F O R
and Jerome Rothenberg
P O E T S
Edited by Pierre Joris
T H E
Edited and with an Introduction by Mark Polizzotti María Sabina: Selections Edited by Jerome Rothenberg. With Texts and Commentaries by Álvaro Estrada and others Paul Celan: Selections Edited and with an Introduction by Pierre Joris José Lezama Lima: Selections Edited and with an Introduction by Ernesto Livon-Grosman Miyazawa Kenji: Selections Edited and with an Introduction by Hiroaki Sato Gertrude Stein: Selections Edited and with an Introduction by Joan Retallack Nicole Brossard: Selections Selected by Nicole Brossard. With an Introduction by Jennifer Moxley
M I L L E N N I U M
André Breton: Selections
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
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
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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23
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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28 29 30 31 32
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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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
JM
■
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
\
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
■
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
/
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 ■
9 6
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P O E M S
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
■
P R O S C E N I U M
/
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
9 8
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P O E M S
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
/
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
1 0 0
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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
/
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
1 0 2
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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
/
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 <junction superimposition _____________ planets / faces it passes impeccable with speed carries it all off, odors, numbers without sorting smiles, pangs, the absolute eyes glued to the poem I study the light that’s saved 1 0 4
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P O E M S
ENCORE
it’s never enough each time you roll hope around in your mouth to appease too many ideas their opposite lit a taste for curves and for everywhere at once with the option of crying out should death and utopia start to collide
GESTURE
I don’t know the how the first howl of thoughts when they graft on to simple gestures somehow as if there were a link between the intent to move and a way of thinking without too much grief, the sensual voice and all the fullness of a science of the body
I N S T A L L A T I O N S
/
1 0 5
RAI
your arms white epoch beyond I vacillate time moves to the touch linking the long-said of the real atom, plinth and the state of life all ondulate, waves ■
EM
1 0 6
\
&
RM
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P O E M S
MATTER HARMONIOUS STILL MANEUVERING
I assume that day breaks in more than one place and because this thought comes to me in the midst of reality and its unnameable poses, so as to bear witness to time and languages in movement, I resort to the thought that nothing is either too slow or too fleeting for the universe
I know that all has not been said because my body has settled into this thought with a certain happiness and because amid the inexplicable jolt which makes of words a path, running water and so much thirst, by linking vowels and the backside of thoughts, eyes narrowed in fascination, I can draw close to death and to its opposite
Both poem and translation have been revised since they originally appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1990. The new version of the poem appears in Au présent des veines (Trois-Rivières: Ecrits des Forges; Echternach, Luxembourg: Editions Phi, 1999).
M A T T E R
H A R M O N I O U S
S T I L L
M A N E U V E R I N G
/
1 0 7
at this late hour when the gaze is at its most supple and life turns and turns again between the blue and the astonishing law of lighted cities, at this late hour when words grip the chest as in operas and images await the flickering line of fever and of the future, my eyes tilted down low upon humanity worry from the very root of eyes of desire
all has not been said because I know that I love absolutely in tongues the pink shells of meaning, the assiduous structures which graft ecstasies and something torrential in the midst of the voice and its performance, secret matter, rounder matter, matter like your sighs and still other liquids
1 0 8
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P O E M S
today I know that the bluest structure of the sea comes close to our cells and to untouchable suffering the way life circles three times around our childhood without ever really touching it because we are close to reality and matter cannot fall without warning, without leaving us here, skin hesitating between philosophies and the dawn, half and forever in torment, in the vast complication of beauty
all has not been said since the body is punctual and so many passionate versions and rare gestures remain, an incredible synchrony of senses, while thought, always poised for alliance, takes care to redo in the mind the scenery and the beautiful portraits we love to dream as symmetrical and resonant to our childhood, for there are features which appease us if only for an instant so as to die close to happiness hollowing out the universe with our shoulders and with tiny imaginary lips which labor thanklessly in the interest of life to invent the world and the cosmos for us as permanent like the absolute proportion of our hands when, voice and palm, indistinctly, they caress the body and its full present tense
M A T T E R
H A R M O N I O U S
S T I L L
M A N E U V E R I N G
/
1 0 9
at this late hour I know that life can confirm silence, can set fire to approvals, trace circular tears and give birth to dust and I like it this way for I’ve learned between July and October to look at all the fires, to steep myself in the strong smell of nudity, above all in the splendor of mauves, of facades, and of strange sonnets which gesticulate in language as we do in the night, dreaming so as not to die voiceless
all has not been said and I rush forward my skin charged with cyprin* and with echo because I want to smile, embodied and thinking, inseparable from nature with its long breath; so when I look at stable objects and time turns upside down in my chest, splits open thought, elucidates death in a single bound, I know that all has not been said because my chest is tight
* Cyprin: female sexual secretion. English word coined by Susanne de LotbinièreHarwood in her translation of Brossard’s Sous la langue (Sous la langue/Under Tongue, 1987).
1 1 0
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P O E M S
at this late hour when memory is afraid of its leaps and the nerves in the midst of desire are overwhelmed with responses, I know that all has not been said, I know that light when it fractures shadow revives my respect for shadow and for light, I know that the life that is mine, overflowing into the air of energy, urges me to breathe up close into my hand long images of necessity and, of emotion, beautiful breaches in the background of dreaming and of identity
at this late hour when naming is still a function of dreaming and of hope, when poetry separates dawn and the great beams of daylight and when many times over women will walk away in stories, carnal and invisible, I know that all has not been said because between urbane conversation and tradition it is cold in vertigo and sometimes in the volatile matter of tears a strange sweat of truth settles in as if life could touch its metaphors ■
M A T T E R
H A R M O N I O U S
LW
■
S T I L L
M A N E U V E R I N G
/
1 1 1
ULTRASOUNDS
NAVIGATING AT NIGHT BY MEANS OF MILKY ARMS AND IGNITERS OF SYNTAX, I THOUGHT ABOUT THE TUMBLES AND BEAUTIFUL SOMERSAULTS THAT IN CHILDHOOD WE LOVED TO SHARE ON THE GRASS
1 1 2
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P O E M S
The perspective that enters into the composition of words perturbs every radical woman who wishes to draw nearer another woman with a sexual act in mind. A sexual act between two women requires prose beforehand, text long after. A sexual act between two women supposes the encounter of the parts, called sexual, which are in fact few in number, and constitute only a tiny area of the geography of the body. To draw nearer a woman is one thing, with a sexual act in mind another, which requires vast deeps within the eyes.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 1 3
Prose, as word given, occupies a large place between two women mutually interested in engaging in a sexual act, because she engenders narratives that allow the multiplication of the sexual parts of both one and the other, while respecting the singularity of each (perfume, scar, childhood in the urban jungle, tattoo, blank page). Prose stimulates tiny glints of recognition deep in the eyes, glints which in turn ignite the senses. Sense is sometimes nomadic—one then thinks that syntax zaps into desire in search of sexual parts that in daily life are inaccessible to the eye, or even to the imagination.
1 1 4
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P O E M S
The truth of prose lies in the filth of cliches, its essence in a sudden opacity that awakens our sleeping meanings. That being so, prose offers its epochs like so many mirrors, scripts and generations to ease the reading of the values and emotions that enter into the composition of our sexual parts. It is therefore used for various purposes, the main ones being to recover the memory of childhood, to observe the slow motion, movements and folds of feeling, and to shape the desiring self. Prose says that nothing really dies. Prose absorbs the shadow of our tears, absorbs part of our lives, the better to offer them to us in the munificence and spareness of our first visions.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 1 5
Prose, prose, here is the essential word of a happy liaison between the abundant nature of the I and the copious imagination that enters into the composition of the real. Beautiful liaison, to which many women are indebted for a glimpse of the possibility that their sexual parts are more numerous than is usually thought. Prose, prose, starting with the ear, that sexed pearl (the ear being sensitive to a very wide variety of sounds, it easily welcomes the most strange propositions, the most bold words, provided they are accompanied by certain images known for the pleasure they provoke) where the secret leaning of our assertions takes over from the thread of narratives. Prose is tenacious, little comes together without her.
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P O E M S
THUS, one day in May, while sitting in a cafe in Coyoacan (Mexico), exchanging some casual remarks about the effects of high altitude with a woman at the next table, the woman said “me too” with a shaped intention that disturbed me there where life is so intimate that we say it is invisible to earthly eyes. “Me too,” then she proceeded to unroll before me a giant historical fresco of red-framed windows, big game, military costumes, piles of skulls, sumptuous stairways, mirrors in which her voice against her will, she said, always drew the same self portrait and its syntax, the same syntax, she said, because of this: “We were walking, my daughter and I. One evening in July, as beautiful as my mother. Dead at twenty-five. My pain, later. Since then I tremble easily but I paint. I love painting. Sometimes my diary.” She paused, asked the waiter for some lemon and I continued to listen: “No one writes without piling up silence. Each time a word is beautiful or a fresco, alive in my breast, it diverts my attention to what is without memory. I am brave as the Frida of my red and orange Mexico. We will always have a childhood at the tips of our fingers to make us search through the vocabulary. I am a woman lover of words.” “Me too” I replied very close to her ear and her hair, in the free zone of the spoken and a narrative that came to me in the form of paintings, water colors and etchings, all signed by women. I told how several years ago there had been a huge exhibition of the works of Emily Carr, Marcelle Ferron, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. I described in detail the light, the texture, the milkiness, the volume of the breasts, then, at a certain point, I don’t know why, I ordered a mango and prose, prose, spoke at length of Montréal, unaware that most of the words I had used could have a sexual connotation. “Me too,” because prose occupies a large place in my life, brings me nearer, I tell you, to women.That’s the way it is, there’s nothing I can do about it. I associate so many happy and unhappy events with our bodies that to understand them, I must always call upon my imagination. This seems contradictory to you, doesn’t it, that to understand what is real, I have to make use of what we call fiction. But that’s how it is.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 1 7
What about you and stories? I like them short, but there should be no shadow of doubt about death. We will need long stories. What about you and theory? There is no theory without representation, though abstraction sometimes nourishes my decisions. So from prose to prose we continued talking, so well that I could now make out, in the area of her face alone, the sexed number of character and mental traits which—not counting the voice, which had not ceased to trouble me since the first words exchanged about the lack of oxygen at high altitudes—invited me to introduce, into the composition of words, shapes and sounds of a nature other than narrative.
1 1 8
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P O E M S
NAVIGATING AT NIGHT, BY PURE FERVOR OF AURAS I ARRIVED THERE AHEAD OF THE NIGHT AND HER BAROQUE FOLDS, THE MILKY SHAPE OF INAUDIBLE THOUGHTS FAR OFF, FLUENT.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 1 9
The cerebral design that enters into the composition of words quickens any radical woman who wishes to draw nearer a woman with a very lyrical sexual act in mind. A sexual act between two very lyrical women requires of them that their voices project, high fidelity, very beloved nuances. A lyrical sexual act supposes the repeated encounter of the parts, called lyrical, that are in truth numerous and varied, as experience teaches us about beauty.
1 2 0
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P O E M S
The poem does not have to carry the burden of proof that meaning, informed by a plural usage between two women envisaging a sexual act, leads to the steady erasure of the lie and its thrusts scattered throughout culture and the imaginary. The poem is desirable in itself, because it shelters a soul said to be sensitive to the light of loving bodies. Without the poem, neither the one, woman, nor the other, desirable, would have in the depths of their eyes that expression that ignites metaphors, that ignites pleasure and recognition, that expression where life will, within the so-called flow of laws, take stock of its vastness.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 2 1
From beauty that plunges us into astonishment, it follows that a tear or embrace that can favorably be compared with eternity will find its song or offer itself to thought like a linguistic resource that can transform the sexual act into an extended exploration of the cerebral design and its complex curves.
1 2 2
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P O E M S
Then, prose slowly reappeared like a new consignment of precious goods. Playful prose, whirlpool of fiction, labrys prose, gateway to dreams, see how before my eyes you come, three times changing your name, evoking the long struggles and she-loves of the tangled contours of narratives and utopias, see how you come, between the lines, bringing the poem closer to my lips still hot from the repeated question of urgency. Prose, seeing you so close up walking into the afternoon, I hear (right by my ear and hair) any radical woman wishing to draw nearer a woman with a sexual act in mind. Ultrasounds of the sexual parts. Silent prose, breastfed with images and landscapes, moist, pink, juicy. See how at last silence navigates at peace between the absolute yes of the resting body.
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 2 3
Thus, WHILE SEATED IN A CAFE ONE DAY IN MAY, I was working ON AN AESTHETIC ARGUMENT to justify MY EARTHLY SHOULDERS AND my SEXED intentions, I COULD, LOOKING AT HER, AVOID CERTAIN DESCRIPTIONS SUCH AS my life, OR EVEN THAT OF THE ROOM THE TWO WOMEN WITHDREW TO. I COULD, while looking at her, INVENT SHAPES THAT BRING TOGETHER SIGHS AND question THE CRAZY IMBALANCE OF DESIRE AND reality.
