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A modern exponent of the labyrinthine like Borges is
Michel Deguy. From Baudelaire's inventing of la cité, to Rimbaud's Illuminations and Un Saison en Enfer, the transition from verse poem to
prose-poem - with Laforgue's and Corbière's vers libre as the first articulate bridge - onwards
to such as Jarry's Ubu Roi and René Char's scintillating prose passages. René Char? Oui. Without him, no Michel Deguy? Mais
non! There are so many
important predecessors. What about that tropical diplomat Alexis Saint-Léger
Léger, a.k.a Saint-John Perse - so long championed in Britain by Kathleen
Raine? Or shall we, with Geoffrey Godbert (Freedom to Breathe, Stride, 2002), trace the prose poem back
to Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841)? At any rate, I look at the Deguy of Recumbents, and my mind slips down the long slope
back to both Les
Fleurs du Mal and the
Paris Journals; except, of course, Baudelaire was a brilliant versifier,
rooted in Racine (root) and Corneille, but the end of France's mightiest
poetic tradition from La Chanson de Roland many centuries onward. (So strong a tradition of le
vers that French
peasants could compose villanelles in their heads on the spot.). You might,
of course, wish to parody King George V on his death bed and expostulate
'Bugger Baudelaire!'. To which I would reply, Okay, I give you Stephan
Mallarmé instead - but only for those who can't stomach the least tinge of
tradition: the old-fashioned elegance and clarity of French enlightenment
(its last gasp in Baudelaire) that Mallarmé and Rimbaud destroyed. C'est
vrai n'est pas?
It was said - was it Housman? - that the French were incapable of real
poetry, only verse. He'd probably use the prose-poem as an additional stick
to beat them with today. But we later generations have come to a gradual
appreciation of the prose-poem, though in my case with the single qualifier
that I also extend to all modes of poetic expression: the intellectual. What I mean by this is that poets are
not intellectuals but creatures of the imagination. And while I appreciate that the French
are naturally a more intellectual people than the English, it is not helpful
to the making of good poetry. Without the personal agony of a Baudelaire, the
anger and alienation of a Villon, poetry slides towards l'ecriture (so brilliantly uncovered by Barthes in
his Writing Degree Zero),
that is: writing about writing or process. And in Deguy there is obsession
with language, so that it is no surprise that the book incorporates Jacques
Derrida's essay 'How to Name' - itself placed knowingly in inverted commas.
But I have said enough about the long journey from vers to texte, and hinted at the even longer journey from
language as purveyor of reality
to language as the sole reality. A few quotes now by way of demonstration of
the writings in this volume of Michel Deguy's work:
I want at all costs to get back in to the
language, make a gift to the possibilities of telling of this straying toward
what has now gotten its name from you, which is called enigma this courtyard, this border,
these cloths, these doorsills of Paris where you're banished, and I wish the
poem might turn itself into a novel in order to allure kitchen gestures,
things said over the phone, the use of the wind, the insignificance of what
separates us from death; at all costs to give back to language, which would
be its tomb, everything it gives us that we call its outside
(from 'Manufacture')
I would merely observe of this: if language is reality, there is nothing 'to
get back into' nor any need for 'possibilities of telling' (after all,
language as reality is its own automatic telling, n'est pas?) And
how about this from the title poem 'Gisants' or 'Recumbents':
I believe
something like an air of resurrection
is at work
with death and it's up to the poem
whose telling
carries off more than it enrols
taking things
by the heteronyms
of the other
thing it desires
to say
of poetry that whatever you bind
in its name
shall be bound on earth
Surely this is the cant of the anally-retentive intellectual?
In the prose-poem 'May Day' - which seems to be a mélange of half-comments on the fate of the Polish émigré situation induced by the Second World
War - we get the same preoccupation with écriture:
How to repudiate the delegation of the poem and do a counter-poem page,
with its brow tilted back, if it's less a matter of text with poland than to do something with a poem which
wouldn't make itself overly heard, useful like Martha, translatable,
reducible, exportable, which might leave by squads with other means of
rescue?
Abstraction, system, process - the intellectual mode; reification of idea and
expression of feeling - the poetic.
Now and again, though, something different happens, as in the piece called
'Procession'. It contains a famous utterance of Deguy's namely, 'Still
necessary that a life's duration be proportioned to its nothingness - that to endure be
each person's work.' It may get - probably does - its greater effectiveness
through its slightly elegiac tone, Deguy's lament for the death of 'Jacques
D.' - presumably Jacques Derrida, the famous deconstructionist. Like the
poet, another super intellectual. This how the prose-poem ends: 'Let us
forget all grievances, even if we are contemplating their contradiction; let
us forget nothing and raise our eyelids - the upper one, a sky, the lower
one, a cliff - let us recognize in these places his graveyard by the sea.' The italics are Deguy's. It is
interesting they refer us to arguably the greatest and most beautiful French
poem of the Twentieth Century, Le Cimetière Marin of Paul Valéry. A bit of academic
showing off, peut-tre?
After 'L'Après-midi d'un faune' it became possible to disrupt the reader's expectations (of, for
example, logical syntax, the sequetur, etc.) with impunity: though the yelps
and complaints do continue, and the natural audience for poetry has (largely)
'voted with its feet'. Then, later and more forcibly still, came the
imposition of the scientific practice of experimentation upon poetry, in the
belief (very often mistaken) that experiment inevitably leads to innovation:
an error that science does not make, knowing many experiments fail.
Though this inadequate review of Recumbents demonstrates, as much as anything, the reviewer's
doubts about so significant a French language-oriented poet, I cannot sign
off without saying that every British poet should, at some time or other,
submit him- or herself to the experience of a thorough post-modern French
poet like Bonnefoy, Char or the Michel Deguy of this volume. It will prove a
teasing, confusing but, always, a mind-stretching experience.
William
Oxley 2005
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