1 The following paper (in French) was read and distributed by poet Michel Deguy at New York University’s Maison Française on August 31st, 2016, when he was awarded NYU’s Medal of the Center for French Civilization and Culture. Michel Deguy is the founder and managing editor of the quarterly journal Po&sie, founded in 1977 : http://pourpoesie.net/. FOR NYU Michel Deguy and Kenneth Koch, overlooking New York from the Brooklyn Bridge in 1985. A “brief life” and a manifesto, here then is the subject matter of my grateful remarks. To thank the research center and its director, the Maison Française and NYU, Tom Bishop as a friend, all my friends and, in sum… America, this is the gist of my talk, accelerated herein like the credits of a film. An America of one’s own, for each of us: this is mine, in too few words—which I dedicate to Yves Bonnefoy (cremated on July 11th of this year) and to my friends, the American poets that I too have lost… Because mainly it’s about poetry, poetry in relation to two memories, French and American, two languages, two poetics… or ten, or however many poetics. 2 The method in my brief is autobiographical, fatally allusive: pluvial “name dropping,” and somewhat aposiopetic, as was said in ancient rhetoric, or, if you prefer, prone to voluntary gaps of memory. It closes with a manifesto, yes, an obsolete genre, and concentrated here as a pharmaceutical viaticum… since I believe (yes, it’s a belief) that our very dark times call less for a “nuanced opinion” than they do for a declaration of responsibilities, in view of what’s at stake: can poetry still do something for today, poetry of which the doing (the “poïeïn” in “poïemata”) is the saying, the reverse of Austinian performativity. Does the traditional sobriquet of artist (on its small cloud of autistic insouciance, or with its mask as loan from the creator, more recently referred to as remodeler, or re-­‐molder, of the world) suit those who today profess, or protest, or declare in the subtitles of their books that poetry is their business, and that the name of “poet,” if it does not apply to a “state” or a profession, names a desire… that remains desire. It was thus exactly half a century ago that I discovered America at the invitation of René Girard, who invited me to Hopkins—which allowed me—gave me permission—to “cross” amazing Manhattan for the first time. I skip the 50 pages it would take for me to recapitulate the next 50 years, speaking only of my American years.1 To limit myself to an enumeration, itself laconic, of the campuses where frequent visits, as a visiting professor or writer, allowed me to glimpse—from the vantage of poetry, and despite my lack of bilingualism, or, if you prefer, my bad frenglish—the extraordinary richness, polemical power and internal struggles of “American” poetry, poetics, and poets. 1 At approximately the same time I discovered the other America, the one to the South, which was for me a way of returning to (perhaps to arrive at) Europe!! I cannot discuss that here. 3 So, Baltimore, and Buffalo (where John K. Simon, together with Raymond Federman and Jacques Benay, were able to attract Barthes, Foucault, Serres, Cixous, and basically prime the pump of “French theory”); and UCLA, where I pause to salute the ex-­‐chairman of the French Department (there were many at the time) Eric Gans, who is now the author of the beautiful and stunning Canzoniere under the pseudonym of Goldfarb, and the recipient at the same time of my most recent preface to the work of an American poet! I date back to these distant Californian years the beginning of my serious and fruitful friendship with Clayton Eshleman, and my first meeting, in San Diego I imagine, with Jerry and Diane Rothenberg (and soon Marcel Henaff)—and I’m forced to substitute for Perec’s “I remember” this somewhat disquieting “I imagine” , since I am conflating, in my states-­‐uniting synopsis, sequences that are neither contemporaneous nor chronological, as in the arbitrary flashbacks of a post-­‐modern director or “filmmaker” (without knowing if the screenplay can be made into a good film)… I was at Berkeley, at Stanford, at Irvine, where I came across my friends Derrida, Lacoue-­‐Labarthe, Nancy, but also Judd and Renée Hubert… while passing (because one should recall that in those years the round-­‐trip ticket Paris-­‐San Francisco allowed for the multiple stop-­‐overs that favored the forging of friendships as part of the “drift of the trip” [le sens de la visite]2 )… passing through Albuquerque, where Nathaniel Tarn entered my life, and Austin: where Christopher Middleton did the same, these Englishmen who set off to pursue poetry… in America; and Wichita, with Wilson Baldridge; Louisiana, with Adelaide Russo; and last but not least Alabama, where Richard Rand pointed out to me that the name Tuscaloosa appears in Les Fleurs du Mal. Coast to coast, crossing the “Middle West” of a hundred campuses… (I remember conferences in Rochester, colloquia in Atlanta, “readings” in Oklahoma) to arrive back East and continue to project the map of my time, as if in my own version 2 “Le sens de la visite” is the book title that was no doubt inspired by my American academic nomadism. 