Nicole Brossard: Selections 9780520945104

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Literature in Translation Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

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N I C O L E

B R O S S A R D

SELECTIONS

NICOLE BROSSARD

SELECTED

BY

INTRODUCTION

UNIVERSITY

NICOLE

BY

OF

BROSSARD

JENNIFER

CALIFORNIA

Berkeley Los Angeles London

MOXLEY

PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Frontispiece: Painting by Nicole Brossard, February 1967. Courtesy of Nicole Brossard. For credits, please see page 236. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brossard, Nicole. [Selections. English. 2010] Nicole Brossard : selections / selected by Nicole Brossard ; introduction by Jennifer Moxley. p. cm. — (Poets for the millennium ; 7) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-520-26107-5 (alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26108-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Brossard, Nicole—Translations into English. I. Title. pq3919.2.b75a2 2010 841'.914—dc22 2009039103 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

C O N T E N T S

Photographs follow page 6 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key to Translators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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POEMS

from The Echo Moves Beautiful (1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7 from Logical Suite (1970)

everything gels white . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 mutual attractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 between the lines the liquid slides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 afterward it’s so little . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 it’s only initial and doesn’t stop being so . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 to act and tend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 again and without cease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 there is the palpable night shifts feverish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 suspension of the act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 Subordinating Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 from The White Centre (1970) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 6 from Daydream Mechanics (1974–1980)

Reverse/Drift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 0 A Rod for a Handsome Price . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5

from The Part for the Whole (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 9 from Lovhers (1980–1986)

(4): Lovhers/write . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 5 July the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1 The Barbizon Hotel for Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1 from Double Impression (1984)

The Marginal Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 8 from Aviva (1985, 2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2 from To Every Gaze (1989)

Cities by the Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 8 If Yes Seismal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1 from Obscure Languages (1992) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3 from Vertigo of the Proscenium (1997) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 from Installations (1989–20 0 0 )

Passage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 Eternity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 Taboo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 9 Color Separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 9 Margin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 0 Tongue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 0 Shadow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 1 Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 1 Contemporary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 2 Tympanum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 2 Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 3 Mores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 3

Downtown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 4 Sweep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 4 Encore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 5 Gesture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 5 Rai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 6 Matter Harmonious Still Maneuvering (1990)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Ultrasounds (1992) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 from Museum of Bone and Water (1999–2003)

Museum of Bone and Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6 Typhoon Thrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 3 The Throat of Lee Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 3 from Shadow: Soft et Soif (2003) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 0 from Notebook of Roses and Civilization (2003–2007)

while caresses draw us close . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 7 the color of tears at the bottom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 7 whatever the month or wound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 8 to the dawn add i am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 8 the tongue rarely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 8 in a time blue and easy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 9 Precautions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 0 Suggestions Heavy-Hearted

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 4 Rustling and Punctuation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 6 Every Ardor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 8 It’s Lively . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 0 Soft Link 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 1

from Ardor (2008)

all thirsts are hollows of light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 3 one calls noise of beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 3 Nape 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 4 Nape 10

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

Nape 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 4 from After the Words (2007) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 6

DOCUMENTS

Poetic Politics (1990) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 9 [Untitled] “I’m a woman of the present” (1999) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 3 Process of a Yes Its Energy in Progress (1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 7 Why Do You Write in French? (2000 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 6 Interview with Nicole Brossard (1993) lynne huffer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 1

Catalog of Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 1 Credits

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

I don’t believe that one becomes a writer to reinforce common values or common perspectives on reality. —Nicole Brossard

Pleasure. This is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard’s poetry. There are other words, of course, words with historical and political resonance— Québécoise, avant-garde, feminist, lesbian—words which cannot be uttered casually, words which cause some to stop listening and others to lean in and listen more closely. Brossard puts such words at risk, for under her pen they magically change. Heavy words become light yet still maintain their gravitas, their restrictive weight (“labels” as some dismissively call them), becoming expansive, utopian, inspiring. Specific historical moments turn into universals, personal desire into the condition we all share of being incorporated—in our bodies and in the body of language. Like a mystic’s vision, turning the arduous climb to enlightenment into a flash of brightest intensity, Brossard’s pen lifts these heavy words into an ether of lightest thought. The result is pleasure, the pleasure of thinking, of reading, of having a body, of being in love, of being alive. The pleasure is ours, but it is also hers: “For my part, I have always made writing a place of pleasure, of quest, a space of dangerous intensity, a space for turbulence having its own dynamic.”1 Of course, ever since

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Sappho declared “what one loves” the “most beautiful thing on the black earth,” such themes have been central to poetry. They belong to Beauty’s realm and as such take part in “the aesthetic.” Aesthetic is a troubled word, a word which, at least since modernism, has been used as a code for “apolitical” and “disengaged.” Writing that has the explicit goal of challenging the reader’s ideas, or inciting social change, or shocking us out of our complacency, cares little for the aesthetic. Or so we are told. After all, too much Beauty might lull us to sleep . . . and yet, just in time, here comes Brossard to wake us up. She does so gently, shaking us out of our stupor. Her poetry effortlessly reunites the aesthetic and the political, updating the meaning of both as it does so. When we read her writing we experience a beauty both traditional (sounds and slippages) and entirely new (shifts in syntax, breakages of meaning). When we read her poetry we are reminded that, when it comes to something as personal as pleasure, aesthetic pleasure included, le privé est politique (the personal is political). One would think such a feat would garner great attention, and indeed, Brossard’s literary accomplishments have been well recognized in her native Québec. Since her first collection of poetry, Aube à la saison, published in 1965 at the age of twenty-one, Brossard has not rested. She has produced over thirty volumes of poetry, a dozen novels, several plays, numerous essays, talks, and interviews. She has edited three anthologies, three literary journals, and codirected a film. Though only a fraction of her output has been translated into English (or was originally written in English, as is the case with some of her essays), knowing where to begin when encountering her oeuvre can nevertheless be daunting, for the first-time reader certainly, but even for those who for many years have had a passing familiarity with her writing, reading an excerpt here and there, always interested, always hoping for more, though never sure where to find it, or where Brossard’s work fits in

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the scattered and sophisticated story of contemporary poetry. In addition to the language barrier, there is also that stubborn problem of trying to see across resistant borders into the literary culture and concerns of another place. We long for a cosmopolitan conversation but often have no idea where to find it or whom to trust as interlocutor. And sometimes we become so engrossed in playing our own particular geopolitical part in the global theatre that we fail to hear or see the actors in the theatre right next door, though we may be, in many ways, putting on the very same play. This present collection of Brossard’s writings is a welcome first step to resolving these cosmopolitan conundrums. At last we in the anglophone world have a convenient and elegant selection of Brossard’s poetry, chosen by the author herself. This volume represents forty years of daring. Forty years of pleasurable caresses along the body of language, a body both responsive and elusive, a body next to which we fall asleep only to dream the beautiful dreams of polysemous meaning. The poems included here range from Brossard’s 1968 book, The Echo Moves Beautiful (L’écho bouge beau), a book which she has often marked as the place where her “adventure of writing really started,”2 to her 2008 book Ardor (Ardeur). In between are selections from more than a dozen other books of her poetry, the genre in which, though her poems have received less critical attention than her novels,3 Brossard feels most contented: “It is in poetry that I feel myself most happy. I find a space there, a sense of well-being in which my relation to the world is absolutely happy, living.”4 For a writer whose language use is synonymous with spontaneity and playfulness—or to use Brossard’s term, the ludic (ludique)—this makes perfect sense. Poetry, after all, not only frees us from the constraints of character and narrative, it also, through its privileging of sound and rhythm, suits writers concerned with exploring the ways that the surface pleasures and semantic slip-

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pages of language enhance and expand our understanding of the complex material and immaterial worlds both. If ever there was a writer invested in such a quest, it is Nicole Brossard. Brossard developed her constellation of concerns as a young woman coming of age in the heady atmosphere of 1960s Québec, a time that has come to be known as the Quiet Revolution (La révolution tranquille). It was a time of great change in Québec politics, religion, and culture. During this tumultuous decade the Roman Catholic Church, which had historically played the role of elite translator between the Frenchspeaking Québec people and the English-speaking Canadian political structure, lost a good deal of its power. Québec became secularized. This change from an “ultra-Catholic Québec,”5 into which Brossard was born and where she received her early schooling, to a Québec in which she could assert that the Catholic Church had left a “sour taste” because of its “control on education and sexual life (marriage, contraception, abortion, homosexuality)”6 was profound. The 1960s were also the heyday of the Québec sovereignty movement, which focused a desire for the political independence of the province of Québec from the Canadian Confederation, as well as the question of what constitutes Québec identity, on the issue of language. Language was all. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the fact that a people who began the decade as “French-Canadians” ended it as “Québécois.” It is worth saying again: language was all. And if language is your battleground, then literature can never be neutral, for it will be called upon to provide both cover and weapons for the fight.7 Analogous to race in the civil rights movement in the United States, the French language, for the young Québec poet, was marked both with a history of political oppression, and as a source of cultural pride. In “Poetic Politics” Brossard makes her feelings about the historical suppression of her mother tongue clear: “I resent[ed] profoundly how as French-Canadians we