1 2 4
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P O E M S
HENCEFORTH, I COULD, NAVIGATING BY DAY AND NIGHT AMONG MILKY VOWELS AND THINKING MATTER, ADMIRE LIFE PERFORMING HER TAI CHI, GREAT LEAPS IN THE GRASS, IN THE FLUSH OF DAWN AND THE CORTEX ■
LN
■
U L T R A S O U N D S
/
1 2 5
from M U S E U M O F B O N E A N D W A T E R
MUSEUM OF BONE AND WATER
I know this by the words I am missing my life has gone to sleep in the contour so precise of the tip of a long bone though I still know how to smile before Roman cloisters and their ossuaries the value of I love you
1 2 6
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P O E M S
1
cold luminous November morning I count my words the bone that will not counter time from the other side of silence the art of peoples and of bones entangled my answer never differs water a way of hiding pain
2
in Palermo the slow fall of ochre time between my lips a threaded baroque yes I want slow morning’s procession an arm of the sea and of the future water that grips births against all the squadrons water as far as the eye can see abrading silence
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 2 7
3
in Dresden a morning of station soot and museum I stopped short at a map index finger jabbed into destruction welter of peoples and skulls mass of marble and silence in the midst no one will revive for tomorrow to take up the conversation where it left off
4
in San Cristóbal de las Casas a morning of Black Virgin of Coca-Cola and incense siempre I caress an idea of life in the dust smell of flesh and silence red everywhere seeped into fabric by dint of images flashes of fear amor that chases off the goats
1 2 8
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P O E M S
5
water returns smell of glacier at my wrist my museum life files past head here chest there a harrowing work in the distance Madrid shines beneath etchings of Goya at the bottom of a page a detail of the Cannibals kills me in the no-noise of knowledge water all water I want it glacial
6
morning or noon in the city I write my head resting on humankind and others too in repetition on the line of the horizon as on the screen we tear the alphabet from dawn’s arms hands, heart and muscles in the rain detached from reality by brilliant procedures
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 2 9
7
this morning not fretting about shade I gather bones shells present of lavender noble back visible far-off like bay water all round the tongue cuts every rosebush no one dares laugh once cleansed of it all suspicion naturally a bone art spies on art and my life
8
May morning Ontario Street I observe the bone and blue of questions brush up against territory of when I was young a theory of vanishing in mind in each phrase the background murmur of farewell thus tomorrow contemplated in tears white thighs washed in river water
1 3 0
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P O E M S
9
silence between rosebushes flash indigo I get used to questions to their shadow in the bay of Palermo immediately thirst nothing more troubled and bowed than the skull the mouth having struggled for breath the idea of carnage and vermilion in my chest to the point of exhaustion
1 0
always this mad trap of perception if with Greek voice and a bit of chalk I touch to the quick the morning languid with dew bits of rejoinder and paper in another life of tragedy I move with water tell me what you intend with the architecture of bodies and water all down their cheeks
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 3 1
11
my joy in fiction engages every subject suppose I’ve a body a skeleton sexed a touch away from intimate words and self-portrait in Dresden a morning of soot and frost I cross the black and the white of three postcards the ruined facade of the women’s church unimaginable gust of wind at my back
1 2
the etchings of Goya in Madrid crosshatch of bars convents ripple of cars dancing in the dark at high noon child’s fingers caught between vowels and the wool of prayer mats and luxury simplicity of the verb to die and its ink
1 3 2
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P O E M S
TYPHOON THRUM
and it takes flight whitecaps typhoon thrum like an elbow in the night ray of mores the world is swiftly dark
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 3 3
everywhere where the mouth is eccentric it’s snowing: and yet this heat long beneath the tongue, the me curls up emotion glides ribbon of joy harmonic eyelids
1 3 4
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P O E M S
as the world is swiftly dark and night turns me avid from everywhere so much brushes up that the tongue with its salt pierces one by one the words with silence, typhoon thrum
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 3 5
in full flight if I spread my arms my hair slow in the oxygen I claim there are vast laws beyond cities and sepultures voice ribbon, eyes’ blade
1 3 6
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P O E M S
tonight if you lean your face close and civilization stretches out at the end of your arms, tonight if in full flight you catch my image say it was from afar like a die in the night
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 3 7
and while my sex dreams of daybreak engorges ecstatic epitheliums it’s snowing and again proximity I claim it’s the aura or the image asymmetric of the image in brief full flight
1 3 8
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P O E M S
groundswell, image ceremony my heart is agile emotion between us matter of laughter matter too true and my voice that cracks in the cold of galaxies
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 3 9
I claim I keep watch in silence in the rose cold of galaxies I claim that if the eye is black it cannot keep watch
1 4 0
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P O E M S
everywhere where the laughing virtual mouth of energy devours dawn disgorges its yes she cries out as wildly as she comes tympanum, sonorous mauve vast laws that lick the air’s depth from afar
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 4 1
in the morning the she glides high and rivers beneath my skin are long from so many windings savory with women and lucidity in the morning the river surges swept away when I touch you face-to-face in affirmation
1 4 2
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P O E M S
THE THROAT OF LEE MILLER
/ each time une phrase opens with an I she must be really young and as we translate her we must avoid saving never or in my view I remember the throat of Lee Miller one June day in Paris
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 4 3
/ 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
1 4 4
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P O E M S
/ I often move to the same spot a woman in love to capture shade at the same hour and as we translate I breathe the throat of Lee Miller perfection of the image as I draw near
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 4 5
/ often in the midst of the phrase I am breathless I observe I can stay that way a long time without memory and as we translate I touch certain places I exhaust myself the throat of Lee Miller no trace of a kiss
1 4 6
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P O E M S
/ above the city and the museum huge intelligent lips signal in a red that calls everything into question and as we translate I restrict myself to the top part of the work the throat of Lee Miller around four in the afternoon a silver-print day
M U S E U M
O F
B O N E
A N D
W A T E R
/
1 4 7
/ I often said every day art stretches out in our lives as twoedged dialogue and as we translate I cross the Rue de l’Observatoire the throat of Lee Miller in mind lips or bodies entangled I observe
1 4 8
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P O E M S
/ now in the thick of winter raging red Geneviève Cadieux’s Milky Way I don’t think I suffered from the comparison and as we translate bien sûr il n’y a pas de rapport the bared throat of Lee Miller open to speculation ■
M U S E U M
O F
RM
B O N E
&
EM
A N D
■
W A T E R
/
1 4 9
from S H A D O W : S O F T E T S O I F
I won’t blurt out if it all goes wrong, avalanches or eternity and blue funk I know we’ve dabbled in too many horizons mouthing the infinite patiently translated .... I haven’t yet said a word about disappearance or vocabulary it’s too vast and you remember solitude it scrapes the bottom of the sea and the alphabet that night may span the invisible right up to the notebooks of our indocility .... and now life falls nights on your breast
1 5 0
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P O E M S
as civilizations stream and word is a word used to rub lucidity against dawn and l’ombre with no one attached
by the number of poems, I always knew if someone was about to die or brush dawn with her mouth and the following day .... Life, la vie n’était pas vilaine, It was July we were hopelessly toiling. At night I said yes in the grape-red darkness of lips expanding on the present the trembling of vowels
The air is opaque today and chiming like symbols eroding the world at close range in our eyes. In the morning I count roses, insects. And solitude. Concealing sighs I drown effortlessly in the urban wind
S H A D O W :
S O F T
E T
S O I F
/
1 5 1
verbal tense and your hair Il y avait it was longing feuillage dense des origines.
a few night syllables through leafy words let’s watch our dream muscles move our eyes outstripped by nostalgia let’s watch tears, palms and fists like thirst the ever vague idea that living is necessarily a plus dans le langage .... ideas of falling and labyrinths as if at arm’s length all that is was made to shift dawn one day reveal the animal reign so I wake in pocketknives and dust
I haven’t yet said a word about disappearance upstream from all pronouns
1 5 2
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P O E M S
life makes decisions beneath the skin preparing wheel of dreams and hoops and games of math and caskets now glaciers the stuff of dawn and suffering
dawn doesn’t founder with its capital letters an elegant way of juxtaposing smiles piping hot and wounds if you’d like any .... and if torment if what quickens your nights of reading and irreality si la poussière vibre sur tes doigts lean back on shadow in a place with blue and emptiness there will surely be water in your eyes modernity and fear in your clothes ....
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it is true that we are often together there to strip the world determine life touch come closer because of farewells and untellable tragedies
softly no nothingness just stories heads or tails scattered along the length of the quotidian and creatures for there are always creatures ready to run for us before eternity get drunk coil up in language creatures suspended from our need of sea and wave
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hold on in silence at dawn the verb to be courses in the veins, a heavenly body, it flies as after love or grain of salt on the tongue early morning, taste of immensity it draws near the first dampness come kiss me think of the great power of water that makes a place of us
this will have been an idea of flight of fervor or like a dialogue when we drop at the foot of words it will have been surprising light in time unfurling perfect sea the entire width of the alphabet and of wind
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we are still narrating bubbles of silence linger in our questions night falls GB
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from N O T E B O O K O F R O S E S AND CIVILIZATION
while caresses draw us close to the source and to dawn a fox’s life you were saying ■
the color of tears at the bottom of a ravine the heat of summer on the earlobe it all feeds the senses: madonnas that stoke the fever an old translation of Virgil ■
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whatever the month or wound the soft color of afternoons you plunge into la lingua la lingua and its salty murmur ■
to the dawn add i am in the middle bite marks and certainty: we all need seashells and reality ■
the tongue rarely approaches dawn without a sob ■
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in a time blue and easy when the light is slow and ties urgent knots with shadow and catastrophe you say we need rain rain and even more night than the abyss can rein in or the silence of people of tenderness
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PRECAUTIONS
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humid and hot the idea of a reed. Repeat: it’s night later guess what gives rise to the sensation of easy languor. A void at the level of life
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furious words iron bar line of light) how to scream dogs in the midst of a smell of burning (of tires of night
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from eyelash to wound life has to lie flat don’t you think between us and the mirrors
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humidity in the eyes it concerns us such an old mystery a sky of animals brume with signatures that wander
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SUGGESTIONS HEAVY-HEARTED
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the idea of balancing on the tip of an I suspended by the feverish joys of July or salivating before the dark of a present filled with whys that stream through thoughts
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then give me the pleasure of tracing words impossible to tear holes in go back through the course of time between dialogues don’t waver
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repeat: memory hold fast. The tongue it calls on us, on everything curls up everywhere to feed on silence
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an idea of absolute carried off in a word in a blast of wind ask your question
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SMOOTH HORIZON OF THE VERB LOVE
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an urban image from the eighties when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur and at the back of the room women wrapped their arms around nights of ink and dawn
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calendar of murmurs vague caresses about the planet and its water we could have confused words but there were doors open confetti in the midst of darkness gentle ways to swoon in a corner with she who put her tongue in my mouth
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focus on yes, on the woman’s eyelids caress not silence not word focus beyond. Hold me back
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RUSTLING AND PUNCTUATION
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the world we’re winded wound-up passion unfurling under the tongue
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a street name a shadow that floats glued like a weekday to the dust old refuge: use the familiar
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often that’s happiness say i love you or sleepless night colors that precede the iodine of words torment of punctuation
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turn your head to the right side of the horizon and water this is Montréal cheek to cheek embedding in the tongue a scent of enigma, a link
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EVERY ARDOR
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beware of words that blur of summer heat that unfurls like an ocean over the species
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thus we’ll leave without remembering verbs in their time that brought us closer to mirrors and rapture
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since immensity seeks to take on another form imagine the speed of the murmur the noisy surging of old intentions this great yes risen from the depth of memory
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if the whole body is bent over what respite if the body kneels breaks surface at the hour of bedsheets or ink
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IT’S LIVELY
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fountain/fossil: wouldn’t you rather roll tomorrow off the tip of the tongue restart reality break day
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it’s lively you might say a color that doesn’t make sense it’s so real that we think riot of genes dashing madly in broad daylight toward the origin
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you sleep a bit of dna in your silence you sleep up close to the word dissect thinking: we’ll go a great shout in our chests try out our parachutes
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SOFT LINK 3
It’s names of places, cities, climates that haunt. Characters. Clear mornings, a fine rain that falls all day, rare images from elsewhere and America, two natural disasters that make us close ranks amid corpses, it’s quiet or violet acts, mortars, ice cubes in glasses at cocktail hour, noise of dishes or a slight stutter that momentarily torments, a slap, kiss, it’s names of cities like Venice or Reading, Tongue and Pueblo, names of characters Fabrice Laure or Emma. Words honed over years and novels, words we spoke with halting breath laughing spitting sucking an olive, verbs we add to the pleasure of lips, to success, to sure death. It’s words like cheek or knee and still others further than we can see that leave us teetering on the edge of the abyss, to stretch like cats in morning it’s words that keep us up till dawn or make us flag down a cab on a weekday night when the city’s asleep before midnight and solitude is caught like an abscess in the jaw. It’s words spoken from memory, in envy or pride often words uttered with love while laying our hands behind the head or pouring a glass of port. It’s words whose etymology must be sought, then projected on a wall of sound so the cries of pain and sighs of pleasure that wander in dreams and documents lay siege to the mysterious darkness of the heart. It’s words like bay, hill,
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wadi, via, rue, strada˘, dispersed through the dictionary between flamboyancies and neons, burial mounds and forests. It’s words arms of the sea, ensembles of sense that claw or soft at our chest, cold shivers rivulets and fear abrupt in the back while we try to fissure the smooth time of the future with trenchant quotations. It’s words that swallow fire and life, who knows now if they’re Latin French Italian Sanskrit Mandarin Galician Arab or English, if they conceal a number an animal or old anguishes impatient to shoot up before our very eyes like cloned shadows replete with light and great myths. ■
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all thirsts are hollows of light in the pain a strong moment of origin in the large chart of the pronouns tell me if my death goes quickly from one century to the other if in time one has to forget the orchid, to adjourn the frenzy tell me if this appetite I have for dawn will go and amidst the cultures tremble like an obsession, a horizon ■
one calls noise of beauty the sea soldered to the salt in the infinitely night beyond all the narrations one also calls noise of beauty silence its slow signature at the bottom of dawn
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NAPE 9
in our thoughts here they are slow organs of memory indeed our imagination split in two recaptured amidst crowds and first names comes with zeal without the least erasure all the way to the temples to ramify the senses and the caresses all form of kiss blended
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turbulence I also love the kind knotted in the heat wave and the togetherness the lowest point of respiration our we enumerated brand new in the future
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back, ankles everything has a name herb’ephemeral vertigo everything has a name come my tiny life in the short lapse of the retorts
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go find a little more ink an outcome Dice. Square of night. Now beyond the barbed wire come, I take you by the waist. ■
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from A F T E R T H E W O R D S
after : we are an appearance an unknown alphabet, humanity’s dead angle a taste for drunkenness that barks that grabs confusing everything long ago and fast not yets after someone mrmrs me at any time of day and of brain I am not truly myself only yesterday in time or the cosmos ■
after, when the being’s low will still wants to translate background sound overcome with life after the lost shadow of the reeds and of the verb vanish the slow oxygen of the whole alphabet after you will cram into another species PJ
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Translator’s note: Words in italics were in English in the original.
