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Questions about poetryand answers byJean-Michel MAULPOIX© Sud, N° 118-119, 1998Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
1. How can one forward along with poetry after poetry ?
Poetry never did anything else but getting out of poetry. Through an active process, it always carries on and disregards. It is part of its essence to forge forward ahead. That's its very way of becoming identified : restlessness, impatience, care for language, i.e. when all is said, lyricism. Lyricism is no sentimental complacency but, rather, « seizure », enthusiasm, the climbing movement projecting language in front of itself (leaving the ego hanging fire, marking time, stranded in the blur). A boisterous energy, lyricism alters language and riddles its weaknesses. It inflates humbug balloons to make them blow up. It refuses to confine itself to what is. I view it as an uprising power of language and sacking of thought, liable to disentangle itself from formal constraint, to shake up inertia and wringing the neck of the elegiac feeling.
2. Verse or prose ?
Prose is not the « reserve of poetic forms », but the ever renewed substance of that heterogeneous claim for being established within language. Prose is what poetry pits itself against. That against which it moves, ventures, alters and renews itself. It is through prose (or the prosaic) that poetry may exist and change. It is through it that the poem keeps in touch with history. Verse is nothing more but the speeding up or the slowing down of prose. The pulse of language alters its rhythms in the way as the subject changes marshalling yards. Both loose and entangled, poetry is manifold.
3. « The technical nature of poetry ».
Poetry is high tech. Moving forward. Extremity. The simultaneous art of overhanging and centring. One must hit the bull on invisible targets. Poetic art is stochastic. It compels to aim accurately facing the indeterminate. One should work together both limit and limitlessness. A seamster's technique ? Close combat technique ? Poetry is the art of fighting with appearances. A close combat indeed against the alder of its capacity to break up and recombine what is given.
4. Is writing a poem nowadays still « writing under the candle » ?
It means lighting several objects : a cigarette, an oil-lamp, a lighthouse in Ouessant, a reefer, iodine spotlights, a lighter, a candle, Marylou's eyes, flashes in the pan or fireworks, a church-candle, a camera bulb, a propellor reactor… It still means using day-light, with the light of both desire and thought.
5. Does writing nowadays mean putting away the seats before the rain ?
Yes. But also leaving them out under the shower. Both waterlogging and second-hand. Saving or embezzeling. Trading signs. Spoiling appearances or saving them. Daring huge release. Lyricism does not jib at expenses. Celebration and lamentation are truly not all that different. For over half a century, French poetry shrivelled itself up in bad conscience. It made a vow of poverty and never gave up seeing the water-marks lowering down. Now I believe that if any kind of truth or ethics is liable to be hoped for on the part of the work of language, it will only be if one lets the whole lot of its inherent contradictions freely play. It's only through lifting the ethico-formalistic embargo that poetry may face the present.
6. Do you feel ill-at-ease to be labelled as a poet ?
Yes. Since in me the poet remains the opponent of the writer. His kind of coarse-looking part. The writer is much closer to the reality principle. He keeps being confronted to a language less enamoured with its own reflections, fluencies and shortcomings. I positively insist in keeping in contact &endash; simultaneously &endash; with both these chaps.
7. A crisis of poetry or of communication ?
The poem harms the hackneyed notion of « communication ». It replaces it with the more lively one of « linking ». To link and take apart is a matter of wedlocks and divorces that have to be made clear.
8. Voice ? Mouth ?
The poem is wherefrom a voice is being uttered. I wish it to be as close as possible from one's breath, i.e. from one's very existence, contradictions and precariousness. In the voice, the tongue makes a commotion and hurly-burly of language. Lips join and disjoin. As the title of the latest Claude Esteban's anthology says : within a poem « someone starts speaking in a room ». Someone attempts to end mourning, looks for some new trend away from melancholy, attempts to find a way out, wishes to find its tune …
9.Translating ?
The poet is an hermeneutist. He keeps on translating but like reciting his multiplication tables. |