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were despised and discriminated against by Anglo-Canadian politics. I have always made the language issue a personal thing.”8 Previous to this crucial period, Québec writers had been expected to promote a very restricted definition of Québec identity based on religious faith, the land, and stiflingly codified gender roles. This call to bolster the stability of the central ideological triumvirate, rooted in the nineteenth century, was promoted as necessary to ensure the survival of Québec culture. “Survival” (survivance) was the watchword. Because the survival of oppressed minorities much depends on numbers, women had a very particular role to play in this cultural project. They could ensure “survival” by having lots of babies, a Church-sanctioned ideological campaign that came to be known as “the revenge of the cradle” (la revanche du berceau). If a woman did choose to take up the pen, she could only find literary success and support from the establishment by writing heroines that did not overtly challenge Church, land, or family. As far as covert challenges, well, as the reassessment of the previously dismissed literary output by nineteenth-century women in the anglophone world has shown, such subversions were going on all the time. Nevertheless, previous to the 1960s, the Québec literary scene was not one in which writers interested in moving beyond the national project to international themes and concerns found much support. This was doubly true for women writers, whose particular concerns were seen as trivial when placed alongside the larger revolutionary effort to create a unified Québécois “we,” a “we” that, while supposedly standing in for the universal subject, was actually gendered male. A quote from novelist Jacques Godbout, himself an active participant in the debates of the time, illustrates this discrepancy: “All Québec writers sleep with the same girl whose name is Nation. But this girl has no house. That’s why we say of he who wants to become a writer that he is a pioneer; like the pioneers, he will have to, simultaneously, build the house

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and make love to the girl.”9 Serendipitously, however, the tacit exclusion of women in the shaping of a new Québec identity left women writers free to follow their own paths, paths which, as it would turn out, were intellectually challenging and formally inventive and would do much to help turn Québec literature into an international literature. As scholar Mary Jean Green puts it, “This marginalization of the concerns of many women writers by the 1960s literary establishment undoubtedly contributed to the turn away from national themes and the explicit rejection of the identity narrative by the strongly experimental feminist writers of the 1970s.”10 Among whom was the central figure of Nicole Brossard. Nicole Brossard was born in the city of Montréal in 1943. Until she was seven she lived with her parents, and eventually her younger sister, on Rue Garnier in the northeast of the city. Her family then moved to an anglophone district called Snowdon in Montréal’s west end, a move Brossard’s class-conscious mother saw as “upward.” This relocation acquainted the young Brossard with the differences between the French and English cultures of the divided city. On the one hand, there were the common workers who spoke supposedly “bad French,” called joual, and lived beyond the dividing street of St. Lawrence, where, Brossard’s mother assured her, “everything was murder, orgies, and women of illrepute.”11 On the other hand, there were the Brossards’ proper, professional, and mostly anglophone neighbors (lawyers, judges, and the like), including her own extended family and her father, who spoke English at his respectable accounting job. Unfortunately, for Brossard’s mother anyway, warnings about the wrong side of town and insinuations that each of her daughters should eventually seek an “Englishspeaking husband” had quite the opposite effect from that intended on the young would-be poet. As the image of a “city split into two cultures”

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Top: Nicole Brossard, 1981–1982. Photo by Denyse Coutu. Nicole Brossard and her daughter, Julie Capucine, Ogunquit, Maine, 1987. Photo by Germaine Beaulieu.

Writing. Photo by Nicole Brossard.

Top: Notebook: “Giorgione 1476–1510.” Notebook: “13h.50.”

Top: Ear Inn, New York, 1988. From left to right: Charles Bernstein, unidentified man, Jackson Mac Low, James Sherry, and Nicole Brossard. Griffin Poetry Prize Award ceremony, June 2008. Foreground from left: John Ashbery, Nicole Brossard, Michael Ondaatje.

slowly took shape inside her, Brossard came to identify with the margins, putting herself imaginatively in the role of the outcast and rebel.12 The rebel was, until young adulthood, educated by nuns (on one of whom she had her first crush) and then until age eighteen at MargueriteBourgeois College. In 1963 she entered the University of Montreal, graduating with a Licence ès Lettres (Bachelor’s of Arts and Letters) in 1968, the same year she would publish the first volume excerpted in this collection, The Echo Moves Beautiful. It was during this first stint at the university (in the 1970s she would complete two advanced degrees) that Brossard’s literary life took root. She wrote and published her first poems, and she met the people with whom she would, through a shared passion for politics, literature, and the connection between the two, begin to shape the collective identity necessary to forming that sense of being part of something larger than oneself called “a generation.” As Brossard remembers it, “We were working, so to speak, on four fronts: challenging English-Canadian political and economic domination, denouncing the exploitation of our natural resources by American multinationals, struggling against the power of the clergy, resisting the omnipresent influence of French literature.”13 To a generation who “felt like strangers to [its] own literature,” the question of what it meant to be a Québécois writer was primary. It was a question intimately tied up with the “split city” of Brossard’s childhood, a question of margins and centers. Despite the vow to “resist” French literature, changes going on across the pond—in literature (the nouveau roman) and linguistic theory (post-structuralism)—would also come into play, and indeed, would have an important influence on the direction Brossard’s writing would eventually take. It was during this formative period that Brossard, along with fellow student writers Marcel Saint-Pierre, Roger Soublière, and Jan Stafford, founded in 1965 the seminal literary magazine La Barre du

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jour. The name, which can be translated literally as “bar of day,” comes from the expression à la barre du jour, a figurative way to say “daybreak.” In keeping with this message of “a dawn of a new day” in Québécois literature, La Barre distanced itself from the nationalist agenda of Church, land, and family, was avant-garde in its literary tastes, and openly interested in the then new ideas of post-structuralist theory. Because of this convergence of interests, we can read the seemingly innocuous barre (bar) of the magazine’s title in a far more significant way. In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously takes Ferdinand de Saussure’s bar14 between the “signifier” (the look/ sound of a word) and the “signified” (the meaning of a word) to be literal, illustrating the divide between the separate functions of the linguistic sign with a bar like the one that separates numbers in a mathematical equation, as follows: S s

In Lacan’s equation, the capital “S” of the signifier takes precedence over the small italicized “s” of the signified, visually dominating it. Thus through a simple illustration an entirely new poetics can emerge, a poetics in which the meanings of words are barred from their graphic representation, leaving words “free” to move about and signify at will.15 The instability of language that terrified Stéphane Mallarmé a hundred years earlier (and which I discuss below) returns in a revolutionary era as an unmixed good, a radical seed through which the entire structure of society might be made to grow in a different direction. Given that Lacan’s Écrits were published in France the year after Brossard and her coeditors founded their magazine La Barre du jour, the young Québécois editors could not have known how their prophetic title would dovetail with Lacan’s formulation, and yet, steeped in the

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pages of Tel Quel as they were (an ambiance which primed them to fall in love with the linguistic liminal), this is clearly a case of what Oulipians call “plagiarism by anticipation.”16 Literary magazines started in college and in the flush of new enthusiasms usually fold after a few issues, their editors having come to an impasse or the funding run out. In stark departure from this pattern, Le Barre du jour ran for fifty-seven issues, until 1977, after which it was retooled and rethought to become La Nouvelle Barre du jour, which continued publication until 1990, though Brossard, who had in the meanwhile cofounded the feminist paper Les Têtes de pioche (The Hard Heads), left in 1979. La Barre du jour was a literary calling card that provided the opportunity for Brossard and her contemporaries not only to articulate their own views, but also to open a dialogue with writers and artists of earlier generations, such as Alain Grandbois, Alfred Pellan, and Claude Gauvreau, this last an esteemed signatory of the 1948 manifesto Le Refus global (total refusal)—a document so powerful in Québec it is thought to have provoked the Quiet Revolution. In her brief text, “Autobiography” (published in a 1992 collection), Brossard imagines her five-year-old self having a fanciful connection to this historically significant manifesto: “my ray may have connected with the one emitted by a group of artists who, gathered around painter Paul-Emile Borduas, published the manifesto entitled Refus global: ‘The bounds of our dreams were changed forever [. . . ] Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for internal drives!’ said the ray.”17 Brossard’s ecstatic excerpt from the Refus global manifesto is telling. Dreams, magic, mysteries, love, and drives—all things that were to become increasingly important to her writing in the 1970s. It was during the early part of this decade that she was fundamentally changed by two events. She gave birth to her only child, a daughter, and she fell