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POETIC POLITICS
I have divided my presentation into two parts. The first part has to do with the body of writing, its motivations, its energies. The second part has to do with the references and values that surround us and the kinds of linguistic reaction they call for when we disagree with them. I say when we disagree with them because I don’t believe that one becomes a writer to reinforce common values or common perspectives on reality. I would like, in this talk, to make space for questions regarding different rituals, different approaches, different postures that we take in language in order to exist, fulfill our needs to express, communicate, or to challenge language itself: hoping that by playing with language it will reveal unknown dimensions of reality. I have been writing for more than 20 years. I have written poetry, novels, texts, essays. Today, I am still fascinated by the act of writing, the processes, the trouble, the pain, and the joy that we go through in order to put in words what we feel, what we recall vaguely but which insists on being recalled, what we envision whether it is full-length images or enigmatic flashes running through our brain like a storm of truth. Those who are familiar with my work will know that one of the most recurrent words in my texts is body (corps).This word is usually accompanied by the words writing (écriture) and text (texte). The expression Le Cortex exubérant summarizes my obsession with body, text, and writing. For me the body is a metaphor of energy, intensity, desire, plea-
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sure, memory, and awareness. The body interests me in its circulation of energy and the way it provides, through our senses, for a network of associations out of which we create our mental environment, out of which we imagine far beyond what we in fact see, feel, hear or taste. It is through this network of associations that we claim new sensations, that we dream backward in accelerated or slow motion, that we zoom in on sexual fantasies, that we discover unexpected angles of thought. I have always said that writing is energy taking shape in language. Sexual, libidinal, mental, and spiritual energies give to us the irresistible need to declare things, to make new propositions, to look for solutions which can unknot social patterns of violence and death, to explore unknown territories of the mind, to search for each of our identities, to fill the gap between real and unreal. In other words, energy motivates us to write but it also needs to find its motive to be able to do this. Energy has to go out and has to come in. The body is its channel. But the body claims to be more than a channel: it thinks of strategies to regularize the flow of energy. The body alone cannot process all energy, it needs language to process energy into social meaning. Among the uses that we make of language, there is a privileged one called creative writing. It is in this sense that I say that writing is shaping figures and meanings within the merry-go-round of energy that traverses us. Filtered by language, this energy finds a rhythm, becomes a voice, transforms itself into images and metaphors. Energy that is too low keeps you silent, energy that is too high makes noise instead of meaning—even though silence and noise can eventually by interpreted as an historical momentum. Sexual, libidinal, mental, and spiritual energies provided with a motive or an object of desire, or both, engage us in a creative dimension. When these energies synchronize they offer a privileged moment to a writer. Most of the time we call this “inspiration.” These energies can
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also work alone or in combination. Sexual energy produces a multiplicity of images and scenarios. Libidinal energy creates projects and goals. Mental energy provides for sharpness and for abstraction. Spiritual energy links us to a global environment. Yet all these energies can stagnate or make you mad if they don’t meet their object of desire, or organize themselves in such a way that they can at least dream of—or figure out—their object of desire. Now let me make a distinction between the motive and the object of desire. The motive is something that whatever the situation eternally returns in the work of an artist. The motive is roots, flesh and skin. It is incontrovertible. It is inscribed in us as a first and ultimate memory. It is carnal knowledge. All good writers have a strong motive. The motive is most of the time hidden in the core of a work, hidden but recurrent as a theme. It seems to me that motive (a good reason and a pattern) is a personal, existential question that makes one endlessly repeat: why or how come? It is a three-dimensional question caused by a synergetic moment, this moment being either traumatic or ecstatic. With the synergetic moment gone, we are left with this three-dimensional question, a question to which we can only respond with a two-dimensional answer—that is, a partial answer that obliges us to repeat the question and to try other answers. We answer in two dimensions because we think in a chronological way, one word at a time, one word after the other, while the body experiences life synchronously. Writing, we have to make choices, to separate things. Naming is separation, it portions out reality. Dreams are 3-dimensional but we forget about them or cannot understand them. As for the object of desire, it is probably always the same one mediated by different people we fall in love with, by books we cannot recover from, by situations to which we respond passionately. For me, a good writer or a good painter always repeats the same motive, the same
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question, the same statement in all her or his works. Think of Kandinsky, Rothko, Betty Goodwin. Great artists are always driven by a motive while fairly good creators have to rely on their objects of desire: if the object isn’t there, then nothing happens but sweat. It is well known that people give and take energy from one another; that blame, insult, humiliation take away energy; that praise, love, and respect multiply energy. The principle is very simple. But it gets complicated when it applies to the way men and women are positioned in regard to language’s patriarchal values. We cannot avoid questioning this cultural field of language, which both provides us with energy or deprives us of it. What I call the cultural field of language is made of male sexual and psychic energies transformed through centuries of written fiction into standards for imagination, frames of references, patterns of analysis, networks of meaning, rhetorics of body and soul. Digging in that field can be, for a creative woman, a mental health hazard. This second part is more personal. What I propose to discuss is a kind of trajectory in my writing. I would like to show how my politics of poetic form—my Poetic Politics—have been shaped within a sociocultural environment as well as through private life. But I would also like to talk in general terms of the behaviors that we encounter in writing while we make space for ourselves as well as for ideas that we value and themes that we privilege. Since in principle language belongs to everyone, we are entitled to reappropriate it by taking the initiative to intervene when it gives the impression of closing itself off, and when our desire clashes with common usage. Very young, I perceived language as an obstacle, as a mask, narrow-spirited like a repetitive task of boredom and of lies. Only poetic language found mercy in my eyes. It is in this sense that my practice of writing became at once a practice of intervention and of
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exploration—a ludic experience. Very early I had a relationship to the language of transgression and of subversion. I wanted strong sensations: I wanted to unmask lies, hypocrisy, and banality. I had the feeling that if language was an obstacle, it was also the place where everything happens, where everything is possible. That I still believe. I have often said that I don’t write to express myself but that I write to understand reality, the way we process reality into fiction, the way we process feeling, emotion and sensation into ideas and landscapes of thought. After all, the difference between a writer and a non-writer is that the writer processes life through written language and by doing so has access and gives access to unexpected, unsuspected angles of reality—which we commonly called fiction. What about expressions like strong sensations, transgression, subversion, and ludic experience? Let’s start with “strong sensations” and “ludic experience.” What do these expressions oppose? For me, they oppose boredom and daily routine; in a word: linearity. Behind that there is obviously a statement something like: “I am not satisfied with what society offers me as a future or imposes on me in the present because if I were to follow its directives, it would mean that I would have to lead a boring, middlebrow, puritan life.” This means that I value research, intelligence, and pleasure. It also means that I cannot function with clichés and standard values that somehow seem to narrow the possibilities of life: life of the mind as well as life of the emotions. Indeed, our emotional and our critical spirits are more and more eroded. To be more concrete, let’s say that I started to write, in the early ’60s in a Québec which was at a turning point of our history, a period that we have called the “quiet revolution.” Yes, everything was being questioned: education as well as social, political, religious, and cultural life. To my generation, the dream of an independent, French, socialist, secular Québec provided for audacities, transgressions, and a quest for col-
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lective identity. But underneath these changes was essentially the question of identity. Who were we? Who are we? We have a Canadian passport but our soul and tradition are not Canadian, we speak French but we are not French, we are North American but we are not American. As a young person and as a young writer there were three kinds of institutions that had a sour taste to me: First: The Catholic Church because it had a strong influence in almost every field of Québec society and mainly because of its control on education and sexual life (marriage, contraception, abortion, homosexuality). Second: The Canadian Confederation and all its British and Canadian symbols. I resent profoundly how as French Canadian we were despised and discriminated against by Anglo Canadian politics. I have always made the language issue a personal thing. Today I am still vividly hurt when someone who is living or has been living in Montréal for many years addresses me in English. Third: The literary establishment. When you write you write with and against literature. You write out of inspiration from writers and books, but you also write against mediocrity and the clichés the literary establishment promotes. Maybe it has been unfair to some writers of the generation that preceded mine, but I was fed up with poems talking about landscapes, snow, mountains, and the tormented rhetoric of love and solitude. At the same time, I felt deeply for Québec literature which the generation of La Barre du Jour and Les Herbes rouges were about to rediscover and to renew at the same time. So all together those three realities set up for me a social and literary field that I could oppose and later on transgress and subvert. Very early my poetry was abstract, syntactically nonconventional; desire with its erotic drives had a great part in it. Part of what I was writing was consciously political, at least at the level of intention. Let’s say that my
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“basic intention” was to make trouble, to be a troublemaker in regard to language but also with values of my own embodied by a writing practice that was ludic (playing with words), experimental (trying to understand processes of writing), and exploratory (searching). You see, it brings us back to my values: exploration (which provides for renewal of information and knowledge), intelligence (which provides the ability to process things), and pleasure (which provides for energy and desire). So from 1965 to 1973, I can say that I would see myself as a poet— an avant-garde poet, a formalist poet. Being a woman was not at stake, didn’t seem to be a problem. Of course it was not a problem because in some way I was not identifying with femininity nor with other women, with whom I felt I had nothing to share. I could understand and talk about alienation, oppression, domination, exploitation only when applied to me as a Quebecer. I was a Quebecer, an intellectual, a poet, a revolutionary. Those were my identities. They were all positive and somehow they were valued in those years of cultural changes and counterculture. So in some way by transgressing I was still on the good side. But in 1974, I became a mother and about the same time fell in love with another woman. Suddenly, I was living the most common experience in a woman’s life which is motherhood and at the same time I was living the most marginal experience in a woman’s life which is lesbianism. Motherhood made life absolutely concrete (two bodies to wash, to clean, to move, to think of ) and lesbianism made my life absolute fiction in a patriarchal heterosexual world. Motherhood shaped my solidarity with women and gave me a feminist consciousness as lesbianism opened new mental space to explore. All this to say that my body was getting new ideas, new feelings, new emotions. From then on my writing started to change. It became
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more fluid, though still abstract and still obsessed with language, transgression, and subversion; but this time I had “carnal knowledge” of what I was investing in words. My frame of references started to change and new words (words that I had never used) started to invest my work: vertigo, cliff, amazon, sleep, memory, skin. I started to use new metaphors to understand things: the spiral, the hologram, metaphors which would help me to drift away from a linear and binary approach. Questions started to flow about identity, imagination, history, and more and more questions came about language and the incredible fraud I was discovering in the accumulated layers of lies told about women through centuries of the male version of reality. Which is to say that I also had to deal with contradictions, paradoxes, double binding, tautology in order to understand what I would call “the father knows best” business. Patriarchy being a highly sophisticated machine, it takes time and energy to understand how it works. Now I would like to try to answer more precisely the questions raised in this series of lectures on “The Politics of Poetic Form.” While writing this essay, I found myself saying: “It is not in the writing that a poetic text is political, it is in the reading that it becomes political.” I knew something was true and wrong at the same time with this statement and therefore I decided to divide it in two affirmative statements, which are: A. It is in the writing that a text shows its politics. B. It is in the reading that a text has a political aura. I believe that a text gives subliminal information on how it wants to be read. Its structure is itself a statement, no matter what the text says. Of course, what the texts says is important but it is like body language. Body language tells more about yourself and how you want to relate with someone than do your words. I would like to point out three aspects in which a text shows politics: its perspective, its themes, its style.
