ton nom

mais cela n'est pas autre chose que dire:

vivante, tu étais ce corps vêtu et non vêtu,
    ce corps qui contenait ta pensée (ou ton âme)
    et ce corps aussi portait ce nom, le tien

l'identité ne persiste dans le monde que de cette analogie

tu es, diraient d'autres, telle que te restituent
    dans leur souvenir, s'ils se souviennent, ceux
    qui t'ont, ne serait-ce qu'un instant, connue

ainsi tu serais, mais divisée, changeante, contradictoire,
    dépendante, par éclipses,

et quand chacun de ceux-là sera mort, tu ne serais plus.

et sans doute, ici encore, l'idée de survivance emprunte aux
caractéristiques mêmes du monde de ta vie

    mais, pour moi, il en va tout différemment:

    chaque fois que je te pense, tu cesses.

Rêve Du 17 Août

Je suis dans un café; un café parisien, semblable à celui, proche du métro Liège où, tous les matins, je viens lire un journal et prendre un petit-déjeuner. Il est tôt (une jeune femme blonde passe une serpillère humide entre les tables, sous les pieds des clients, sous les miens), mais il ne fait pas nuit. J'étale le journal devant moi: le patron s'approche et pose sur la table un «crême» et deux tartines beurrées; il prend les deux pièces de dix francs que je sors de ma poche et me rend un franc vingt. Quelqu'un entre.

Rêve Du 11 Février

Je suis dans un café; un café parisien, semblable à celui, proche du métro Liège où, tous les matins, je viens lire un journal et prendre un petit-déjeuner. C'est le matin (une jeune femme blonde passe une serpillère humide entre les tables, sous les pieds des clients, sous les miens) mais il fait encore nuit. J'étale le journal devant moi; le patron s'approche et pose sur la table un «crême» et deux tartines beurrées; il prend les deux pièces de dix francs que je sors de ma poche et me rend un franc quatre-vingt. Quelqu'un entre.

Parfois, Après Tant D'années

    Parfois, après tant d'années, je me demande
    Descendant, remontant la rue, je me demande

    Fermant les volets, le ciel bas, je me demande
    Dans l'herbe, le livre retourné, lignes contre terre, je me demande

    Du palier à la marche, je me demande
    Cessant de parler, je me demande

    Avec incompréhension, je me demande,
    Séparé, je me demande

    Devant l'oeuf^[*] , l'oeuf crevé, je me demande

    Après tant d'années,
    Pourquoi

Ce Que Disait Ce Poème

                                 à l.d.

ce que disait ce poème, je l'ai oublié

j'ai su ce que disait ce poème, mais je l'ai oublié

le poème disait cela , mais cela  que disait le poème, je l'ai oublié

que le poème disait  cela , est-ce cela  que disait le poème? Si c'est  cela  que
disait le poème, je l'ai oublié

peut-être que, sans savoir ce que disait le poème, alors que je disais le
poème (au temps où je disais le poème), déjà je
l'avais oublié
mais si c'est cela  que disait le poème, je l'ai oublié

maintenant, quand je dis ce poème, je ne sais pas si je dis  ce  poème,
puisque ce que disait ce poème, je l'ai oublié

c'est pourquoi ce que dit ce  poème n'est plus vraiment ce que disait le
poème

et que j'ai oublié