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in love with another woman. At this time Brossard also decided, after a few years of working as a teacher, to devote herself full time to her writing. The result of these experiences was to move feminism and lesbianism to the center of Brossard’s poetics: “Motherhood shaped my solidarity with women and gave me a feminist consciousness as lesbianism opened new mental space to explore.”18 During this decade Brossard, with Luce Guilbeault, made a film entitled Some American Feminists: New York 1976, a project that put Brossard in contact with leading feminists, including Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, and Simone de Beauvoir. Of course, the 1970s were an amazing time for feminism, and women writers everywhere were energized by the women’s liberation movement although responding to it in different ways. In the United States an identity-based feminist poetry of experience, exemplified by the work of Adrienne Rich, became a dominant mode. Although she was an admirer of Rich’s work,19 Brossard’s avant-garde allegiances, Québécois perspective on the language question, theoretical interests, and indeed, her French, allowed feminism to shape her writing in an entirely different way. Her poetry became intimate, erotic, sensual, playful, woman centered, questioning, and utopian, but she never used traditionally narrated autobiographical experience. “I have always kept my distance from autobiographical writing,” Brossard tells us, “as if this raw matter of life called lived experience has no relevance until it has been transformed by creative energy, by the questions and the imaginary landscape it generates.”20 Instead, influenced by French writers such as Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig, Brossard’s trajectory moves not from female experience and body to text, but in the opposite direction. Her wordplay around the term “cortex,” whose sound combines the French words corps/texte (body/text), explains it best: “The term ‘cortex’ expands to reveal ‘corps’ and ‘text,’ the implication of the body in the text, and the perception that the ‘body’

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is written by language.”21 If language writes the body, and that body is a lesbian body—which for Brossard means a utopian body rooted in eroticism— then it follows that language itself must be an erotic body, a body devoted to pleasure without boundaries, always changing, endlessly alluring . . . “Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?” Barthes asked in 1973 in The Pleasure of the Text (Le plaisir du texte). “Yes,” he answers, “but of our erotic body.”22 In Barthes we have more than one body, and our “body of bliss” is wholly distinct from the “body of anatomists and physiologists.” Brossard makes her own list: “Between Plato’s body-tomb, the theatrical-body, the body of modernist writing, the feminine body of difference, the lesbian body of utopia, the queer body of performance, the body invents its surviving, its narrative, which is its displacement in the middle of knowledge and beliefs. We need to place the body at the right place in the dreaming part inhabiting us.”23 And so we are back to the dreams, and the Refus global manifesto. Following another Barthesian clue through the labyrinth of Wittig brings us even closer to Brossard. “The text . . . grants a glimpse of the scandalous truth about bliss: that it may well be . . . neuter.”24 This Barthesian “neuter” reappears in Wittig in the guise of the lesbian, a concept that she sees as “beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man. . . .”25 The pleasure of the text is neuter, as is the lesbian under patriarchy, and neither can be located in the traditional narrative. In order to have our pleasure, therefore, everything, even language itself, must be reinvented: “Somehow feminist consciousness and lesbian experience incite us to process reality and fiction in such a way that we have no choice but to reinvent language.”26 In this statement we hear the feminist up-

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dating of Arthur Rimbaud’s Lettre du voyant: “A language must be found;—Moreover, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come!”27 The need to process reality differently surely demands a change in rhythm, a rethinking of the patterns our articulations take, and, as a result, a new kind of poetry. Barthes suggests our bliss lives where we least expect it: “it is intermittence . . . which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing . . . between two edges . . .” or, as in Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, the edge between two indeterminate, unending female bodies.28 This is a key concept for the reading of Brossard’s work, for intermittence—with all its erotic implications—is how meaning is made in her poetry. At the beginning of this introduction I claim that Brossard’s poetry reunites the aesthetic and the political, by which I mean that her writing seems to eschew the anti-aesthetic programs of the historical avantgarde, as well as the socialist-realist programs of politically engaged writing on the left. It is her feminism and her lesbianism that allow her to do this. She is sympathetic with what Wittig diagnosed as the Marxist denial of the need for oppressed peoples to “constitut[e] themselves historically as subjects.” As Brossard writes in “Poetic Politics,” “[a]nyone who encounters insult and hatred because of her or his differences from a powerful group is bound, sooner or later, to echo a we through the use of I and to draw a line between us and them, we and they.”29 If it is through the “I” that the “we” is echoed, those lacking an “I”—a subject—will be able to speak for neither themselves nor others. We can hear Brossard funnel this “we” through her “I,” fluidly moving between the two, in a prose poem from Obscure Languages: I suppose that the collective recourse to suffering is justified. But we will remember that it is while observing the stars that one part of our madness was drained into music, the other, to my great astonishment,

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into martial arts. I suppose that suffering, if it were to disappear, would require more precision in our proof of love, more trembling in our vocal cords when I name.

Here, in what looks like a relatively straightforward set of statements, Brossard still manages to create that alluring intermittence Barthes wrote of. We go from “suffering” and “madness” to a possible solution: “I suppose that suffering, if it were to disappear, would require more precision in our proof of love, more trembling in our vocal cords when I name.” We move from precision to proof of love to trembling vocal cords and, finally, to the act of naming. This movement from the immaterial abstract space of love to the material, concrete space of the body is pure Brossard. The vocal cords tremble, the tongue moves, naming begins. The eroticism is explicit. Or, as she puts it in a poem from Lovhers, “because my obsession with reading / (with mouths) urges me / toward every discourse.” This excerpt contains one of Brossard’s central figures, a figure that reveals the semantic interplay of writing and lesbian desire, and is embedded in the French language: the homophones for tongue [langue] and language [langue]. Of course, in English the word “tongue” can refer to language, but it is a bit of an oddity, with the whiff of slang about it, and sits a little to one side of the more habitual word, “language.” Not so in French. The intermittence of the tongue arouses the lover to her own language: “the feel of tongues, the patience / of mouths devoting themselves to understanding” (Lovhers). We are in a place of deep eroticism, but not of pornography.The pleasure of the text, like lesbian sexuality, is as Barthes writes, not the pleasure of the striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction).30

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Brossard’s poetry exploits the immediate pulse of pleasure. Abandoning narrative teleology, we are content to remain at the tear, the edge, in the silence of the page where “convulsively white this body speaks” (The Part for the Whole). But how do we read the aesthetic in Brossard? What is her work’s relationship to poetic Beauty, which I here mark, perhaps provocatively, with a capital letter? I bring this up in part because I feel we must, as Brossard herself does, go beyond the “thematic” and the “gestural” to explain what makes her writing so alluring and, indeed, so pleasurable. Among anglophone readers, Brossard’s writing has been classified as “experimental,” a word which at this point carries a well-known set of assumptions. When we read experimental poetry, we expect meaning not to come easily, normal syntax to be disrupted, our received ideas about what poetry looks and sounds like to be challenged, and the poet to put all these devices in service to some larger, political and ideological change—beyond poetry. Louise H. Forsyth describes these expectations and how Brossard’s work fulfills them: “Brossard’s works are always experimental. She does not ever allow readers of her texts to take her words for granted. . . .This is by way of effective resistance to the performative linguistic formulae of hegemonic discourse that imposes norms regarding subjectivity.”31 Readings like this one are important, for they allow scholars a theoretical way into the poetic mind they might not otherwise have, and they illustrate how poetry can have wide-ranging cultural impact. And yet, such scholarly perceptions of experimental poetry’s efficacy risk confining its importance to historically bounded ideological concerns. Perhaps we should also ask, What effect does experimental poetry have on readers who feel they have already broken free of the “norms” imposed upon them by “hegemonic discourse”? And what about readers who do not and never have “taken words for granted”? Have such readers outgrown the particular kinds of intel-

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lectual pleasure Brossard’s poems offer? Of course not. Brossard’s poetry doesn’t just interrogate established poetic devices or subvert cultural assumptions, it also creates something entirely new, a new space of mind, of body, of life. A space in which it becomes possible not only to imagine a better future, but also to more easily live and breathe right now. Beauty has something to do with this. There is an aesthetic pleasure to be had when reading Brossard’s poems, just as when we gaze upon the body of a lover. It is not just an idea, but something to look at. Granted, we may be more likely to find the words “happiness,” “desire,” “eroticism,” and “body” in Brossard’s work than any mention of Beauty (though she does use it), and yet it is a word that cannot help but occur when reading her poems. In the Greek pantheon, Beauty is feminine and disruptive, shaping and changing history, inspiring simply by existing. There is much Beauty to be found here, of language, of mind, of landscape, and indeed, of women. Perhaps Brossard’s serial poem “The Throat of Lee Miller,” from Museum of Bone and Water, can stand for the many others. No simple ekphrasis of Man Ray’s iconic 1929 photograph “Lee Miller: Neck,” Brossard’s poem moves the visual into the literary, translating the invitation of that image into the poetic desire for repetition and intermittence. Lee Miller’s neck is a thing of astounding feminine beauty that, once seen, is difficult to forget. But Brossard doesn’t need to tell us that, she can simply evoke it, record her desire . . . and write. Listen: / often in the same phrase I return knowing to repeat just there where worry still craves vows entwined and as we translate to explain my genre I watch the throat of Lee Miller that year it was worth every abstraction