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The perspective. What I call the perspective is an angle from which we orient the reading of a text before it is even read. This can be done by quotations beginning or inserted in the text, for example from Virginia Woolf, Marx, Martin Luther King, etc. This can also be done by dedication of a poem to someone whose name will ring a political bell. For example, dedicating your poem to Che Guevara, to Valerie Solanas, to Paul Rose, or even to Ben Johnson. The third way is to title your poem or your book in such a way that it will suggest some political metaphors. For example: Chili’s Bones Flowers, Clitoris at Sunset, The Color Purple (in which we read subliminally “people of color”) or Give Em Enough Rope (which can be understood “give them enough rope to hang themselves” or “give him enough rope to do want he what”). Quotations, dedications, and titles provide for immediate references or statement. They tell a state of mind, they point out literary, cultural, or political networks. Themes. There are themes that are bound to have if not ideological at least a troubling effect: Sexuality, eroticism, homosexuality, lesbianism —something is always at stake with eroticism because it deals with limits, morality, and the unavowable. Language—writing about language, pointing out how language works or giving feedback on how what is being read has been written can also imply politics of awareness because it takes away the “referential illusion” of the reader. Postures. Disqualifying symbols of authority by uncovering the lies and the contradictions on which they have been constituted—God, Pope, President, Man, or little man (as in husband, lover, or father). Valuing marginal experiences—valuing people who are inferiorized, for example valuing women as subjects. Style. Shaking the syntax, breaking grammatical law, not respecting punctuation, visually designing the text, using the white space, typesetting as you choose, using rhythms to create sounds. All of these have
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a profound effect on readers, offering a new perspective on reality through a global formal approach as did for example the impressionists, the cubists, and the expressionists in painting and as did, in literature, the surrealists, le nouveau roman, the post-moderns. Among writers we can name Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Monique Wittig for The Lesbian Body. So by changing the perspective, the themes, or the style, somehow you deceive the conformist reader in her or his moral or aesthetic expectations and you annoy her or him by breaking the habits of reading. At the same time, you provide for a new space of emotion and you make space for new materials to be taken into account about life and its meaning; you also offer the non-conformist reader a space for a new experience—traveling through meaning while simultaneously producing meaning. These interventions send a message in which the poet says: I don’t agree with prevalent moral or aesthetic values. I am not respecting the status quo. There is more to life than what we are thought to believe, there is more to language than what we are used to expecting. While the statement “It is in the writing that a text shows its politics” repels or seduces the reader (most of the time belonging to the dominant culture), the second statement “It is in the reading that a text becomes political” calls for a process of identification from the reader belonging to a minority or treated as such. I believe that a lot of writers belonging to minorities whether sexual, racial, or cultural, or writers who belong to groups who live or have lived under colonization, oppression, exploitation, or a dictatorship, are bound to have a highly loaded personal memory out of which they express themselves as individuals. But inevitably their personal story converges with the one of thousands who have felt and lived the same experience. Memory, identity, and solidarity are at stake when reading is
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taken as political; just as transgression, subversion, and exploration are at stake when writing is taken as political. Anyone who encounters insult and hatred because of her or his differences from a powerful group is bound, soon or later, to echo a we through the use of I and to draw the line between us and them, we and they. WE triggers emotions based on solidarity, memory, identification, complicity, proudness, or sadness. THEY triggers emotions based on anger and revolt. Hatred also: THEY cuts the relation. YOU (in the plural vous) triggers accusations, blame, reproach. It maintains the relation because it is a direct address. You calls for negotiation just as they calls for struggle. We all have an I/We story and a We/They story. If you belong to a dominant group, they is either laughable, insignificant, or used as a scapegoat. If you belong to an oppressed group, they is targeted as enemy because they have proved to be a real threat or danger to your collectivity or your group. As an example, I could draw a personal chart which would read like this: I/we writers I/we poets I/we women I/we feminists I/we lesbians I/we Quebecers
you non-writers you prose writers you men you sexists you heterosexuals you Canadians
politically non-pertinent politically non-pertinent politically pertinent politically pertinent politically pertinent politically pertinent
People from groups who have been politically, economically, and culturally silenced or censored have expectations that one of them will speak about them and for them. Women have those expectations, feminists, lesbians, Indians, blacks, Chicanos have those expectations. Those readers want so much to hear or see things about themselves
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that they can even overestimate the political involvement of a writer. That is why writers from those groups are often asked the question: Are you a political writer? Êtes-vous un écrivain engagé? A question that embarrasses them and which they will be tempted to avoid by saying that they write what they write because they are creative. Which is true, but not as simple as it seems. For example, while writing a feminist article, I questioned myself wondering who is writing my text: the poet, the feminist, or the lesbian. I came up with this answer: The feminist is moral, responsible, fair, humanist, has solidarity. The lesbian is audacious, radical, takes risks, strictly focuses on women. The creative person has imagination and is able to process ambivalent emotion and contradictions as well as transforming anger, ecstasy, desire, pain, and so on, into social meaning. So altogether, I would say that one’s Poetic Politics shapes itself within the weaving movement of personal motive with energy, identity, knowledge, and the ability to process emotions, ideas, sensations into a meaningful response to the world. As for myself, my poetic is essentially to make space for the unthought. As a woman, I am left with a language that has either erased or marginalized women as subjects. Therefore in my poetic I perform what is necessary to make space for women’s subjectivity and plurally, to make space for a positive image of women. This task engages me to question language—symbolic and imaginary, from all angles and dimensions. In conclusion, I would like to say that a good part of my life has gone into writing and it probably will continue to be like that. In the desire and the necessity to reinvent language, there is certainly an intention for happiness, a utopian thrust, a serious responsibility. It is because I feel both profoundly in me that I continue my course of writing. Voyage without end, writing is what always comes back to seek me out in order to distance death and stupidity, lies and violence. Writ-
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ing never lets me forget that if life has a meaning, somewhere it is in what we invent with our lives, with the aura of streams of words that, within us, form sequences of truth. 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.
Coda Poetry: For me poetry is the highest probability of desire and thought synchronized in a meaningful voice. Poetry is a formal and semantic intuition that is brought forth by our desire, this desire not knowing the laws that motivate it. Text: The text is a thoughtful reflexive approach of the processes of writing and reading. When we play the text against the poem, it is as if we would like to tame the irrational of the poem. A text can be written without “inspiration,” without a story. To write a text, you only need a “motive” to trigger the pleasure of writing and to perform or to explore in language. Now I would like to establish the rapport—the connection—I have with poetry, prose, writing, and language. This I can say now, but even five years ago I would have been unable to identify this rapport. A) My rapport with poetry has to do with the voice finding its way at the very moment of synchronization of thought and emotion. It is the rapport of intelligence in the sense of comprehension (to take with one self ). B) My rapport with prose and novels resembles my rapport with reality as it is in daily life. I find prose and daily life so boring that I can only exist in these two realities by making ruptures in the sentence or in the discourse, by seeking surprises and discoveries, by expending
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meaning. Writing prose, I need to explode the narrative, the anecdotal, the linearity of time, the normal mumbling of characters. That is why my novels are anti-novels that challenge traditional novels. C) My rapport with writing has to do with desire and energy. This rapport is essentially ludic and about exploration. The body and the act of the eyes are mainly involved. D) My rapport with language is a matter of perspective on patriarchal knowledge and on its symbolic hierarchal/dualist field. It calls for vision rather than for subversion. It calls for awareness, concentration, sharpness. Vision goes beyond transgression because it brings forth new material.
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I like to say we and look elsewhere make of language turbulence catch up with me in my tradition in the sentence’s duration pleasure softly spaced out catch up with me in my difference
I’m a woman of the present fascinated by the history that enters into the composition of the words with which each generation bears witness to its anguish, invents its hope, modifies the collective tale. I am interested in what confines each generation inside themes, metaphors, theoretical and stylistic attitudes. I imagine the passion of the language that is allowed to escape from this. The turbulence that cracks open history. The desire that consumes the common places. I imagine the interior urgency that forces the liquidation of an era’s truisms. Literature is the fruit of a displacement of belonging into a belonging that invents its own horizon. I always displace myself starting from the words of my belonging Today, 24 February 1998, I answer the question from where I speak,
Epigraph: Line 1 is from Fluid Arguments. Lines 2 through 6 are from a Pierre Joris translation of Vertigo of the Proscenium. Another Joris translation of this poem appears on page 97.
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thus: from there where I feel a strong desire to be silent. Not that I want to be done with writing. To the contrary, I speak from a place, difficult to designate, for sure, but from which the words would organize themselves in such a way that their choreography on the page gives an impression of silence, of a lowering of the volume of ambiant noises, noises that are not always depth sounds. As others satisfy their desires with daring gestures, so do I want to satisfy my penchant for silence with words that have a strong sensual resonance, literary connotations, and philosophical depth. It is said that identity as quest or self-affirmation often acts as the engine of writing. This may be true, but it seems to me that what works best in us is that which vibrates, moans, compares, cuts, spark(le)s in language in a singular manner. In effect, we work well with what resonates in us, that is to say with what has the property of extending the duration and/or the intensity of the value we attribute to certain words. Around these words, with these words, we create microclimates, sometimes called theme, style, or stance. Key words, passe-partout words, bulldozer words starting with which we trigger tornadoes of meaning. Turbulence takes up residence: grammar and syntax adapt themselves. For me, the words that carry me away, that stimulate me, are before all abstract or strongly symbolic. As I have stated repeatedly in numerous essays, I tend to make a synthesis of my reality by reducing it to its most simple expression, to a vital formula which incorporates the essential of what, for me, is significant in a life: desire, ardor, intensity, speed, intelligence, honesty, lucidity. Thus, rightly or wrongly, I always project onto the group to which I objectively belong (woman, lesbian) qualities of creativity, rebelliousness, and passion. Similarly, the Montréal I view as mine will be a desirable and exciting city. No matter that winter lasts close to five months, for me Montréal will always be
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a July city, a summer city with a tiny opening onto October—an October of rebellion. It seems important for me to recall here how I marvel at that period between 1974 and 1984 when I had to play it close to the vest, in language, so as to exist as a female subject, that is to say I had to invent and practice writing rituals. As far as my sense of belonging to Québec is concerned, I have to say first of all that I am part of a generation that takes it for granted that it lives not in the province of Québec, but in the fictive and virtual country called Québec. I am moved and touched by this belonging, though this emotion has never been the core matter of my work as a writer. What I have tried to inscribe before all into texts such as SoldOut (étreinte-illustration), French Kiss (étreinte-exploration), is the Montréal of modernity, its North American energy and of course its linguistic drama unfolding through memory, in the quotidian and as a scenario engaging a future in which I is less and less an other and more and more completely other. The Québécois frequently use the expression nous autres (we others). It translates well this feeling of strangeness and ambivalence which we still experience in relation to ourselves. It is before all in our relation to the French language that this effect of strangeness comes to the fore. Linguistic contexts which proceed from political contexts are carriers of tensions and semantic excesses which energize literature. Every writer who is subjected to linguistic stress records those malfunctions of meaning which enter into the composition of her mother tongue and transforms them to her profit. As a Québécoise, it is certain that I am subjected to a strong linguistic stress because the rift between the written language (reflection) and the spoken language (life, the quotidian, daily experience) is major, if one takes into account the constant intrusion of English and of that other
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language born from the forced association with English: le joual. This linguistic stress can be seen at work in my novel French Kiss (1974). A further stress: to inject feminine subjectivity into a language which discredits the feminine. It is in L’amèr (1977) and in my novel Picture Theory (1982) that I have best, it seems to me, fought and survived that struggle of/with meaning. Since always I love to keep myself elsewhere. I love to keep myself in the untranslatable, that is at the very limit of I exist and the poem. ■
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PROCESS OF A YES ITS ENERGY IN PROGRESS
The text of this mise-en-scène was composed in French by Nicole Brossard with excerpts from her books: L’amèr (1977), Amantes (1980), La Lettre aérienne (1985), Installations (1989), Langues obscures (1992), La Nuit verte du parc Labyrinthe (1992) and some unpublished texts. Of these, only Langues Obscures has not been translated [but see p. 93 for translated selection]. See These Our Mothers (1983), Lovhers (1986), and Green Night of Labyrinth Park (1992). ■
A title, a mise en scène. Progress of an energy that says yes amid the complexity and variety of living forms. Certainly, we are never through with the torment, with our lofty affirmations. There are always questions to warn us against what we already are, what we already know, questions that generate narrative, feeding the back-and-forth between reality and what, virtual, throws us back into the enigma. Yes, because we deal in lies and changing your mind isn’t easy amid the laws and sepultures. It is in language, we will recall, that lives the hunted hand of the I weigh my words, the tracing hand that does everything not to cheat the juggling hand. I say process of a yes its energy in progress. I insist on questions, although my writings are marked by affirmations, encompassing global propositions in which I never hesitated to use never, always, as though each time rushing toward what an I desire radically could bear witness
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to. As though I was watching not to encumber myself with the objections liable to slow down my certainty, this tenacious little point, this motivation that, meanwhile, works its subject, its sphere of influence, stretches its fantasies like the many metaphors that order the succession of thoughts. I say yes because if patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be. Again for this we must want her, very real in our words, this integral woman that we are, this idea of us that, like a vital certainty, would be our natural penchant to give meaning to who we are. I say yes for us to lose the convulsive habit of initiating girls to the male like a commonly practised lobotomy. In effect, I want to see the form of women take shape in the trajectory of the species. Yes, because we are never without worry before the opacity, although others before us said that is where they drew their inspiration. I acknowledge that writing only has meaning when applied to living well. All writing is a sentimental subject. Others before us, fertile in images, avowed their penchants; others, free thinkers, declared their dissidence or decried their knowledge, but each time they were surprised by a gentle breeze on their skin, it did not fail to teach them of a pleasure that haunts long after thought has declared itself fertile. I acknowledge, our I derealizes the world in its own interest, at the level of the confession. Sentimental. I say yes, I say all of it yes I know writing is memory, power of presence, and proposition. I know that to write is to make yourself exist, like deciding what does and does not exist. I say yes because I have to imagine the worst, that is to say that the little man wrapped in his big m has with a single pen-mark and singular frame of mind crossed out the existence of Women, decreed women’s inferiority, and invented the woman. I say yes because I must of course imagine what awaits us.
