For François Cornilliat
and Mary Shaw
Each
poet tends to fall to one side of the debate between deliberate labor and
inspiration, of willful work or furor
poeticus. But the careful laborer and the possessed Ion ultimately both
seek ways to provoke happy accidents, and one cannot plan an accident. This
task requires a rhapsodic approach; I cannot write in linear progression, from
one line to the next. I need to invent a series of entryways, and combine
these, working recursively, constructing the poem as a mosaic or a work of
marquetry, constantly resisting the impulse toward intuitive continuities in
favor of fresh conceits. Words constantly attract words with neighboring
values; waves tend spontaneously to roll or tumble rather than to trill
or to fade. Pages tend to turn or flip rather than to stumble or to click; feet
tend to stroll or wander rather than to vibrate or to stutter. Convention acts as a centripetal force, drawing words toward
one another in combinations that appear natural. One cannot simply céder l’initiative aux mots, leave the
initiative to words, as Mallarmé wrote: or else, one must follow the words but
not our impulses with regard to them, in a perpetual attempt to resist our
habits of thought and speech. The rhapsodic impulse works centrifugally against
convention. Different poets work at different scales; some accept the
centripetal force of convention between words
in order to combine sentences or passages in unconventional ways, but all
poets must somehow negotiate the tension between expectation and
counterintuition.
The café
provides a naturally rhapsodic environment. I am pointedly not watching the
world go by. Two women are discussing their aspirations in Christian ministry
and faith ; I wonder how their conversation affects the writing process of
the neighboring Jew daydreaming about his writing process. The writer, of
course, resembles a monk, but the hum of human life around me seems vital to my
supposedly ascetic activity. The word inspired
returns over and over in their conversation, but in faith as in writing, I
believe in doing, inspired or
not ; debatably, this confidence in the ritual act rather than the
reliance on unpredictable inspiration has a strong Jewish resonance. I prefer
the provocation to the accident, while Ion prefers to emphasizes the accident
over the process that provokes it.
The opposition to ascetic isolation also inhabits
Judaism : the Christian tradition emphasizes distance from the world in
favor of the spiritual ; Jewish practice affirms an engagement with that
world ; our very appetites may serve godliness. This idea also has a place
in the Christian tradition, by way of Rabelais, for instance : Gaster,
human god of our appetitive nature, gives rise to the best and worst of human
enterprises, but the ascetic distance of Stoic apatheia cannot provide an adequate compass for action and decision,
for we live in the world.
The café
sustains my writing process with an echo of the world. Around me, people wonder
whether or not they ought to get married, while only the Dive Bouteille, the
divine bottle, will provide them an answer. Writing is a confounding series of
similar decisions, just as arbitrary and just as decisive, and the poem, like
the Dive Bouteille, remains out of reach, just over the next wave, on the
island of happy souls, though we settle for our own offal, and claim it smells
of saffron. Panurge’s final metaphor encapsulates the poetic process, the
alchemy that transforms excremental words into a delightful spice. Rabelais
wrote an ars poetica.
Must one
find one’s voice in writing ? Perhaps attempting to shape words beyond the
pressures of convention and habit is instead an attempt to escape our voice, to
the extent that the latter represents our tics and our spontaneous impulses. I
am always trying to write someone else’s poem. To imagine a way out.
Alexander Dickow is associate
professor of French at Virginia Tech. He is a bilingual poet and translator who
works in French and English, and a scholar of modern and contemporary French
and Francophone literature and film. His poetic works include Appetites (MadHat Press, 2018), Trial Balloons (Corrupt
Press, 2012), Rhapsodie curieuse (Louise Bottu,
2017), and Caramboles (Argol
Editions, 2008). His translation with Sean T. Reynolds of Air of Solitude and Requiem by Gustave
Roud is forthcoming from Seagull Books in November 2019. He is currently
working on a novel, The First Supper.
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