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The translator makes the smart decision to leave the word “genre,” which in English as in French may refer to “kind” or “style” but in French also refers to the gender of words (that is, masculine, feminine, or neuter). A resonance emerges: “to explain my gender I watch / the throat of Lee Miller. . . .” Both the image and gender are being translated. Another excerpt arouses more meaning: “and as we translate/I touch certain places I exhaust myself//the throat of Lee Miller/no trace of a kiss.” We can read “no trace of a kiss” in at least two ways. On the image of Lee Miller’s throat, there is no lipstick trace, or other impression of a kiss. In addition, the poet has not kissed the image, or left her mark, though she felt the desire to do so and was provoked: “I touch certain places I exhaust myself.” These lines bring us back to those previously cited, “it was worth every abstraction.” The abstract idea still arouses, still leads to satisfaction. Similarly for Brossard’s poetry, the idea though abstracted yet yields satisfaction. The loss in English of the double meaning of genre brings up the issue of translation. It is a key issue for this collection, since Brossard is a poet for whom words and their elements—signifier, phoneme, grapheme—are never casually employed. She is a devotee of wordplay, almost to a Cratylus-like32 pitch, and wordplay, as Rosmarie Waldrop points out, is “particularly vulnerable to the action of translation.”33 Often, it is simply lost. Though, as Waldrop also reminds us, sometimes what is lost in one instance can be gained in another; sometimes the “target language” (the language into which the poem is being translated) can offer delights not found in the “source language.” Barbara Godard’s translation of Brossard’s 1980 book Amantes offers a case in point. The French title means “lovers,” but that final “e” genders the word as feminine. “Lovers” in English is not gendered, and therefore the word initially conjures the normative image, a heterosexual pairing. Godard solves the loss of the feminine implication of

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the English “lovers” by employing wordplay not present in the French. She invents the word “lovhers.” When first encountering this new word we as readers must stop. We’ve never seen it before, and yet we recognize the parts that have gone into its making. Meaning is not disrupted but enhanced. Godard’s English title also alerts us that we are meeting a book filled with desire and play, a thoroughly ludic work. What Godard gains in this one word invention helps quell the frustration of what might be lost elsewhere as she moves Brossard’s text into English. For example, throughout Lovhers, a delirious book quickened by erotic language and quotations from major figures in the feminist and lesbian pantheon, Brossard repeats the line: “je n’arrête pas de lire.” Translated literally this means simply, “I don’t stop reading.” But in the French the wordplay between “de lire” (to read) and “délire” (frenzy and, further, “un-reading”) is obvious. In order to bring this meaning across Godard must improvise, adding language not found in the original, and so “ je n’arrête pas de lire” becomes “i don’t stop reading/deliring.”34 I have to resort to a similar compromise when translating The Part for the Whole. A line in the second poem of the sequence reads in the French: “vulve—lu e(t) vu.” In the French word vulve (vulva) Brossard sees lu (read) and vu (seen), et means “and,” thus leaving us (minus the “t,” which she puts into parentheses) with the straight translation “vulva—read and seen.” In the English all sense that the graphemes of one word morphed into three other words is lost. Frustrated, I decide to include the French phrase, though some English readers will be excluded. The result is the none-too-happy “vulva—lu e(t) vu— read and seen.” I console myself with the thought that Brossard often mixes the two languages in her poems. But then, when I translate another poem, “The Marginal Way,” I am given a gift. Nine stanzas in, I am confronted with a line that stands as a good example of Brossard’s

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language mixing and wordplay: “my mind agite l’essentielle.” Translated literally we get: “my mind upsets the essential.” But when the elle (her) at the end of the line goes missing, the feminine is lost. Since Brossard’s entire career has been dedicated to putting the feminine back in, this is no casual sacrifice. But then, I find it. Not an exact match, but the essence is honored: “my mind upsets the inherent.” In the original French, “my mind” is in English, and so I make a second decision to move this phrase into French, so a reader will have the sense of two languages operating in one poetic line. In the final translation the French “my mind agite l’essentielle” becomes the English “mon esprit upsets the inherent.” Translator Guy Bennett’s lovely rendering of Brossard’s 2003 chapbook, Shadow: Soft et Soif, is an excellent illustration of this poet’s beautiful ability to skillfully weave together French and English, starting with the title’s gentle rhyme of the English “soft” with the French soif (thirsty). In these moments in Brossard’s work, English and French collaborate. It is a reflection of a general value toward community and collaboration that can be seen throughout her life as a poet. In the 1980s she collaborated on two books of poetry with the anglophone Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt, and has worked with visual artists, notably with Francine Simonin, in the untranslated D’arc de cycle la derive and Notebook of Roses and Civilization.This ethos of an openness to collaboration, to working with others, makes Brossard’s poetry an especial pleasure to translate. Instead of the all-too-common feeling that, in translating, we are destroying the original, Brossard’s poetry makes us feel that we are collaborating with her, responding to a generous call. It has been almost one hundred and forty years since Rimbaud called for poets to invent a new language. The existing one was insufficient to the task of responding to, or inventing, the dreams of the future. Mallarmé too looked and longed for a different language, though he

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felt a “supreme language” of perfect communication already existed on some mysterious plane. He was tortured by the Babel problem: the worry that languages are imperfect precisely because multiple, and, indeed, the dilemmas of translation could be interpreted as evidence of this imperfection. How can truth hold across these different ways of saying things? Disturbed by the instability of meaning, Mallarmé could not well bear (though he saw it before Saussure) what would become the central tenet of twentieth-century linguistics: the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. His frustration was palpable: “I am disappointed when I consider how impossible it is for language to express things by means of certain keys which would reproduce their brilliance and aura. . . . We dream of words brilliant at once in meaning and sound, or darkening in meaning and so in sound, luminously and elementally self-succeeding.”35 Though words may be inexact signs ill-adapted to rendering the real (“night” sounds bright when it should sound dark, or “history” excludes her story), Mallarmé also recognized the role of poets in rectifying this discrepancy. “But, let us remember that if our dream were fulfilled [for a supreme language], verse would not exist!”36 Neither would this book, nor the stunning poetic accomplishment of Nicole Brossard. While her quest through the landscape of language is conducted in a way far less labyrinthine and agonized than Mallarmé’s in “Un coup de dés,” she nevertheless undertakes the journey with similar passionate conviction. She is always pressuring the borders: the way words signify and slip, and how the edges along them (or their “horizons,” to use a favorite word of hers) can be sites of intellectual and erotic awakening. She is also motivated as a writer by a desire to, as she puts it, “distance death and stupidity, lies and violence.”37 Brossard reminds us that the call to reinvent language is no flip grab for novelty but a deeply political call necessary to our survival. In order to conjure a collective and habitable world, we must mind our

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words. As Brossard critic Forsyth puts it, “words are means to produce sharing among real writers and readers—along with textual and virtual ones—as they work together like creatively engaged translators to make meanings out of personal experiences and collective lives.”38 It is a group project, with ethical implications, one that Brossard does not take lightly: There is a price for consciousness, for transgression. Sooner or later, the body of writing pays for its untamed desire of beauty and knowledge. I have always thought that the word beauty is related to the word desire. There are words, which, like the body, are irreducible: To write I am a woman is full of consequences.

Thankfully this intensely solemn mission, a mission that is—as Brossard reminds us in this quote, one of her most famous statements— “full of consequences,” is made, under her fine pen, so extraordinarily pleasurable that few will want to resist it. Jennifer Moxley Orono, Maine 2008

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Louise Forsyth, ed., Nicole Brossard (Toronto: Guernica Press, 2005), 20. Nicole Brossard, Fluid Arguments, ed. Susan Rudy, trans. Anne-Marie Wheeler (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005), 69. Out of 150 articles listed on the MLA bibliography, only 19 list the word “poetry” in the subject category. Brossard’s novels Mauve Desert and Picture Theory, with 35 and 11 articles respectively, have received the most critical attention. That said, it should be noted that Brossard’s novels are far from conventional, and in many ways resemble poetry. Forsyth, Nicole Brossard, 22. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 119.