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I say process because where masculine thought was able to avoid addressing the duality of the sexes by inferiorizing the feminine gender, the feminist consciousness cannot in turn consent to such a blindness. I say yes, yes, I get it: while validating the existence of women and discrediting the logic of men’s imaginary constructions, the feminist consciousness finds itself obligated to ask the question of difference in a series of prudent statements that, on the one hand, do not dehumanize men and, on the other hand, do not deify women. I say yes, we will have to agree on what in us says it is hurting. All civilizations have subdued part of the suffering, allowing it to bloom amid the overwhelming passions, labors, and grand temples. We have spoken of the unconscious. Absolutely insisted on the magic of women’s arms in the midst of darkness. Often mentioned the smiles of women passing by without finding in them subjects. I say yes because I want to be alone like poets are when the questions follow one another like archipelagoes of meaning. Even if poetry forces me to look at the world, pain, and sometimes winter when the snowflakes settle on your forehead, I want only to be hurt by beauty, too much. I say that my eyes are numerous, vigilant, in love, and worried. I certainly am touched by our happy gullibility amid concrete things that turn our sphere of influence upside-down. Others before us have known the spectacular reconciliation of the young timbre of their voices with the old documents where we rub shoulders with death without too much discomfort. I am touched by the impregnable space invented by our eyes to free us from the species. Yes, because whatever the knots, the silence, and the vertigo with which the verb “to be” is fastened to our lives, the thinking matter loves that the idea of desire wins against all the clichés and destruction, for in our bodies when we do the inventory of inventions, mucous mem-
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branes, vertebrae, neurons secrete other signs to draw us closer to the line of audacity where a thousand norths, a thousand souths meet. The idea of desire is a supple idea, similar to the way we sometimes use the future to draw together the time between our lips and answer for existence. I have this image in me of the extravagant suppleness of our thoughts when they turn around us, full of seduction, to suggest orchids and infinite numbers so that we can share the art of touch, vice prism versa light, with an air that says: my bella-scribe listen to the tigress in you, stretch out your ribbon of silk, divide our intimacy, the sufficient fullness of our intermingled phrases. Yes, because when the thinking matter meets our pleasure, the language, said to be wise, suddenly panics in the sonorous splicing of the images. So amid the sounds of breathlessness, the ancient cries, and the trembling of our voices, so our own language, said to be young, stretches out to meet it, sometimes to the point of falling away. Yes, because there where it hurts in life, by successive touches, it is not death, but the mobility of light, the gift we have for aggravating beauty. Yes, every morning, I take interest in life, every morning I get comfortable in my body so as to be able to respond when a woman gives me a sign. Yes, because we really should make a significant act of presence within the body of the language, a language, let it be said, that does not voluntarily welcome the desiring lucidity of the woman subject. Because language knows nothing of women, or rather, let us say it knows nothing but the slanderous racket repeated by generations of misogynists, phallocrats, and sexists. Yes, because language renders women non-existent and in so doing obligates us to perform rituals of presence that exhaust the more vulnerable among us, while on the con-
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trary electrifying the more audacious. Yes, writing I am a woman is full of consequences. Yes, because multiplying the ideological anchors, forward flights, the syntheses, feints and perspectives, always searching, a mirror, drifting on a word, bumping into another, obsessed or distracted, thought is the most modern of the language games that liberate desire. Yes, it begins with the skin; if I want to last in utopia, all love labors in me and let’s say amazes me because of the hypotheses, source, cyprine, at work, I love you. Yes, I succumbed to the temptation as one enters into the circuit of gestures that assure survival, conquest, a smile, and the fusion of fictions, come the night when eye to eye we recall the most delightful delinquencies, a sleight of hand and before our eyes opens the agile memory of utopian girls moving in italics or in a fresco toward all the exits. Yes, I take an interest in knowledge, the price to pay, for example, if we prematurely amputate the thought of a few utopias. I take an interest in all methods by which we might escape despair. Thinking has always left me contemplative, supposing that by the simple fact of being in that state we can eliminate some mystery or black hole or lie. Yes, because there are invisible structures in our bones that allow us to extricate ourselves from childhood and family maneuverings. Childhood does not suffice when we live amid the planets and lies. Indeed, the I perched on its anatomy, great interpreter of obscure languages, is watchful that we not compromise our chances for salvation amid the speaking beings, ever dispensing a bit of hope by constantly resembling someone. Yes, because we shall remember the voluptuous episodes, this “take me” in proportion to the imagination. I am indeed moved by the vivacity of the I. Its way of evoking, between my lips, a surprising else-
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where. I like a well-documented I, capable of such perfect silence and laughter that we allow ourselves to be touched all over. Yes, process, because the thought of eternity comes easily when we caress a woman. When vowels acquire an unusual texture, rebelling on the tongue, flooding the imaginary like an “I think” amid caresses and pleasure. Yes, because without respite I hear this distinct pronunciation, the sonorous form of the desire of her. In the vowels’ double, I hear an anterior and virtual body, blanks of madness. I keep the balance between the sounds. Yes, I write up close to what I write. It is always the same words, great objects of speech, light, night, or silence, the same birds in the afternoon, another paragraph on this side of words, the answer that escapes when I take a breath. Yes, death has no sex but an I, yes, our body alleges that our body breathes easily in the unreal. Yes, because with every generation the poem modifies the level of desire, the irritability of our eyes amid the comparisons, I mean to say between the eyelids, I mean to say that this is where I remember the best, nothing intimate, only fifteen minutes, in French, I mean to say, without description, only with my eyes, without mistaking the fruit for my many pens, without counting the number of bodies. Yes, because there are sensations that, like music when it touches bottom, our stomach and eyes in full imagery carry us beyond the sadness and debris that I repeat deep inside myself. Yes, because there where life is an idea that brings us closer to silence, our pain is invalid. It is certain that I am moved by this distress that culminates in full civilization, full moon night, when our replies move, doors sleeping in a vast world, when everything incites us to abandon our incompatible smiles amid the sighs and devices. I agree, each time we use simple words to try and renew our ties to
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the inhabited body that connects us to the species. I agree, speaking quite simply inflames. Yes, because the company of thinking and playful women, the company of lucid and desiring women resonates with that part of me that does not give in. Yes, working a poem excites me like nudity does, or a long slow dance with a woman, a beautiful set backdropping consciousness. Yes, process because whoever writes must imagine the imaginary has already gone through it, in her city and her language, and fully wept her hope at the end of sentences. Men’s bodies need tears because, for centuries, they have thought very hard while drying up the lives of women. Women’s bodies conserve tears even after death. Lesbian cyprine continues to sing long after death, approving the ecstasies and their configuration in the universe. Life does not pass through neutral gender. At the far side of great fields of interlaced signifiers and signifieds, each generation marks the horizon, eyes filled with tears, arms filled with myths. Yes, because each time an image relays desire, this image, with unexpected vigor, gets the drift of meanings. This is how, unconsciously, images penetrate the solid matter of our ideas. Process, yes, because reality is not enough, because beauty is demanding, because sensations are multiple, because placing a lot of oneself in language does not explain the patriarchal horror, does not explain the composition of my subjectivity. I write, mobilized by the primary matter of desire. Word matter, when it is too cold or too soft or so crazy that our thoughts have difficulty containing it, this matter that is eternally contemporary with our joys and mobilized bodies, stirs, breathes, slices us to the bone, then sutures in wells and whirlpools of amazement. I exist in written language because that is where I decide the thoughts that regulate the questions and the answers I give to re-
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ality. I do not want to repeat what I already know of language. Storehouse of illusions, obsessions, passion, anger, and whatever else that requires us to transpose reality. Yes, because a lesbian who does not re-invent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing. Process again: can a woman crying out in pain hear the cry of another woman at the same time? The cry of one woman and another and the cry of another woman, do they get confused in space and time, the great cry of the rebel (rebelle) and the long cry of the subjected, do they become confused to the point that we believe we are hearing one immense and long cry of terror? Yes, I hesitate to gorge the I with hope. I hesitate to keep too close an eye on it. In the middle of civilization, nothing forces us to declare our anguish. I respect muses, their inimitable labor between the af-firmations and the burning negations. We’ll have to agree on our irreproachable hopes. There still exist impregnable passions that allow us to ponder “my life” at the end of my arms. Yes, because I would like to heal the sense in the universe around one woman and around many. Yes, it is close to the word of honor that desire can render speakable our comparison between the ocean and our intentions for happiness. I take an interest in knowledge because too much life escapes us when we exercise our capacity for joy. Yes, I watch the ways we suffer in the spectacle of subjectivities, between our eyes tangled in glory and debris, I watch the ways we suffer embed themselves in culture, stubborn-worded lionesses. I watch the ways our sufferings invent, flexible and opulent, our poorly protected eyes. Yes, every woman whom I can resemble, when coming into contact with air, has formal lips and our face is interested in happiness.
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Yes, I write because part of life passes by unnoticed. Literature is used for that: bringing ourselves closer truly always to a woman. Yes, because beauty is an optimal passion. Speaking of literature is necessary, intonation of the voice, mirror of the multiple. I involve myself always and several times in a single poem; I am not afraid of being as woman changed lesbian. Yes, because suffering, like life, circles our childhood three times without ever really touching it, because we are close to reality, and because matter cannot fall without warning, leaving us there, our skin hesitant between philosophies and dawn, half way, forever in torment, in the vast complication of beauty. I concede that the planet is a great enigma in our voices that persist, modern, between the anguish and the cat calls. We will have to agree on the nobility of torment. On the way, I will describe the grand gestures of seduction that I inevitably traces when it flies away without permission, raising our eyelids each time, golden delirium. I would say process, I would say that I would say that nothing is too slow, or too brief, for the universe, I would say that naming is still a function of dreaming and of hope. ■
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WHY DO YOU WRITE IN FRENCH?
This essay was read in April 2000 at a conference organized by the Department of French and the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University in New York. “The Chosen Tongue: Language and Construction of the Self in French and Francophone Literature” featured roundtables on the subject of French language and literature. Brossard participated in a roundtable entitled “Pourquoi écrivez-vous en français?” moderated by Maryse Condé. The other panelists were Mongo Beti, Raphaël Confiant, Nancy Huston, Vâclav Jamek, Daniel Maximin, and Abdourahman Weberi. As the only panelist from Québec, Brossard addresses the challenges of having been born a francophone in North America for whom French both is and is not her mother tongue. As a feminist, Brossard speaks of the need to escape the misogynist conventions perpetuated by all languages. ■
All the love we can have for a language will never be ideological. —France Théoret, Entre raison et déraison
To tell you the truth, I have never asked myself that question. Belonging to the only group of francophones issuing from the French colonies who can really claim an infamous “Gallic ancestry,” being part of a people for whom the French language is an obsession, a favorite pastime, a source of anguish and pride, having inebriated myself very early
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on with French literature as though it were mine in hopes of one day, to paraphrase France Théoret, talking like we write, it seems to be completely honest if a bit simplistic to answer today’s question by saying that I write in French because French is my mothertongue. This in spite of the fact that the language spoken around me throughout my childhood was imbibed with English words as though to force us to position ourselves within the dailiness of North-American reality. Here a char with son windshield, son bumper, ses tires; here a bar with its floor bien shiné, ses waitresses, ses hot-dog toastés, ses beans, ses smoke meats, ses sundaes. Here, a seventeenth-century pronunciation with our moé pis toé against which my mother warned me, here many curse words, church words, where anger, pleasure, appreciation, amazement, and deception are all expressed by the name of God in one form or another. The superlative is a curse, each emotion has its curse. That said, I think a mothertongue is oral and that written language holds nothing maternal. In this sense, French is not my mothertongue. While a mothertongue and reality flow together, gasping, full of holes, stammering, with dangerous liaisons and surprising constructions, written language is initiation, lesson, mistake, and castigation, a taught language with its rules to obey and its exceptions, a deliberate and conformist language strong in gender discrimination and outlawed meanings, a language of great taboos and a selective memory. The vivacity and vitality of written language finally depends on the adventurous ones, the dreamers, the audacious, and the amazons who take the time to write a book or to live a lifetime in the form of a book. So I write and, while I admit that for me the French language is nobly aggravating, it is also madly pleasurable, because it puts at my disposal dazzling delirium, exemplary transgressions, and honorable delusions of grandeur. Written French is very obviously the language of Louise Labé, Molière, Madame de Clèves, Marcel Proust, Jean
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Genet, Colette, Camus, Monique Wittig, Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Romain Gary, Nancy Huston, Anne Hébert, Réjean Ducharme, and of Michel Tremblay; of Maryse Condé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau. But it is also the language of Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Claude Gauvreau, and Raymond Queneau. It’s a nit-picking, picnicking language. It’s all so beautiful and complicated, I can also say I write in French because of the joy and pleasure of reading Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in translation. From our very first written words, we learn to exist differently. To play. To polish. To perfect our joys and our misfortunes, to displace the horizon. And above all, we try to have a pure heart about words as we examine them under every angle: in front, behind, a lado de, dessous, dessous, and over the shadows. If there are childhood faces furrowing the mothertongue and keeping us emotionally enraptured, there are others that, working in written language, ignite the passion for elsewhere, risk, and the unsaid. Despite having nothing to do with one another, written language burns to appease the needs of mothertongue, and childhood memories almost always make for touching books. For my part, I have only rarely used my mothertongue to write, maybe in a novel that came out in 1974, called French Kiss. A novel whose story (which has nothing to do with childhood) unfolds through word play crossing Montréal, Sherbrooke Street, with time to stop for a lingering kiss where the tongues, filled with stories and a future, happily intermingle. As for the rest of my writing, I write French, I mean to say with the verb “to be” and some surrounding words which, in my case, try to escape from the conventional, the everyday, and quite obviously from a grammar that can in one fell swoop make any trace of the thinking female and the feminine disappear.
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But is the question not how the French language, in its literary form, inflects my vision of the world and my attitude towards life, love, death, reality, and fiction? Summarily, toward which ideas, which ethic, am I oriented by the French language, in whose arms does she push me, about what does she want me to think? Before which beauty does she want me to pause? Does she make me more rational and logical than I would be without her, more friendly, more arrogant? Does she incline me to uselessly turning pirouettes and somersaults, does she draw me to the hidden-phrase, mirror-phase of armchair psychoanalysis? The dear French language who always travels by train and lingers on the terrace all day long, does she have what it takes to stay in gear through the daily grind across the Americas, from sea to sea, is she equipped in verve and verb to translate the depths of women’s thoughts on life, Man, and the little boys he transforms into soldiers who have remained remarkably identical for centuries? In fact, I have long asked myself whether the French language had what it takes to venture into Québec’s great north, to pick blueberries and observe the moose on the lakeshores, to transform the collectively repressed into the lucid and beautifully risked, to surf for a time on the idea that we may not die after all, to go out all night and blow off steam before stopping dead in your tracks at the idea that yes after all we will disappear one day. I belong to a generation that has had its doubts about what the French language could do for us, specifically if she would allow us to enter into what in French we called modernity, while anglophones were already postmodern. Could we, in proper French, enter into a contemporary world where space and time would be completely modified, where speed would fracture memory and identity, where strong sensations would replace the emotion that requires a real book-slowness to be born? Could we, in proper French, invent it, remake it, desire it, start
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it over, and release this new world of genetic modification, the virtual, and the internet? Good old French, speak to me of science and ethics, speak to me of women in Algeria, Zaïre, Haiti, Romania, and around the passenger stations, speak to me of Paul Celan and of Walter Benjamin walking in Paris, speak to me of my next book in translation. ■
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INTERVIEW WITH NICOLE BROSSARD
lynne huffer In the city, the traces, leave behind the high stakes, nicole, without erasure. —Nicole Brossard, L’amèr (These Our Mothers)
Montréal, October 1993 I would like to begin by talking about your work both as a writer and a feminist. Since the 1970s you have been a part of the feminist movement as a poet, novelist, editor, essayist. Could you put the history of these various activities in a contemporary context?