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Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 30. For an excellent overview of the role of literature in the Québec “identity project,” see Mary Jean Green, Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). In addition, I am indebted to Green’s argument for my subsequent remarks on women’s role in this project, as well as its literary parameters. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 30. Jacques Godbout, “Novembre 1971/Ecrire,” quoted in Green. Green, Women and Narrative Identity, 19. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 122. Much of this sketch, including quoted material, is culled from Brossard’s own short “Autobiography,” in Fluid Arguments, 117–145. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 129. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916; New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Needless to say, Lacan reads this division through the lens of psychoanalysis, not poetry. Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature) is the name of a group of primarily francophone writers who create literary works using structural constraints, sometimes based on mathematical formulas.Writers associated with Oulipo include Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Harry Mathews. The Oulipians borrowed the term “plagiarism by anticipation” from early Christian theologians, who used it to explain how some parallels between pagan and Christian ritual were caused by the devil’s plagiarizing the gospels before they were written in order to discredit them. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 121. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 31. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 139. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 118. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 273n. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 17. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 68.

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Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 16. Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” in Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind (Boston: Beacon 1992), 550. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 106. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 379. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 10. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 34. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 10. Forsyth, Nicole Brossard, 35. In Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, Cratylus denies the arbitrary relationship of the signifier to the signified, positing that words are naturally connected to the things they represent. Rosmarie Waldrop, “Silence, the Devil, and Jabès,” in Dissonance (if you are interested) (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 146. My subsequent remarks on translation are also indebted to Waldrop’s thinking in this essay. For an excellent analysis of this and similar translation issues in Brossard’s work, see Susan Holbrook’s essay “Delirious Translations in the Works of Nicole Brossard,” in Forsyth, Nicole Brossard, 175–190. Stephane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956). Ibid. Brossard, Fluid Arguments, 35. Forsyth, Nicole Brossard, 36.

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K E Y

T O

T R A N S L A T O R S

GB

Guy Bennett

DD

David Dean

BG

Barbara Godard

PJ

Pierre Joris

RM & EM

Robert Majzels and Erín Moure

EM & RM

Erín Moure and Robert Majzels

JM

Jennifer Moxley

LN

Lucille Nelson

LS

Larry Shouldice

FW

Fred Wah

LW

Lise Weil

A-MW

Anne-Marie Wheeler

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N O T E

Many of the poems in this volume have been translated from French into English for the first time. Please see the catalog of works at the back of the book for the publication history of Nicole Brossard’s works in French and those previously translated into English (p. 221). In addition, please see the credits section for a list of all the works whose selections appear in this volume or that appear here in their entirety, with original French titles included (p. 236).

P O E M S

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from T H E E C H O M O V E S B E A U T I F U L

neutral the world envelops me neutral with lightning bolts of contradiction it is naked desolate and yet inhales I knew it by the rhythm getting ready there ■

zero & time stirs with troubles of radiant mouth tempo warm breath invade the center disk of a world that’s mine the electronic truths lose themselves in excess that beats hard on frail images the mirror ceaselessly swells each silent measure wells up directly in the belly ■

the back all she curve you hear me from aback murmuring desire catching my breath to reach you the other way around your hot muscles anticipate me here clear weather measureless and of total hunger

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lightning tears so beautiful the charm O inside the joy ■

it is at the threshold of rhythm that I carry this terrestrial equilibrium where from chinese shadow I shift to devious shadow: I decline curved silhouette under the somber lampshade ■

phantom fountain veiled the fog traces by finger the lip between the walls I ask what time at the same time in this here place outside against the pane zero the circle whirls radiant head how ■

shop windows to grab the drunken rumor the gazes intersect op the game and your dream among these liquors you slide from heaven into night the alarm troubles in you darkening gravitates blood jostles ■

seek there that faraway depends if you look close by far however try if you touch the wall or the avid emptiness that —no connection—that reins you in

2 8

\

P O E M S

unless you discover according to your step so passing by the rude root I wonder although no root odor they blend all possibly ■

yes this clear weather between the eyelashes why so many lines episodes today difficult despite the calm of being without memory to guess zero in the white to draw the cipher the extreme word or a lower case swing and game simultaneously an iron red a brilliant suite ■

listen rather peacefully to the bark’s cracking the bark you saturated with oil or soap nails teeth skull murmur their echo at all costs the sound shadow invading you ■

T H E

E C H O

PJ

M O V E S

■

B E A U T I F U L

/

2 9

from L O G I C A L S U I T E

everything gels white in happy time deep dark also all chaos when your hand passes too much then departure for belly thus all is there as sprout as latency oversteps the mark and never restricts itself curved line never gels in the past what the belly espouses up front in my saying naked the color though fictive so true cuts in the delirious black ■

mutual attractions when intimate renewal appropriates from us locks in together displace the shadow so slowly

3 0

\

P O E M S

around us that the bonds move very initiatory ■

between the lines the liquid slides and imposes itself novel thus from the body pleasure gushes delicious humidity the mauve rests and inscribes itself radiant fixity ■

afterward it’s so little once time’s slid out of reach afterward it’s however to retrace one’s steps when the figures put forward rip ■

it’s only initial and doesn’t stop being so the movement displacing distorting the horizon the horizon broken always too imponderable ■

to act and tend in the risen night toward the hidden places to act swaying between the world rhythm the authentic doubly silence pours forth carnal

L O G I C A L

S U I T E

/

3 1

■

again and without cease entrancing contrast that reworks the outlines draws them away from the goal forces our orientation again and time shakes from not being eternal ■

there is the palpable night shifts feverish that is to say disconcerting verbal variant oh how the invariable “elsewhere” tames the pronoun in this imprecise zone of the present never was the ephemeral so close to the trap yet it is a matter of the same saying between charm and trap, it oscillates ■

suspension of the act to understand is a sojourn excluding any definition to breathe to show nothing though everything rushes in perpetual face no matter the mask ■

3 2

\

PJ

■

P O E M S

SUBORDINATING WORDS

with a single signifying stroke when the saying leaks the word massacre(s) intensity first of all by probing further ahead further down farther away the formula is born from where does one know it by what by a point thus vibrant for it nourishes and weighs fully on the meaning and the counter in gender agrees with unruly in number and moves liaison the more it precedes the ink pushes precisely (before) outside and inside transition or droll these signs empty and blue despite even if (that is to say although)

L O G I C A L

S U I T E

/

3 3

restriction nevertheless explication vague it is because too much space between the words vague and beautiful to consume the liaison as soon as it enunciates itself paradoxically future and past engender at the same time that moment when it goes without saying that crossing it happens that black/black badly cross-rules the white spaces limit of contrast

3 4

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P O E M S

in these opaque times heaven hauled that many frenzies thus sparkles the artifice and exposes itself eventual accomplishment all on the surface from riot to fabulous sonorous suites the said connection erasure double exasperation the code struts the code analyses the code dictates and at the exact opposite the tender code appears between code and code space is illusory no place conducive to denunciation terminology modifies the code infiltrates the least attempt at resistance henceforth meaning will be double one too many the artifice is inevitable here’s how. ■

L O G I C A L

PJ

■

S U I T E

/

3 5

from T H E W H I T E C E N T R E

I I I

this time time the time white the white centre the centre opening everywhere dazzling within me silent participant attentive this time the energy the energy begins again the ultimate meaning utmost force in this body roused vibrating as if expanding and in doing so expanding no longer holding anything fast this time nothing everything comes to an end in this instant this hollow second

I V

the word vertigo placed then between the seer and the word the word again in general when abstraction takes everything from desires becomes form life absorbs me words fail but specifying is not the solution unity is outside the line continues in the period that distances itself always withdraws in the ultimate gesture that will set everything down in the same time place in the form of a white mark in a blank space

V

attentive to the silence to the moment when nothing happens when the blank becomes life in its place the whole body is freed from life ec-

3 6

\

P O E M S

stasy the life of the centre state pure vigilance when the whole mind exists without constraint continual state of watching established from smile to smile inside the same attentive and happy person’s body nobody there

V

the word proliferates intelligence receives in successive waves the vigorous thrust of words words that engender beyond the real that radiate so strongly and powerfully that ramify useless and disordered the gestures of concentration words memory the past the future word or the whole present alone involves me and words become fertile elsewhere

V

present time present knowledge in the steadiness of the gaze the expansion of the motionless body vertiginous expansion time stopped present encompassing recovering all attempts now only the prevailing atmosphere of death anonymous death structure at last clear white sterile memory that there had been a present time

V I

always it begins again breath endlessly finally never stops because everything in the breath is recomposed in each second it happens cycle the inevitable one after another things revolve around as before as after time affects sometimes but the cycle of desires always starts again this end this future that loops in advance

T H E

W H I T E

C E N T R E

/

3 7

V I

that takes place while time seems to stop lucid more and more each form detaching things unique during this complete pause can one believe because the sharpness of each perception enables me to see more clearly the more I approach the lives the forces exert themselves still a terrible quietness grips the surroundings

V I

when there is nothing more at the circumference life is born and dies on the inside according to the same laws a luminous consciousness attained sovereign presence all that being ecstasy the intense breathing the intense completion of future times and others that the understanding of structures more than ever intoxicating death

V I

the precise word perhaps already doubt places each word on the edge of the sought for meaning the word translation rather event or excess the precision being inner event silent revealing through the muscle fibers the breath alone the real structure of enclosing forces their limits

V I

to return there (no) departure point death sign that what does not change speaks gives life doubly multiplies it when everything happens within the unity to return there always memory of these returns of these lasting deaths too little death so that softness penetrates everywhere that life withdraws and rejoins the dead centres

3 8

\

P O E M S

V I I

everything is neutralized and illuminated emptied of all meaning all death breathes white silence of memory silence silence silence memory all in a single breath the ultimate centre where everything at last can concentrate white centre without surface time time transforms nothing in future time hardens white

V I I

white everything is present dead soft silence and empty of everything death in future breath hardened everything concentrates in this place memory is only memory is no longer in this moment anonymous impersonal the moment of death death seeps into the white breath in this present which is eternalized neutral

V I I

death so that it may come in the quietness joy breath rhythmed life concentrated into a single small point (death) life anonymous since emerging from the same blank the same present memory transforms nothing in future white pause the white centre the body breath death

V I I I

so everything is that way at the precise moment when here there is nothing other than time seized in the instant when unfolds elsewhere memory unfolds here then nothing is other than perceived according to the calmness in the instant when everything is that way an attitude taken in relation to the final illusions ■

T H E

W H I T E

BG

■

C E N T R E

/

3 9

from D A Y D R E A M M E C H A N I C S

REVERSE/DRIFT

and touches magically the consenting skin all the spells that cross it and circulate slow curves in the forbidden areas give your consent so that the beast becomes enamoured of strangeness and lifts its claws to your neck

4 0

\

P O E M S

you reveal yourself without motive muscle you scrape the curves and in the rhythm let yourself bend and dance the charms she-wolf out of place in the season adrift on the horizon a slow image of pleasure

D A Y D R E A M

M E C H A N I C S

/

4 1

black quiver oh move persuasive the words desire and me blindly the passing effects which arouse reawaken the claws which incline one to open and celebration between the teeth the hair and dark set off out of control strength of connection of moving lips cast us adrift reverse the pauses of love since with time silence breath shields herself and bites

4 2

\

P O E M S

and slowness nestles down the hair awakening ravenous unleashed our strategy the seduction swerved

D A Y D R E A M

M E C H A N I C S

/

4 3

beast looms in the place cuts off meaning devours and restores the contours of the unit the image in the shadowy light asleep to the missing sun ...................... if come close insist as if to seduce and to melt together afterwards useless among the other words then the shoulder falls asleep and seeks no other victim to overturn through pleasure and privation ■

4 4

\

LS

■

P O E M S

A ROD FOR A HANDSOME PRICE

(from her to ravish meaning ravine. On the other side artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . grafted onto the sentence o a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing the thigh the valley get turned on

D A Y D R E A M

M E C H A N I C S

/

4 5

the body gentle with daring drug to take away her meaning her skin of orange and olive her texture of assailing couple (you underline them with a stroke like the bed under their weight their pleasure) . . . . . . . . . . . and plunge down and so body to body in the tuft her spreading out in vegetation right to them the point of consent and affirmation little magic boxes . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 6

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P O E M S

the skin a free grammar of silence canvas of impressions of representation fire: artifice a distance the true skin strips off the vowels illustrate the soft sponges or the fine cob

D A Y D R E A M

M E C H A N I C S

/

4 7

the definite connection that exists between ravishing meaning from her and magic boxes ■

a rod for a handsome price swells (but) since the grafts gently the words run along it quietly ■

4 8

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LS

■

P O E M S

from T H E P A R T F O R T H E W H O L E

my lacerating strategist who leads me to fiction censored in the liar’s edits or time the split: desire’s reflection is like this a lure thrown out in vain spinning through space until the “creature” says: my blood doesn’t fit this version or excerpt anymore

T H E

P A R T

F O R

T H E

W H O L E

/

4 9

to save her provocative skin to lose reason the rush the goods spread-out by the mirror if you attempt a moon’s discretion between your thighs the liquid outcome vulva—lu e(t) vu—read and seen in reality you undress her skin and take it all in

5 0

\

P O E M S

feigned—the entire bid / fiction— the injury’s intuition (the injured) her tongue speaks with a hole the one licked or it’s a place to perplex the delicious expert she trembles in love inversely her memory perplexes the slutstory museum woman / voting booth / stretch marks: what a beautiful baby! she soaks without quoting, very private

T H E

P A R T

F O R

T H E

W H O L E

/

5 1

that tends to flow the day drenched in ink green or that moment you open your robe egress illustrated circadian today and the moon your condition of rhythm sister with syrupy insides she depletes the planet of corridors filled with crossroads my wife aroused a vow circling your passionate neck

5 2

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P O E M S

her ass and thank goodness dissolves the first stone or this erosion of the dismissal for she cheats all lost time by playing opposite silently on the outskirts of town without context (swallowing but concise) so she says: that’s senseless or irony of the after-effect the abolished without history and mother tongue in hospital convulsively white this body speaks perhaps to amuse herself underground but at heart charged without restraint she starts over from the bottom of the page filled with the unleashed scents that undress her: flying

T H E

P A R T

F O R

T H E

W H O L E

/

5 3

drying up or fictive the liar opens her fist this abduction all confined by the masculine spread out her withdraw—it depends—at what price and the beyond amends her history you get wet and dry up in pleasant parallels drifting when the net is lifted or concealed down to your feet you put on the brakes and yet this pretext intervenes with your hand as process a gripping sift of the inside or a return to self this morning shifting history with a silent e ■

5 4

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JM

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P O E M S

from L O V H E R S

(4): LOVHERS / WRITE

it celebrates cerebral spinning —Mary Daly One of the festivals celebrated by the companion lovhers called a love festival may take many forms. Love festivals are generally a mutual celebration of two or more companion lovhers. —Monique Wittig Sande Zeig

L O V H E R S

/

5 5

somewhere always a statement, skin concentrated system inverted attentive to the phases of love, this text under the eye: June aroused by audacity precise lips or this allurement of the clitoris its unrecorded thought giving the body back intelligence because each shiver aims at the emergence June the fever the end of couples their prolongation like the most unexpected of silences: lesbian lovhers the texture of identities

in reality, there is no fiction

5 6

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P O E M S

“the rapture” said L. to grasp the sense of a mental experience where fragments and delirium from the explosion translate an experiment on riot within the self as a theory of reality rain prose simultaneously a process which concentrates me through the lips on your shoulder urges the spasm to become graphic: nothing tires our thighs except a little gesture, a coincidence that accompanies us for a long time the time of a few decisive seconds: moan so as to trace identity on the self in the laboratory of emotions I DON’T STOP READING / DELIRING IN THIS JUNE OF LOVHERS all my muscles this spiral of your hands in the secret on my breasts “Eye open to strange correspondences” Michèle Causse I DON’T STOP READING / DELIRING

L O V H E R S

/

5 7

according to the years of reality, imagine going from city to city to recite the smooth versions that slip into each body instigating the unfolding, the excitation: everywhere women kept watch in the only way plausible: beautiful and serious in their energy from spiral to spiral —under the oranges of L.A. the frontier of fire between the ludicrous palm tree and the red flowers like aluminum foil. i am present at the accessible intersection of all the dangers which boost the current of compatible skins excitation: what imperils reality, like an invitation to knowledge, integral presence —near me, her fluid thought, ink, her voice faintly seeking out words a few feet away, our acts of meditation face to face with writing stretched out towards her with the same intensity as my bending over her: breath I DON’T STOP READING / DELIRING

5 8

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P O E M S

“the splendor,” said O. “your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.” Adrienne Rich

everywhere the project of cities and geographies to arouse our bodies to ever greater fluidity, endless flood into our mouths of savors makes this approach of delirium compatible with the mind and we imagine new customs with these same mouths that know how to make a speech, ours tasting of words tasting of kisses (i don’t stop reading / deliring— excitation: what arouses the unrecorded in my skin)

L O V H E R S

/

5 9

“science” says Xa. “lick to the heart of our vast plot” Louky Bersianik

in the happy position of hands on hips a sexual tenderness runs throughout distances—fire is all we can see, the permanence of desire in our precision exercises because our searching lips captivate all our attention, called forth by the science of our music June, the urgency of the fold: ramified couple holding in my hand a book by Djuna Barnes, I can’t stop reading / deliring, i need all my tensions when confronting the drift because in all my muscles, a need for suppleness, that is when i make a spiral in front of you and when the strangest seduction takes form at the same time as the embrace. tonight it seems night pushes us to behavior which is sweetly desiring and our mouths are slowly extinguished, we can’t be more attentive to their effects. ■