LYNNE HUFFER:
The poet, the novelist, and the feminist are still very active. I am still trying to answer questions about what it means to be a contemporary subject in a civilization about to shift into another dimension. Very early on, I said that I saw myself as an explorer in language and that I was writing to comprehend the society in which I live and the civilization to which I belong. Actually, understanding what goes on means trying to process the double-time in which I feel I am living: on the one hand, a historical linear time-space with familiar patriarchal scenarios such as war, rape, and violence; on the other, a polysemic, polymorphic, polymoral time where the speed and volume of information erase depth of meaning, where science proposes itself NICOLE BROSSARD:
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as an alternative to nature, where reality and fiction manage ex aequo to offer proof of our ordeals and of the most dreadful fantasies. While scientific information and images of violence multiply to the point that ethics becomes a polymorphic version of virtual behaviors, I am still Nicole Brossard, born in Montréal, with a sense of the history of Québec and of belonging in that French part of the North American continent. I am still the writer who cannot let go of the idea that literature is subversion, transgression, and vision. I am still the feminist who thinks women have been and are still marginalized by the patriarchal system. I am still the lesbian who enjoys the way desire shapes itself among women of paroles. The radical feminist does not wish to repeat questions and answers she has given in her previous texts. I can only rewrite my obsession for language and for the enigma of creative writing. I also know that desire is definitely a key word for any kind of creative process and that collective dreaming is at the core of any political involvement. I also have in mind that keeping the focus on women’s present and future is the most challenging feat. L H: Let’s come back to the subject of writing. Could you talk about your thoughts on fiction, in its etymological sense, as a sort of ruse or lie that transforms reality?
Yes, I have often said “in reality there is no fiction.” The dictionary associates fiction with faking, dissimulation, and lying. Fiction has always been opposed to reality, as being the fruit of our imagination, as if our imagination came out of the blue. We do not construct fiction differently from the way we construct our relation to reality. In other words, we behave (in terms of patterns) in fiction the way we do in reality. Fiction is not only about story-telling, it is also about the logic of the stories each person initiates in language. By logic I mean the coNB:
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herence of a universe we construct with such materials as sensations, emotions, memory, knowledge, and beliefs which are at work subterraneously within our usual practice of language which is speech. Part of that logic comes along with the literary tradition we belong to, as well as from the language we use. Part of it is idiosyncratic. It is by becoming a feminist that I was forced to question the words fiction and reality. For it seemed to me that what women were experiencing was discarded into “you are making things up,” fictions or lies. One can only think about the rejection into fiction of revelations about incest, rape, and so on. Sexual practice other than plain heterosexual penetration was also seen as fictive, “unbelievable.” On the other hand, men’s fictions about women always came out as being “true.” I think that for a long time the word fiction was an underground territory for what society did not want to admit as being part of the real. Fiction is the hidden face of the unavowable as well as of the unexplainable. I think that by telling their reality, by bearing witness to their experiences, women have narrowed the territory of fiction, of lies about them. It seems now that reality, science, and fiction have proved equal in representing the unbelievable. What is fiction now that “reality shows”— those dramatizations of real stories about serial killers—provide all the details we wanted to know about sex, violence, and injustice? What is fiction when, through technology, a grandmother can bear and give birth to her daughter’s child? Nevertheless, I see fiction as an open space for desire to figure out the narrative of all those permutations we are capable of in order to give meaning to our lives. In discussing theory and fiction in The Aerial Letter, you say: “It is precisely where there is a referential illusion that theoretically women traverse the opaque reality of language and that le sujet fabuleux we contain becomes operative.” What is the relationship between fiction and this “fabular subject”? LH:
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Le sujet fabuleux is constructed in fiction because it can only be developed in the unpredictable part of the narrative, where words and thoughts derive, blossoming with unexpected ramifications, and henceforth initiating threads of meaning that help us to protect the positive image each woman intuits of herself. This image is the fabular subject, but in a patriarchal society the image is seen subliminally. Writing and the referential illusion that it creates allow time to retrace and to focus on the positive image. It is through Man’s fiction that we have become fiction; let us exit fiction via fiction. When you pass through written language there is more of an opportunity to deal with the symbolic or to make the symbolic act for you, to be able to question or to skirt around the given course of what seems to be the universal patriarchal symbolic order. Even by using the word “fabular,” something already shapes itself into a proposition. Things (meaning, images, a sense of truth) happen in writing that would never happen otherwise. I will probably write all my life because the act of writing allows for an encounter with unusual images, unexpected thoughts; a new world is opened each time. NB:
Can you talk about the image of the hologram that is so important to your work? LH:
I have always been interested in everything that has to do with the eye and the gaze. When I first saw a hologram, in New York in 1979, I was absolutely fascinated by it. I started to read about holography and was totally taken by some of the vocabulary relating to it: real image, virtual image, reflection, wave length, holographic brain. Also by the fact that all the information about the image is contained in every fragment of the holographic plate. I related that information to the fact that sentences might also contain the whole of what is at stake in a novel. For me, the hologram became the perfect metaphor to project the intuitive synthesis that I had in mind of a woman who could be real, virNB:
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tual, and symbolic. By symbolic I mean she who, by being other than the mother symbol, could alter the course of meaning, values, and patterns of relationship. The hologram is tied to the idea that somehow we women have to invent our own idea of woman in order to enjoy being a woman and to proceed as a creative subject in language. I often say that if each woman could project the best that she senses in herself onto other women, we would already have accomplished a lot. I, for example, have a tendency to project onto other women the image that they are writers, straightforward speakers, and so forth. With the metaphor of the hologram I was able to integrate reality (women characters living in Montréal, New York), fiction (construction of a space for them to exist beyond their status as characters), and utopia (projection of the desire for the female symbolic). There is utopia, celebration, and projection of a positive image of women in my books. I know that in the United States there is a debate about essentialism. I think feminists should be grateful to those feminist and lesbian writers who are criticized for being essentialist. Thanks to them, the feminist movement has developed beyond the issues of equality and equity into an important cultural and social movement. Fiction, particularly innovative fiction by lesbian writers and philosophers, was the site of an overflow that allowed energy to circulate among women, and that also permitted feminist discourse to open up questions beyond the ones raised in the nineteenth century. Without celebration, desire, radical statements, and lesbian desire, feminism could have been left in the hands of liberal lawyers, lobbyists, or civil servants. LH:
So you’re suggesting that essentialism is a necessary risk.
N B : Absolutely. Somehow, I think there is a great deal of confusion between an essentialism that would refer to biological determinism and essentialism as the projection of a mythic space freed of inferiorizing
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patriarchal images. Usually the accusers associate mythic essentialism, which in fact is an ontological creation, with the biological one. This confusion is not only misleading but dull. Perhaps we can come back to what you were saying about projection—this new intervention of woman—and, in particular, a woman’s gaze. In The Aerial Letter you say that you write “with a woman’s gaze upon you,” and you continue: “A woman’s gaze means: who knows how to read.” LH:
Man’s gaze—the father’s gaze—certainly legitimates a woman writer; it might even inspire her to excellence, as long as the writing stays within the boundaries of patriarchal meaning. It can even allow her to challenge literary tradition, or to write pornographic texts; she can try, if she so choose, to compete with Henry Miller or the Marquis de Sade. But in regard to disobedience to phallocentrism, Man’s gaze has proven to censure and silence women. It promises to retaliate. I believe that a woman’s gaze is the only one that can legitimate and challenge a woman writer to go beyond the description of her social experience. The gaze of the other woman is vital because it induces recognition, complicity, and possibly desire. The gaze between women breaks the line, the fluidity of a system where men and women are trained to direct their eyes on the capital m of man because we are thought to believe that m is humanity. In “The Textured Angle of Desire,” I remark on just how difficult it is to keep focusing on women, and that lesbian love is one of the elements that allows us to maintain this focus. It is difficult to keep the focus on women as a subject of interest, recognition, and desire because of our marginalization. She who chooses to live on the margins (by identifying herself as a feminist or a lesbian), but this time in full control of her choice, gives herself a chance to keep the focus.
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For me, the loss of the gaze of the other woman is also related to the difficulty feminists have in reproducing themselves from one generation to another. In other words, losing the gaze and the focus, we always skip a generation of feminists. I find the idea of a woman’s gaze very difficult to conceptualize, to the extent that the gaze itself is part of the constitution of masculine knowledge and desire. There is a philosophical relationship between the gaze and comprehension, between the gaze and amorous desire. All of this is based on the eye. LH:
It is true that the gaze itself is part of the constitution of masculine knowledge and desire. If you are not a voyeur, the gaze means that you are introducing yourself in another space which is not your own, but which can eventually become part of your world or yourself. The woman’s gaze is meaningful because it works at filling the gap between women. What women see between them is as important as what they see of each other and in one another. The back and forth of the gaze between women (writer and reader) textures the space between them and to me that creates a social semantico-imaginative environment where meaning can be debated. I am amazed how difficult it seems for women playwrights to create dialogue between women outside of the mother-daughter relationship. Most of the time, female characters will interact through monologues. Is it because of a feminist ethic that won’t allow for power relations or hierarchical roles among women? The woman’s gaze acknowledges the reality of the other woman. It makes her visible, present. I believe that it actualizes she who has more than a story to tell. By that I mean she who can play with me as well as with words. NB:
In concluding, I would like us to go back to an idea we started with: the importance of the place from where one writes. InThe Aerial Letter LH:
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you talk about urbanity, and, more precisely, of “urban radicals,” urban women who write and publish. Do you feel that there is still a Québécois specificity to this radical urbanity? It is strange, but I have always felt that speaking and writing about Montréal is making a statement about being a North American of French descent. It is also a way of valuing our own literature. For a long time in our literature, the city was associated with sin, depravation, a place where you lose your soul. So for someone of my generation, I guess it is easy to associate radicalism with the city. Somehow the city seems to organize a metaphoric network that integrates delinquency, belonging, movement, excitement, and excess. In a recent text, I was saying that I am an urban woman on the graffiti side of the wall, on the sleepless side of night, on the free side of speech, on the side of writing where the skin is a fervent collector of dawns. I am from the city; I’ve always lived there; and I love the city and the freedom it allows even if it is dangerous for women. So I’m an urban radical. It’s also a metaphor for me to say: I am a girl in combat in the city of men.
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The fabular subject again?
N B : I guess so. Certainly one aspect of the fabular subject. Urbaine radicale, sujet fabuleux, ma continent are probably noticeable as expressions not only for the meaning they suggest but also for their linguistic fabric, a semantic mix which creates its own aura of resonance. But to come back to la fille en combat dans la cité, I guess she is the product of a choice that I make, which is to stay in the polis in order to confront patriarchal meaning instead of retiring to the mythic island of the Amazons, whose subtext to me is peace and harmony, while the subject for la cité is the law (not harmony), the written word (not the song), and constant change. The mythic island is in me, in books, and in the women with whom I surround myself.
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I am a woman of the here and now, fascinated with the virtual that exists in the human species. But have we women been damaged by men’s way of ordering the world and proving their “humanity”? Because I want all the energy and creativity that women are capable of, I will stay in the city so the law can be changed. Of course, there is that possibility that the law will be changed into something else only when we are done with the written word, which is definitely a partner to patriarchy and history—history being the trajecstory of desire. I guess it is difficult for me to stay on the island because I am a woman of the written word, nonetheless aware of the metaphoric network that comes along with it: individualism, and an endless process of desire and hope that often comes out as an excess or a quest for the absolute. For me, staying in the city means to be alert, vigilant, in order to discriminate between propositions for a future and procedures that would lead to catastrophe. I think we now understand how the double constraint, the doublebind that women experience in a sexist, misogynist, and phallocentric society works. We now know that this double-bind immobilizes, demobilizes women. What you’re saying reminds me of Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) where she also talks about this island separated from the continent, the “dark continent” of the patriarchal order. But it is not about finding the island and remaining there calmly and peacefully. What really remains is the tension between the island and the continent. LH:
The tension which is desire is creative, the tension of debate is also creative. I want women’s creativity to sparkle throughout the city, in the university, on the radio, in books, in films. I now feel that besides the creative tension of being une fille en com-
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bat dans la cité, there is also another tension, which is the one I referred to in the beginning of this interview: a double-time where the sensation of the slowness of the act of writing and the sensation of speeding among images (virtual, fractal, or numeric) mix in such a way that the writer wonders with a sudden disquietude to what world she belongs; if she is drifting away from the shore or heading back toward the idea of a future, another shore. ■
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F R E N C H POETRY
“Aube à la saison.” Trois 12 (1965): 37–68. Mordre en sa chair. Montréal: Esterel, 1966. L’écho bouge beau. Montréal: Esterel, 1968. Suite logique. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1970. Le centre blanc. Montréal: Orphée, 1970. Reprint, Montréal: L’Hexagone, Collection Rétrospectives, 1978. Mécanique jongleuse followed by Masculin grammaticale. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1974. La partie pour le tout. Montréal: L’aurore, 1975. D’arc de cycle la dérive. Drawings by Francine Simonin. Saint-Jacques-leMineur: Edition de la Maison, 1979. Amantes. Montréal: Les Quinze, Collection Réelles, 1980. Double impression. Montréal: L’Hexagone, Collection Rétrospectives, 1984. L’aviva. Montréal: Nouvelle Barre du Jour, 1985. Domaine d’écriture. Montréal: Nouvelle Barre du Jour, 1985. Mauve, with Daphne Marlatt. Montréal: NBJ, Collection Transformance, 1986. Character/Jeu de lettres, with Daphne Marlatt. Montréal: NBJ, Collection Transformance, 1986. Sous la Langue/Under tongue. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Bilingual edition, Montréal: L’Essentielle; Charlottetown: Gynergy Books, 1987. Installations. Trois-Rivières: Les Ecrits des Forges; Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1989.
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A tout regard. Montréal: NBJ/Bibliothèque Québécoise, 1989. Typhon dru. In collaboration with the artist Christine Davies. Paris: Collectif Génération, 1990. La subjectivité des lionnes. Bruxelles: L’arbre à paroles, 1990. Langues obscures. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1992. La nuit verte du parc labyrinthe. Laval: Les Editions Trois, 1992. Flesh, song(e) et promenade. Includes poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz translated by Emile Martel. Lèvres urbaines 23 (1993). Vertige de l’avant-scène. Trois Rivières: Ecrits des Forges/Orange bleue, 1997. Typhon dru. Bilingual edition; English translation by Carolyne Bergvall. London: Reality Press, 1997. “Amantes,” suivi de “Le sens apparent” et de “Sous la langue.” Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1998. Musée de l’os et de l’eau. Saussines, France: Cadex Editions, 1999; Saint-Hippolyte: Editions du Noroît, 2008. Au présent des veines. Trois-Rivières: Ecrits des Forges; Echternach, Luxembourg: Editions Phi, 1999. Cahier de roses et de civilisation. Trois-Rivières: Editions d’Art le Sabord, 2003. Je m’en vais à trieste. Trois-Rivières: Ecrits des Forges; Echternach, Luxembourg: Editions Phi; Limoges: Le Bruit des Autres, 2003. Après les mots. Trois-Rivières: Ecrits des Forges, 2007. Ardeur. Echternach, Luxembourg: Editions Phi, 2008. D’aube et de civilisation: Poèmes, 1965–2007. Edited by Louise Dupré. Montréal: Typo, 2008. FICTION
Un livre. Montréal: Edition du Jour, 1970; Les Quinze, 1980. Sold-Out. Montréal: Edition du Jour, 1973; Les Quinze, 1980. French Kiss. Montréal: Editions du Jour, 1974; Les Quinze, 1980. L’amèr ou le chapitre effrité. Montréal: Les Quinze, 1977; L’Hexagone, Collection Typo, 1988. Le sens apparent. Paris: Flammarion, Collection Textes, 1980. Picture Theory. Montréal: Editions Nouvelle Optique, 1982; L’Hexagone Collection Typo, 1989. Le désert mauve. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1987; Typo, 2009.
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Baroque d’aube. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1995. Hier. Montréal: Québec Amérique, Collection Mains Libres, 2001. La capture du sombre. Montréal: Leméac, 2007. NONFICTION
Journal intime. Montréal: Les Herbes rouges, 1984, 1998, 2008. La lettre aérienne. Montréal: Editions du Remue-Ménage, 1985, 2009. Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman / she would be the first sentence in my next novel. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Mercury Press, 1998. L’horizon du fragment. Trois-Pistoles: Editions Trois-Pistoles, Collection Ecrire, 2005. PLAY
L’écrivain in La nef des sorcières. Edited with France Théoret. Montréal: Quinze, 1976; Éditions Collection L’Hexagone, Typo, 1992.
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The story so far 6/les stratégies du réel. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1978. Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au québec (1677–1988). Coedited with Lisette Girouard. Montréal: Editions du Remue-Ménage, 1991, 2003. Poèmes à dire: la francophonie, 38 poètes contemporains. Paris: Castor Astral/CNDP, 2002. Baiser vertige, Montréal: Typo, 2006.
P E R I O D I C A L S
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Traces. In La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, nos. 118–119. November and December 1982. Ellipse, no. 53. June 1995. Verdure, nos. 5–6. February 2002. How2 2, no. 3. Spring 2005.
V I D E O T A P E S
Les terribles vivantes, 3e partie: Nicole Brossard. Directed by Dorothy Todd Hénaut. Production Office National du Film, 1986.
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Profession poète. Production Quartre Saisons, 1988. Fragments of a conversation on language. Produced by Nora Alleyn. Production O.N.F., 1990. La nuit verte du parc labyrinthe. Produced by Anne Barth. Screenplay by Diane Trépanière. Production La Sterne, 1993. Thank god I’m a lesbian. Produced by Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert, 1992. L’aura des mots. Produced and edited and with screeenplay and cinematography by Anne Barth and Diane Trépanière. Production Vision-Top, 1996. Stolen moments. Produced by Margaret Westcott. Production O.N.F., 1997. Canape. Interview with Jerry Carlson. New York, CUNY-TV, 2004. Au fil des mots. Edition Panoramique, 2005 (
[email protected]).
A U D I O T A P E S ,
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Amantes. Paris: Artalect, 1989, 2004. Sous la langue/Under tongue. Read by Augusta Lapaix. Montréal: Les Productions Annor, 1989. Adriene Jenik. “Mauve Desert” (inspired by the novel Le Désert mauve), 1997. To order CD-ROM, contact
[email protected].
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A Book. Translated by Larry Shouldice. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1976. Originally published as Un livre. Turn of a Pang. Translated by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1976. Originally published as Sold-Out. Daydream Mechanics. Translated by Larry Shouldice. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980. Originally published as Mécanique jongleuse. These Our Mothers or: The Disintegrating Chapter. Translated by Barbara Godard. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1983. Originally published as L’amèr. Lovhers. Translated by Barbara Godard. Montréal: Guernica Press, 1986. Originally published as Amantes. French Kiss. Translated by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1986.
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The Aerial Letter. Translated by Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1988. Originally published as La Lettre aérienne. Surfaces of Sense. Translated by Fiona Strachan. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1989. Originally published as Le Sens apparent. Mauve Desert. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990, 2006. Originally published as Le Désert mauve. Picture Theory. Translated by Barbara Godard. Montréal: Guernica Press, 1991, 2006; New York: Roof Press, 1991. Baroque at Dawn. Translated by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Originally published as Baroque d’aube. Installations. Translated by Erín Moure and Robert Majzels. Winnipeg: Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2000. Museum of Bone and Water. Translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. Toronto: Anansi, 2003. Originally published as Musée de l’os et de l’eau. The Blue Books. Translated by Larry Shouldice and Patricia Claxton. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003. Originally published as three separate books: Un livre, Sold-Out, and French Kiss. Shadow: Soft et Soif. Translated by Guy Bennett. Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 2003. An Intimate Journal. Translated by Barbara Godard. Toronto: Mercury Press, 2004. Originally published as Journal intime. Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005. Originally published as Hier. Nicole Brossard. Edited by Louise Forsyth. Toronto: Guernica Press, 2005. Fluid Arguments. Edited by Susan Rudy. Translated by Anne-Marie Wheeler. Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005. Notebook of Roses and Civilization. Translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Fences in Breathing. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Originally published as La capture du sombre. Aviva. Translated by Anne-Marie Wheeler. Vancouver: Nomados Press, 2008. Originally published as L’Aviva. Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard. Edited by Louise Forsyth. Waterloo: Laurier Press, 2009.
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Andersen, Marguerite. “Women of Skin and Thought.” The Women’s Review of Books IV.4 (January 1987): 16. Bayard, Caroline. “Subversion Is the Order of the Day.” Essays in Canadian Writing 1977: 17–25. ———. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Avant- postes. Toronto: Presses Porcépic, 1978. ———. The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Bayard, Caroline, and Jack David. “Entrevue.” Les Lettres québécoises 4 (1976): 34–37. Beaudet, André. “Le Récit rouge.” Brèche 2 (1973): 59–70. ———. “Gynécophonie-s,” suivi de “Dessins, oblique, profils.” La Nouvelle Barre du Jour 88 (1980): 113–30. Beausoleil, Claude. Le motif de l’identité dans la poésie québécoise 1830-1995. Montréal: Estuaire, 1996. ———. “Le Sens apparent/Amantes.” Livres et auteurs québécois 1980. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1981. 95–98. Bonenfant, Joseph. “Nicole Brossard, hauteur d’un texte.” Voix et images du pays IX (1975): 63–85. Campeau, Francine. “Nicole Brossard sur la scène utopique.” La Parole métèque 5 (1988): 32–33. Conley, Katharine. “The Spiral as Moebius Strip: Inside/Outside Le Désert mauve.” Québec Studies 18 (1994): 149–58. ———. “Going for Baroque in the Twentieth Century: From Desnos to Brossard.” Québec Studies 31 (2001): 12–23. Cooke, Nathalie. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Arc 32 (1994): 55–61. Cotnoir, Louise, Lise Guevremont, Claude Beausoleil, and Hugues Corriveau. “Interview with Nicole Brossard on Picture Theory.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 47 (1983): 122–35. Couillard, Marie, and Francine Dumouchel. “Symphonie Féministe.” GynoThis section of the bibliography appeared in Nicole Brossard, Essays on Her Works, edited by Louise Forsyth (Toronto: Guernica Press, 2005).
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critics/La gynocritique. Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoises Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des Canadiennes et Québécoises. Edited by Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. 77–83. Curran, Beverley. “‘Je suis une Geisha devant mon ordinateur’: Nicole Brossard in Japanese Translation.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 62–71. Curran, Beverley, and Mitoko Hirabayashi. “Translation: Making Space for a New Narrative in Le désert mauve.” International Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 15 (1997): 109–20. Daurio, Beverley. “Interview with Nicole Brossard.” Books in Canada XX.2 (1991). Delepoulle, Anne-Marie. “La rage d’écrire, ou le défi féminin dans l’oeuvre de Nicole Brossard.” Diss. Université de Paris–Val de Marne Paris XII, 1983. Drapeau, Rose-Berthe. “Féminin singulier, pratique d’écriture, Brossard, Théoret.” Diss. Université de Sherbrooke, 1985. ———. Féminins singulier. Pratiques d’écriture; Brossard, Théoret. Montréal: Triptyque, 1986. Dumas, Eve. “Les voix lumineuses de la création.” La Presse (14 August 2003). C3. Dupré, Louise. “From Experimentation to Experience: Québécois Modernity in the Feminine.” A Mazing Space. Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986. 355–60. ———. Les Stratégies Du Vertige. Trois Poètes: Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France Théoret. Montréal: Les Editions du Remue-Ménage, 1989. ———. “La critique au féminin: réalité et utopie.” Women’s Writing and the Literary Institution/L’Ecriture au féminin et l’institution littéraire. Claudine Potvin and Janice Williamson. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, University of Alberta, 1992. 69–76. Durand, Marcella. “If I am really myself ”: On Translation (an Interview with Nicole Brossard). Verdure 5–6 (2002): 54–61. Duranleau, Irène. “Le Texte moderne et Nicole Brossard.” Etudes littéraires 14.1 (1981): 105–21. Fiochetto, Rosanna. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Tuttestorie 1 (1990). Fisette, Jean. “Ecrire pour le plaisir.” Voix et images du pays V.1 (1979): 197–201.
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———. “L’Ecrevisse et l’impossible: glose autour de deux textes de Nicole Brossard.” Voix et images XI (1985): 63–75. Fisette, Jean, and Michel van Schendel. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Voix et Images du Pays III.1 (1977). Fitzgerald, Judith. “Cutting to the Heart of the Matter.” The Globe and Mail, “Books” (26 July 2003). Flotow, Luise von. “Legacies of Quebec Women’s ‘Ecriture au féminin’: Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized, Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street.” Revue d’études canadiennes/Journal of Canadian Studies 30.4 (1995): 88–109. Forsyth, Louise H. “The Novels of Nicole Brossard: An Active Voice.” Room of One’s Own 4.1–2 (1978): 30–38. ———. “L’écriture au féminin: L’Euguélionne de Louky Bersianik, L’Absent aigu de Geneviève Amyot, L’Amèr de Nicole Brossard.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 25–6 (1979): 199–211. ———. “The Radical Transformation of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Some Women Writers of Québec.” International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 7.1 (1981): 44–50. ———. “Regards, reflets, reflux, réflexions—exploration de l’oeuvre de Nicole Brossard.” La Nouvelle Barre du Jour 118–9 (1982): 11–25. ———. “Les numéros spéciaux de La (Nouvelle) Barre du Jour. Lieux communs, lieux en recherche, lieu de rencontre.” Féminité, Subversion, Ecriture. Edited by Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès. Montréal: Editions du Remue-Ménage, 1983. 175–84. ———. “Feminist Criticism as Creative Process.” In the Feminine. Women and Words/Les Femmes et les mots. Ann Dybikowski, Victoria Freeman, Daphne Marlatt, Barbara Pulling, and Betsy Warland. Edmonton: Longspoon Press, 1985. 87–94. ———. “Beyond the Myths and Fictions of Traditionalism and Nationalism: The Political in the Work of Nicole Brossard.” Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Women Writers of Quebec. Edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. 157–72. ———. “Destructuring Formal Space/Accelerating Motion in the Work of Nicole Brossard.” A Mazing Space. Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edited
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by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986. 334–44. ———. “Nicole Brossard and the Emergence of Feminist Literary Theory in Québec Since 1970.” Gynocritics/La gynocritique. Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoises Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des Canadiennes et Québécoises. Edited by Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. 211–21. ———. “Errant and Air-Born in the City.” Nicole Brossard. The Aerial Letter. Translated by Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1988. 9–26. ———. “Préface.” Nicole Brossard. Picture Theory. 2nd ed. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1989. 7–26. ———. “Fernand Ouellette et Nicole Brossard—la poésie à caractère spéculaire: deux moments, deux écritures.” La Poésie de l’Hexagone. Edited by Cécile Cloutier and Ben Shek. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1990. 223–32. ———. “Les jeux de la représentation dans Picture Theory de Nicole Brossard.” Mises en scène d’écrivains. Assia Djebar, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France Théoret, Mireille Calle. Sainte-Foy: Les Editions Le Griffon d’argile, 1993. 73–86. ———. “La critique féministe au Québec: une démarche créatrice.” L’autre lecture. La critique au féminin et les textes québécois. Edited by Lori Saint-Martin. Montréal: XYZ Editeur, 1994. 51–58. ———. “Bursting Boundaries in the Vast Complication of Beauty: Transported by Nicole Brossard’s Au présent des veines.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 100–08. Fortier, France. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Nuit Blanche 46 (1991). ———. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Nuit Blanche 69 (1997): 84–87. Gaudet, Gérald. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Voix d’écrivains. Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 1985. 215–25. ———. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Lettres Québécoises 57 (1990). Godard, Barbara. “La Barre du Jour: vers une poétique féministe.” Féminité, Subversion, Ecriture. Edited by Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès. Montréal: Editions du Remue-Ménage. 1983. 195–205. ———. “L’Amèr or the Exploding Chapter: Nicole Brossard at the Site of Feminist Deconstruction.” Atlantis 9.2 (1984): 23–34. ———. “Mapmaking: A Survey of Feminist Criticism.” Gynocritics/La gynocritique. Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoises Women/
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Approches féministes à l’écriture des Canadiennes et Québécoises. Edited by Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. 1–30. ———. “Preface.” Nicole Brossard. Picture Theory. Montréal: Guernica. 1991. 7–11. ———. “Producing Visibility for Lesbians: Nicole Brossard’s Quantum Physics.” English Studies in Canada 21.1 (1995): 125–37. ———. “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation.” Translation, History, and Culture. Edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevre. London: Cassell, 1990. 87–96. ———. “The Translator’s Diary.” Culture in Transit: Translation and the Changing Identities of Quebec Literature. Edited by Sherry Simon. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1995. Godard, Barbara, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott. “Theorizing Fiction Theory.” Collaboration in the Feminine. Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994. 53–62. Gonnard, Catherine. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Lesbia 120 (1993): 31– 33. Gould, Karen. Writing in the Feminine. Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1990. ———. “Féminisme, postmodernité, esthétique de lecture: Le désert mauve de Nicole Brossard.” Le roman québécois depuis 1960: méthodes et analyses. Edited by Louise Milot and Joop Lintrelt. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992. 195–213. ———. “Theory’s Space in Recent Texts by Nicole Brossard and France Théoret.” Les discours féminin dans la littérature postmoderne au Québec. Edited by Raija Koski, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth. San Francisco: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. 127–41. ———. “Rewriting ‘America’: Violence, Postmodernity, and Parody in the Fiction of Madeleine Monette, Nicole Brossard, and Monique LaRue.” Postcolonial Subjects, Francophone Women Writers. Edited by Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith L. Walker, and Jack A. Yeager. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 186–209. Guerreiro, Sandra. “‘i write to make a presence in language’.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 109–111.