6 0

\

BG

■

P O E M S

JULY THE SEA

Since the day when the lesbian peoples renounced the idea that it was absolutely necessary to die, no one has. The whole process of death has ceased to be a custom. —Monique Wittig Sande Zeig

L O V H E R S

/

6 1

Emerging (Kay Gardner): noon la mer METAPHOR’S splendor (4) from energy rounded with desires / our progress mouths: coffee noon sea pretext origin of the kiss: taste mobile in the full flood of memory _______________ breath and biographical shoulders emerging like a process the tides (at this level): a reflex of rising tides

6 2

\

P O E M S

to find again every day life of lesbian fictions of writing of obscurity and diurnal the feel of tongues, the patience of mouths devoting themselves to understanding integral body against thighs legato only fever: the eye without its sighting

L O V H E R S

/

6 3

and thought takes shape with suppleness in every sense coincidence concentrated in the island (4) loving women picture theory / juillet la mer voice the tongues’ intention

6 4

\

P O E M S

from metaphor to rising tide the versions a form of perception my form that founds the sounds round us like letters experimental the tide amorous spiral I run the risk of conquest so as not to be non-sense

L O V H E R S

/

6 5

memory, some words are such that an embrace conceives their surfaces / allusions because my obsession with reading (with mouths) urges me toward every discourse round the generic sap obsession tied to what questions the abandon the conquest vulva wave the tide of desire the keen defeat of the writing fervent conquest: to read

6 6

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P O E M S

july the sea is the provisional articulation of pleasure which my sister brigand draws our points of falling (emergency curves) when turning the page means: to follow our reading binding our intentions like a thought issuing from this force defeated inside our heads celebrating the reflex of vertigo we can conceive anything

L O V H E R S

/

6 7

concrete within the fiction (wellspring prolonging you) from language and its folds matter, all tides at the limit in my temples are presented skins of convocation in the prospect of pacts ___________ women reclining

6 8

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P O E M S

feverish seaside coffee scenario of what causes suffering in the voices how to describe this opera of the interior passion like an overture on the sea, a reflection of the voice to arouse interest illusion _____________ lyre

L O V H E R S

/

6 9

last day on the island: amorous rigor has assumed its sense and numbers vigilant seductions assemble for concentration (everything is so concrete, orgasm like a process leading to the integral: end of fragments in the fertile progress of lovhers ■

7 0

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BG

■

P O E M S

THE BARBIZON HOTEL FOR WOMEN

an intuition of reciprocal knowledge women with curves of fire and eiderdown fresh-skinned—essential surface you float within my page she said and the four dimensional woman is inscribed in the space between the moon and (fire belt) of the discovery and combats that the echo you persevere, fervor flaming

L O V H E R S

/

7 1

mouth diffuse, nocturnal and intimate round with intervals to pass through the gardens of the real anticipated paintings of the attentive body all the regions of the brain time is measured here in waters into vessels, in harmony the precision of graffiti in our eyes fugitives (here) the writings in the barbizon hotel for women nascent figures within the wheel cyclical tenderness converging

7 2

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P O E M S

space (mâ) among all ages, versatile wrinkles of the unexpected woman when midnight and the elevator in us rises the fluidity our feet placed on the worn out carpets here the girls of the Barbizon in the narrow beds of America have invented with their lips a vital form of power to stretch out side by side without parallel and: fusion

L O V H E R S

/

7 3

but the napes of our necks attentive when on Lexington Avenue steps move close to us again because the scene is memory and the memory within our pages explodes like a perfect technique around this eccentric passion we imagine in the beautiful grey chignons of the women of the Barbizon

7 4

\

P O E M S

so transform me, she said into a watercolor in the bed like a recent orbit the curtains, the emotion tonight we are going to the Sahara

L O V H E R S

/

7 5

we are walking into the abstract (neons) tonight—overexposed—unfettered expression nocturnal women my reflex and the circumstances which my mouth walks like words i expose myself: a useful precaution sur terre: down town amazons have studios for correspondence

7 6

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P O E M S

and here again i find an author too abstract supplicating in space body itself intensity and the rain suddenly abundant to reunite intuitions of matter ■

BG

L O V H E R S

■

/

7 7

from D O U B L E I M P R E S S I O N

THE MARGINAL WAY

the rare and difficult emotions can they be taken off guard like a double the sea, surrounding and well-defined if she is reengaging with the project if writing knows because it is real or facing the landscape (au-delà) thought is ingratiating, then spatial the will without option this is desire, freeing or fictive the history of the word esprit when she writes ever more so for those born fluid already the body trembles in the atmosphere of beech trees, glass, the compelling echo —There is no good likeness of me on the beach / sur la plage— the equivalence, still vague (wave) and bright range is this not being, precisely likely modernity in the rain affinity assured

7 8

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P O E M S

unexpectedly giving reality the slip light slits the eyes who then will recognize again the primal version around the lips which I will evoke three-dimensionally before the echo the flight my body is vague (a wave) an elision moving through several chapters and still you want to transform le sombre des villes again, on the beach, stretched out .... the feeling devastatingly the certainty but first she is at the heights translucent against the outline of lawns the gestures were subliminal consequence so I took the landscape in her for granted double sea binding the body in the warmth nor far from the sound of games the continents succeed each other in the shadows you think about passion existence juxtaposed with vision abridging the surfaces you construct the day around a certainty before the sea the body burns in cerebral proximity (marks its outline at the burn horizon) of a line as follows: the amazon

D O U B L E

I M P R E S S I O N

/

7 9

the intention extreme beauty you add the landscape to the light of inclination the hour is plausible au-delà de la réalité the cosmic body comes from afar voie marginale, in a flagrant way poetry is perfect in the place of transmission, the multiple faces mapped such an idea in the atmosphere petite baie rocheuse by means of pleasure the cliff, the equivalence the resonance of the water on this body or twofold way devastatingly wave (vague) DO THE READING AND I’LL FOCUS memory fashions with hope on the cliff the erosion the dictionary you chose the language the contrast so emerge in the bright affirmation proceeding with your prior gaze keeping the holographic walk for fiction the cliff is not familiar in shadow borders harm the gaze yet I say being circumvents the echo

8 0

\

P O E M S

airborne in the overhead equation of seas, this syllable here is hope mon esprit upsets the inherent she begins at the heart of the spiral at the center of a planetary burn, she trembles consequence and future for whomever is born fluid devours the tides if in the shadows I think of passion at the back of fragments in complete tranquility it’s a feature of reading a position taken in order to see the matter at borders split the eyes I broadcast my existence live I obstinately stretch out my profile at the end of the century one day inflamed in the entity; at the horizon the abstraction splits the cliff it reminds me of her to find myself facing the landscape au-delà du noir chapter finished she touches you at infinity’s last possible step spinning the written ■

D O U B L E

JM

■

I M P R E S S I O N

/

8 1

from A V I V A

aviva aviva a face and the relaying of complicity, ample images leaning toward the lure, her mouth now the looks there are normally words on the edge of emotion a phrase related hidden and unknowingly caressed while running the length of her arms in excitation applied, the idea tenable tenacious for linking

8 2

\

P O E M S

the latest translated anima image and effects of affinity facial formation all learning on her traits laid down now the books singularly, you: virtue in the distance, emotion emotes in the infinite utopia thus caress in excitation running the height of the gesture tongue voracious subject applied igneous liaising

A V I V A

/

8 3

aviva thus the aura leaning toward her while the figure keeps watch emotion and the (latest) humid, very between the thighs taking, the time and some verbs encountered mid-stay

8 4

\

P O E M S

the latest translated thus from her the élan and aura of harmony while the freed figure later be certain decide between the words, what pleases is plenty the detours mid-verb full shade

A V I V A

/

8 5

aviva applied in kind and impassioned in the depths of the eyes the kind of passion euphoria the concept, the saliva and ink composed, the rivers sometimes the limit, it is possible, bodies applying themselves, raison d’être

8 6

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P O E M S

the latest translated this kind of panic applies to eyes a single bound engender the horizon attentive intercept utopia, alive ink is sometimes opposite or yesterday it is possible for a body to hesitate around the being and apply itself ■

A-MW

A V I V A

/

■

8 7

from T O E V E R Y G A Z E

CITIES BY THE TOUCH

they say the night comes like a body balanced paradoxical at the end of fiction’s angular utopia at dawn the profiles sweep the other ways away, not excluding tomorrow like a realized joy ■

and sparks of devotion strike the dawn at the pinnacle of instinct, breasts and following at the skin of touch even more scenes while shoulders and story the beam, the speeds of oblivion in the lengthened night of lives ■

an infra-wager on a thought the dreams fill the folds of night and the word within nudity turning the sequential voice