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Guillemette, Lucie. “Reduplication, traduction et palimpseste dans l’oeuvre de Nicole Brossard: l’inscription d’un espace féminin.” La Francophonie sans frontière. Une Nouvelle cartographie de l’imaginaire au féminin. Edited by Lucie Lequin and Catherine Mavrikakis. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 181–95. Havercroft, Barbara. “Hétérogénéité énonciative et renouvellement du genre: le Journal intime de Nicole Brossard.” Voix et images 64 (1996): 22–37. Holbrook, Susan. “Delirium and Desire in Nicole Brossard’s Le désert mauve/ Mauve Desert.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 70–85. Huffer, Lynne. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 115–21. ———. “From Lesbos to Montreal: Brossard’s Urban Fictions.” Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 117–33. Joubert, Ingrid. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Prairie Fire X.3 (1989). Knutson, Susan, et al. “Vers-ions Con-verse: A Sequence of Translations.” Tessera 6 (1989): 16–23. ———. “Nicole Brossard’s Elegant International Play, in Canada.” Theoretical Discourse/Discours théoriques. Edited by Terry Goldie, Carmen Lambert, and Rowland Lorimer. 1994. 187–202. ———. “Reading Nicole Brossard.” Ellipse 53 (1995): 9–19. ———. Narrative in the Feminine. Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000. ———. “Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs ‘at eye level’: Nicole Brossard’s Jeu de mots & the Representation of Critical Subjectivity.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 112–22. Laliberté, Yves. “Deux recueils de poèmes où Supprimer l’excentricité c’est s’abstenir.” Incidences II–III.1 (1979): 77–97. Lamoureux, Diane. L’amère patrie. Féminisme et nationalisme dans le Québec contemporain. Montréal: Les Editions du Remue-Ménage, 2001. Lamy, Suzanne. d’elles. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1979. ———. Quand je lis je m’invente. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1984. ———. “Les enfants uniques nés de père et de mère inconnus.” Gynocritics/La gynocritique. Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoises Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des Canadiennes et Québécoises. Edited by Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. 199–210.
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Larson, Jacqueline, and Jodey Castricano. “Blue Period—That’s a Story: A Conversation with Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt.” West Coast Line. A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Criticism 15 (1994–95): 29–53. Leblanc, J. “Théorie et pratique de l’image photographique. De l’analogisme mimétique à la codification du ‘visuel-visible’ (sur Le désert mauve de Nicole Brossard).” Texte 21–22 (1997): 219–49. Lévesque, Claude. “Le proche et le lointain.” Garder vive l’émotion. Montréal: VLB Editeur, 1994. 130–37. Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de. Re-Belle et infidèle/The Body Bilingual. Montréal: Les Editions du Remue-Ménage; Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991. McPherson, Karen S. “Memory and Imagination in the Writings of Nicole Brossard.” International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 22 (2000): 87–102. ———. “Post(Modern) Script. D’une langue à l’autre or Speaking in Other Tongues: Le désert mauve.” Incriminations. Guilty Women/Telling Stories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Milot, Louise. “Margaret Atwood et Nicole Brossard: la question de la représentation.” Voix et images XI.1 (1985): 56–62. ———. “Nicole Brossard: une influence coûteuse.” Modernité/Postmodernité du roman contemporain. Edited by Jacques Allard and Madeleine Frédéric. Montréal: Les Cahiers du Département d’études littéraires, UQAM, 1987. 77–86. Moisan, Clément. “Gwendolyn MacEwen—Nicole Brossard.” Poésie des frontières. Montréal: Editions HMH, 1979. 224–50. Moyes, Lianne. “Composing in the Scent of Wood and Roses.” English Studies in Canada 21.2 (1995): 206–25. ———. “Caught in each other’s dreams: Nicole Brossard’s Portrait of Djuna Barnes.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 91–99. Nepveu, Pierre. “La Pensée/L’impensable.” Lettres Québécoises 20 (1980): 24–25. ———. “Trois Romans de Nicole Brossard: une histoire au présent.” Incidences IV.2–3 (1980): 129–38. ———. Ecologie du réel. Montréal: Boréal, 1988. 141–54. Notar, Clea. “Interview with Nicole Brossard.” So to Speak. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1988. 123–143.
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Parker, Alice A. “The Mauve Horizon of Nicole Brossard.” Québec Studies 10 (1990): 107–119. ———. Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. ———. “Myth and Memory in Nicole Brossard’s Baroque d’aube and Vertige de l’avant-scène.” Doing Gender. Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s. Edited by Paula Ruth Gilbert and Roseanna Lewis Dufault. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2001. 36–52. ———. “Surviving in Another Tongue: Nicole Brossard’s Installations.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 44–53. Paterson, Janet M. Moments postmodernes dans le roman québécois. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1990. 109–23. Paul, Catherine Anne. “Le processus de l’écriture d’un point de vue féministe: l’exemple de Nicole Brossard.” Diss. Queen’s University, 1984. Perry, Catherine. “L’imagination créatrice dans Le désert mauve: transfiguration de la réalité dans le projet féministe.” Voix et images 57 (1994): 585–607. Picard, Anne-Marie. “Arrêts sur images: identité et altérité dans Le désert mauve de Nicole Brossard et Rose Mélie Rose de Marie Redonnet.” Dalhousie French Studies 32 (1995). Pouliot, Sophie. “La femme dans toute sa splendeur. Nicole Brossard, poète.” Le Devoir (14 August 2003); on dramatization of Journal intime directed by Brigitte Haentjens. Prieto, René. “In-Fringe: The Role of French Criticism in the Fiction of Nicole Brossard and Severo Sarduy. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Edited by Gustavo Peres Firmat. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 266–81. Rosenfeld, Marthe. “The Development of a Lesbian Sensibility in the Work of Jovette Marchessault and Nicole Brossard.” Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Women Writers of Quebec. Edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. 227–39. Roy, André. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Sortie 2 (1982). Royer, Jean. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Ecrivains contemporains. Entretiens 2. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1985. 22–31.
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———. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Ecrivains contemporains. Entretiens 3. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1985. 163–69. Russo, Linda. “Sensational Intensities: Poetry and Prose: An Interview with Nicole Brossard.” Verdure 5–6 (2002): 123–37. Saint-Martin, Lori. “Nicole Brossard et Daphne Marlatt: la fascination de l’écriture.” Les discours féminins dans la littérature postmoderne au Québec. Edited by Raija Koski, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth. San Francisco: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. 253–75. Santa Cruz, Guadalupe. “Escritoras del Quebec: Las Coordenadas ebrias. Une lectura de Nicole Houde, Suzanne Jacob y Nicole Brossard.” Nomadías 7. Santiago, Chile: CEGECAL (Centro de Estudios de Género y Cultura en América Latina, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile). 2008. 67–101. Santoro, Miléna. “Feminist Translation: Writing and Transmission Among Women in Nicole Brossard’s Le désert mauve and Madeleine Gagnon’s Lueur.” Women by Women. The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Edited by Roseanna Lewis Dufault. Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1997. 147–68. ———. Mothers of Invention. Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Saucier, Michèle. “L’oeil love volubilis. Les courbes d’une écriture. Lecture de/avec Nicole Brossard.” Diss. Université de Sherbrooke, 1981. Séguin, Lucie. “Femmage.” Les Cahiers de la Femme 1.3 (1979): 56–59. Siemerling, Winfried. “The Visibility of the Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard.” Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard. Edited by Winfried Siemerling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 173–204. Smart, Patricia. “Tout dépend de l’angle de vision.” Voix et images XI.2 (1985): 330–33. Strachan, Fiona. “Un livre de Nicole Brossard, lecture fictive, lecture réelle.” Diss. Université de Montréal, 1982. Thompson, Dawn. “Re-Inventing the World: Calculating the Con/Volutional Integrals of Holography in Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory.” Writing a Pol-
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itics of Perception, Memory, Holography, and Women Writers in Canada. Edited by Dawn Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 16–42. Vasseur, Annie Molin. “Entrevue avec Nicole Brossard.” Arcade 28 (1993). Vidal, Jean-Pierre. “French Kiss.” Livres et auteurs québécois 1974. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1975. 42–45. Villemaire, Yolande. “Le French Kiss de la Vénus rouge.” Cul-Q 8–9 (1976): 63–85. Wachtel, Eleanor. “Interview with Nicole Brossard.” In Writers & Co. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, 286–301. Weir, Lorraine. “From Picture to Hologram: Nicole Brossard’s Grammar of Utopia.” A Mazing Space, Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986. 345–52. Williamson, Janice. “Interview with Nicole Brossard.” Sounding Differences. Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers. Edited by Janice Williamson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. 57–74.
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P O E M S
After the Words: Originally published in French as Après les mots. Selections reproduced by permission of Les Ecrits des Forges and the translator, Pierre Joris. Ardor: Originally published in French as Ardeur. Selections reproduced by permission of Editions Phi and the translator, Pierre Joris. Aviva: Originally published in French as L’aviva. Selections reproduced by permission of the translator, Anne-Marie Wheeler. Grateful acknowledgment to Nomados Press for its edition of Aviva. Daydream Mechanics: Originally published in French as Mécanique jongleuse. Grateful acknowledgment to Coach House Books for its edition of Daydream Mechanics and to Larry Shouldice for his English translation. Double Impression. Originally published in French as Double impression. The selection “The Marginal Way” reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Jennifer Moxley. The Echo Moves Beautiful: Originally published in French as L’écho bouge beau. Selections reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Pierre Joris. Installations: Originally published in French as Installations. Selections reprinted by permission of The Muses’ Co./J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing and the translators, Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. Logical Suite: Originally published in French as Suite logique. Selections reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Pierre Joris. Lovhers: Originally published in French as Amantes. Copyright © Nicole Bros sard; translation copyright © Barbara Godard and Guernica Editions. Se-
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lections reproduced by permission of Guernica Editions and the translator, Barbara Godard. Matter Harmonious Still Maneuvering: Originally published in French as La matière heureuse manoevre encore in Au présent des veines. A translation of a different version of this poem was published in Massachusetts Review 31.1–2 (spring/summer 1990). Translation in this volume reproduced by permission of the translator, Lise Weil. Museum of Bone and Water: Originally published in French as Musée de l’os et de l’eau. Poems from Museum of Bone and Water copyright © 1999 Editions du Noroît and Codex Editions. English translation copyright © 2003 House of Anansi Press, Inc. Selections reproduced by permission of House of Anansi Press, Inc., and the translators, Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. Notebook of Roses and Civilization: Originally published in French as Cahier de roses et de civilisation. Selections are translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure (Coach House Books, 2007) and reproduced by permission. Obscure Languages: Originally published in French as Langues obscures. Selections reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Jennifer Moxley. The Part for the Whole: Originally published in French as La partie pour le tout. Selections reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Jennifer Moxley. Shadow: Soft et Soif: Originally published in French in Ardeur. Selections reproduced by permission of the translator, Guy Bennett. To Every Gaze: Originally published in French as À tout regard. The selection “Cities by the Touch” reproduced by permission of the translator, Jennifer Moxley. The selection “If Yes Seismal” transcreated by Fred Wah; transcreation originally published in Absinthe 5, no. 1 (summer 1992); reproduced by permission of the transcreator, Fred Wah. Ultrasounds: Originally published in French as “Ultra sons” in La nuit verte du parc laybyrinthe. Published in Resurgent: New Writing by Women, edited by Lou Robinson and Camille Norton (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Reproduced by permission of the translator, Lucille Nelson. Vertigo of the Proscenium: Originally published in French in Vertige de l’avantscène. Selections reproduced by permission by Les Ecrits des Forges and the translator, Pierre Joris.
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The White Centre: Originally published in French as Le centre blanc. Selections reproduced by permission of L’Hexagone and the translator, Barbara Godard.
D O C U M E N T S
Interview with Nicole Brossard by Lynne Huffer: Originally published in Yale French Studies: Another Look, Another Woman: Retranslations of French Feminism, no. 87. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Interview with Nicole Brossard, Montreal, October 1993, reproduced by permission of Lynne Huffer. Poetic Politics: Published in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990). Process of a Yes Its Energy in Progress: Originally published in French as Procession d’un oui qui va son énergie in Mises en scène d’écrivains. Assia Djebar, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France Théoret, edited by Mireille Calle-Gruber (Grenoble: Presses universitaire de Grenoble; Québec: Griffon d’Argile, 1993). Published in Fluid Arguments: Essays by Nicole Brossard, edited by Susan Rudy (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005). Reproduced by permission of the translator, Anne-Marie Wheeler. [Untitled] “I am a woman of the present”: Published in Boundary 2 26, no. 1 (spring 1999). Reproduced by permission of the translator, Pierre Joris. Why Do You Write in French?: Published in Fluid Arguments: Essays by Nicole Brossard. Reproduced by permission of the translator, Anne-Marie Wheeler.
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