8 8

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P O E M S

■

imprinting the page the idea of dawn unfolds in this need to exist expression’s habit skin’s delirium in the cities by the touch reality like language’s suppleness in morning, coffee, the knowing evidence of the senses ■

the trajectory verbs take when familiar a reflex at breath’s edge is enough, epidermal reflection, cortex followed by concrete words that affirm that azure or tonight and that using words, the voice like being’s trajectory forms a resemblance ■

the ecstasies around sentences noise of aura of aurora and glass some cuts in broad daylight in the space of swallowed syntheses sense spins at top speed an indigo day, the street, around the eyes ■

we will smile when the rapture is over when it is calm or when reading

T O

E V E R Y

G A Z E

/

8 9

the hour and the civilization late and so we will smile as if engrossed the drowsy language between cortex and the edge of the sea as if the whole body was moving up the nape, and secret ■

expression a habit, an entire life: a part of the image, bookmarked in consciousness, quick strike ■

and silence like a support of delirious things and the senses such a skin possible from the closeness like a moment near the cornea this intimacy of dawn that comes about, mist a few syllables seaside, body ■

it’s because all comes sufficiently from one perspective, of touch and the traced images of dawn like a well-rounded decision illustrating mental fervor, a smile overtaken by representation, the reflex of dawn ■

9 0

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JM

■

P O E M S

IF YES SEISMAL

(a transcreation from “Si sismal”)

if above the clysmic bark heaves noise the voice detonates images and words for life a little crazy we think but all right before the actual figures choose choice the border labels space in you if any persistent tissue bristles pitapat on the heart’s much too excited lip could be the air’s too rare naturally some same body remembers too late to search for another wave if a small cup of language soups intention with a continued expression against word crust until the horizon of approach whose fault whose lips

T O

E V E R Y

G A Z E

/

9 1

if the forest of the voice transforms into the trop of chaos or melancholy installs itself in the parlor of surprise plant variety re-speak pond if the see-saw bounces back hot to trot trembling shows up again late cell synapse applied part out on a day of rest great truth a vague smack of the lips gulfs, coral, littoral if, you tremble, you should see inevitably there is some white it is true and of course you tremble ■

9 2

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FW

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P O E M S

from O B S C U R E L A N G U A G E S

I am interested in consciousness because there are invisible structures in our bones that remove us from childhood and family maneuvers. Childhood is inadequate when one lives at the center of the planets and the lie. Of course, the soul’s dog, perched on anatomy, a great interpreter of obscure languages, keeps watch so we don’t miss our chance to be saved among the speaking beings, always meting out a bit of hope through our habit of passing for an other. I suppose that the collective recourse to I facilitates this intensity at the center of the planets and the lie. We will have to agree over what inside us says it is suffering. All civilizations have subdued one aspect of suffering, allowing it to flower inside absorbing passions, labors and vast temples. We have spoken of the unconscious. Many have insisted on the magic of women’s soft arms in the darkness. Often only mentioning her passing smile, ignoring her as a subject.

O B S C U R E

L A N G U A G E S

/

9 3

I suppose that the collective recourse to suffering is justified. But we will remember that it is while observing the stars that one part of our madness was drained into music, the other, to my great astonishment, into martial arts. I suppose that suffering, if it were to disappear, would require more precision in our proof of love, more trembling in our vocal cords when I name. Someday we will have to agree over violence and its long history. Its way of standing between us and the pure beauty of sky and sea, which we have forgotten to such a degree that our terrorized eyes can no longer make out, through the flood of thoughts, a horizon for our thoughts to move on. At the moment, I’m interested in sounds that cause nightmares in the dark, in the nylon stocking hanging over the bed, in all nationalisms, in each canine, in the live broadcast of war. Like many before me, I’m interested in flesh, in the long history of bruises, scars, and cuts. But we will remember that, unlike the animals, we can, with our eyes and only our eyes, turn our desires and the tormenting fire into a watch. From a great distance we can tell time with our eyes, if it’s

9 4

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P O E M S

about a man or a women before dreaming. But we will have to agree over the color of artillery shells so we do not confuse them with the pure beauty of sea and sky. I admit it, to write makes no sense unless it helps us to concentrate on living well. All writing is sentimental subject. Those before us, fertile with images, accepted their inclinations, others, free to think, declared their dissent, but each time a soft breeze on their skin surprised them, it taught them of a pleasure that would haunt long after thought has declared itself fertile. I admit it, our eyes aim at hope. I am interested in consciousness because in the midst of reality beauty always produces a feeling of solitude. Each time thought travels the length of the spine, slowly moving toward our facial features, I am interested in the fictions which fan out, transforming solitude into customs peopled with caresses and alibi. Everyday the shadow slows above our heads, repeats its idea while the body, in the center, persists. I am interested in consciousness, because when life is an idea that brings us closer to silence, our pain is invalid. ■

O B S C U R E

JM

■

L A N G U A G E S

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9 5

from V E R T I G O O F T H E P R O S C E N I U M

the habit of bad readings because of the immensity the taste for surprises and for the moment like a hot drink the immensity how far would we go ■

circumstance of the eyes the pleasure would repeat sometimes we’d say farewell it seems a silence an act of pure will to come back to the beginning caressing eyes our lives in miniature ■

bustle of metaphors a touch of fiction if it is a book it is a space to last relay of meaning at the end of our ashes a feverish touch of presence ■

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deep down in the throat and the imaginary a verbal velocity that commits to tie up in so many pages and light years the conversation as if an overview of the child coursing through our veins ■

let’s not touch silence it is our reserve of hope the renewed function of the future a flash of wit gone joyous to wait under our eyelids perfect distortion of the real ■

fact of language torments catch me in my tradition in the duration of the sentence pleasure sweetly spaced out catch me in my difference ■

V E R T I G O

O F

T H E

PJ

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P R O S C E N I U M

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9 7

from I N S T A L L A T I O N S

PASSAGE

nonetheless if we displace the sense of life the universe in thoughts common laws and legitimate endeavors nonetheless “I lived there” revives dreams, and in the extreme immediacy of sun and irksome things in the threshold’s extreme immediacy we will live mobile

ETERNITY

all forms of eternity have been invented precisely hot or unbearable ultimate monologue, intimate thirst at point-blank range eternity settles in our beds, is challenged aloud in our narratives eternity permeates life the silent part of delirium

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TABOO

in every corner where talk takes place I’m careful not to stammer into forbidden meanings to hiccup and paralyze in graffiti I take care when I dream with my tongue to take morality by surprise in the intact part of desire

COLOR SEPARATION

humanity is fragile more or less peut-être profane with jugular tension in the documented site of words and if my eyes struggle so in public places and in the sun it’s because the ‘indestructible this’* of hope absorbs me so partial

* Roland Barthes

I N S T A L L A T I O N S

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9 9

MARGIN

I can’t hold still life’s too thick so lucid, oiled smooth with nights and narratives I slip into the margin cortex still ardent, taken up with vascularity and journey I explore the subject of docility

TONGUE

because it is with the mouth speech is an ultimate machination around the belly a flux of tenderness and fear that makes unfathomable the verb to be recto verso speech licks all

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P O E M S

SHADOW

a beautiful subjectivity that doesn’t broach lucidity all bodies pronounce shadow avid for images and those days we inhabit the same universe impregnable passions still exist that leave us dreaming my life at arm’s length

INSTALLATION

every morning I take an interest in life huge detours and proofs the tail ends of century at the heart of language icons, silks, often manuscripts the odd-numbered body of women great quakes visible from afar I settle into my body’s installation so as to be able to respond when a woman gives me a sign

I N S T A L L A T I O N S

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1 0 1

CONTEMPORARY

where it hurts in life by successive strokes it’s not death but mobility of light our gift for aggravating beauty

TYMPANUM

sibilant tongue close up, life wants amplifies slim seconds the threaded sound of desire your shoulder brushes against a roof _______________________ the heart is vast noon, ontology

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P O E M S

GENERATION

both hands in the conversation I commute between asides crash of styles intervals between values I wager between generations lucidity, other references the Big Bang of memory suddenly women visible speaking is never too real

MORES

the means we take so fine to circumvent death not forgetting the violet estrangement of our eyes to link conversation and move the head in concerted shortcuts synthesis of a way through I am physically used to existence

I N S T A L L A T I O N S

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1 0 3

DOWNTOWN

you say there is as if living were for sale all around the sun parking lots that embalm fatality houses full of washbasins and people by heart, there are words we forget by heart culture fear to say the earth is vast is old warrior reflex

SWEEP

for with this life, I tell myself eye urgency, emotions