4 (which has yet to be written) of Butor’s Mobile… on to Stony Brook with Robert Harvey, Hélène Volat, my bibliographer, to Albany with Pierre Joris, and Rutgers, with François Cornillat and Mary Shaw (while I deliberately omit Canada, visited ten times over, Montreal, Toronto or Halifax, despite the presence of dear Christopher Elson and the still warm memory of an honoris causa at King’s College)… The just-­‐used suspension points indicate that I suspend anachronistic “reminders” to reset myself in New York… I ground myself here, with partiality, so that we may pause, in haste, and in the noetic passion that is our element, at, and on, some of the pensive themes that I want to recall here, in this very hour, compendiously and confusedly… in other words, by skimming “content,” whether it concerns the issue of friendship, translation, the lecture/reading or poetic theory. Thus, I developed certain habits in regard to New York—yes, and if I had the time and talent for novel-­‐writing, I would describe a typical day—for example one of those weekends during the first academic semester, coming down from Buffalo to LaGuardia and to Kenneth’s place, Kenneth Koch, i.e. North, in the vicinity of Columbia (specifically, to 25 Claremont Avenue, between Riverside Drive and Broadway at 115th St.). Then later, and increasingly so after Kenneth’s death, South, taking the full measure of Manhattan’s expanse, to the other campus, the other neighborhood, NYU, not without the occasional stop-­‐over on 42nd St. thanks to Mary-­‐Ann Caws, who welcomed me many times in her home not far from the Metropolitan; and thus, over the course of more recent stays, gradually homing in on Washington Square, the French Department and the famous corner office of Tom Bishop, in bonds of friendship with its author-­‐professors: Denis Hollier or Eugène Nicole, Michel Beaujour or Richard Sieburth… Excuse me, once again, if I juxtapose and equalize everything, in associative anamnesis, for an aging not-­‐unjust memory that would recapture the lost decades, if cheese and wine could serve as the madeleine in the Tea… 5 What I received through Kenneth was enormous: the narrative and the modernity (at last century’s midpoint) of One Thousand Avant-­‐Garde Plays; in the ambiance, if I might say, of the so-­‐called “New York School,” in the company of John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Harry Matthews (and the living memory of Frank O’Hara)… and also the vibrations emitted by Olson or Duncan… Life in Manhattan included readings. I was not only an audience member at St. Mark’s, but also a reader, as in Columbia’s Maison Française, thanks to Kenneth and John. My first American book, with a long preface by Kenneth Koch, was published and translated thanks to Eshleman in 1984 by U.C. Press with the well-­‐considered title Given Giving, which translated, for what it’s worth, “Donnant Donnant.” Clayton’s dedication stated: “It has added a dimension to my sense of what is possible-­‐not possible in poetry now.”3 I had tried a first time in 1978 to “render” [“rendre”] (as was commonly said in our country, according to an old esthetic expression)… to render what I experienced into a book welcomed by Denis Roche (and not by Gallimard, although I was on its editorial committee) under the explicit title Jumelages [“Twinnings”], followed by Made in USA. This collection closes with poems to Kenneth Koch, Duncan, Olson, Tarn and Middleton, and my first poem written in New York dedicated to John Ashbery; which I will not read because I hope to leave some time for you to hear the second and more recent one [“September in New York” [http://thebatterseareview.com/271] translated and read by Richard Rand. Jumelages refers to this preferential dual relation spanning the two sides of the Atlantic. In 1980, at Gallimard Editions, Jacques Roubaud and I (with Claude Roy, whose name isn’t mentioned?) published an anthology of “21 American poets” ; which would become a “reference”… and which was soon “augmented” and corrected by Emmanuel Hocquard’s anthology, to which I will return later. Our own anthology was later followed by Alain Bosquet’s (Do Not Forget) and then notably by the exploratory, rich, knowing, and inventive book by Serge Fauchereau Lecture de 3 I am saying nothing of my second book, Recumbents: Poems, translated by Wilson Bainbridge, Wesleyan University Press, 2004, nor of poetry journals. 6 la poésie américaine [“A Reading of American Poetry”] published in 1968 by the Editions de Minuit (reprinted in 1998)… an “inaugural” work which itself re-­‐opened the twinning of previous generations (a re-­‐opening after and with work), the worksite where Apollinaire had hailed Whitman, Valéry-­‐Larbaud imported Joyce, Leiris (let us not forget the Leiris years) auscultated Melville, etc. The originality of successive generations reestablishes origin thanks to forgetting. Perenniality renews anteriority and “pursues all of poetry” [“poursuit la poésie toute entière”] (Max Loreau). The impossibility of “presenting,” not exhaustively of course, but appropriately, i.e. without deformation or oversight, or unfairness (which nonetheless some other critical luminary will judge flagrant) the complex limitless field of the writings here discussed, and the currents that traverse it and at once constitute it, that unite, intersect, come into conflict (the selfsame field that the predicate “poetic” niggardly subsumes), makes me venture this generality (the second motif, then, of my paper, after friendship): the existence of poetry in anthologies (and more and more imperiously according to an economy that I will not question here) makes impossible what in other fields we call objectivity; stated otherwise, quite simply, the constitution of an object and a measure. An anthology is arbitrary, violently so. The selective choice of the selected cannot not pass for subjective (“partial” means “partial”). The un-­‐selected (set aside or passed over in silence) immediately claim unfairness—and the anthologist feels flattered. Exhaustiveness, acribia, criteria-­‐logy fail, often discredit the anthologist, even if said anthologist takes pride for as much in an introduction. Ours went beyond Alain Bosquet’s, and as soon as it was published was amended, expanded by Emmanuel Hocquard’s, under the significant title 21 + 1 poètes américains. At work in those years, somewhat off to the side, but most influential, Denis Roche was working for Le Seuil [Editions]—we, for Gallimard, which had not yet been infiltrated by Tel Quel. War of the editors—and also, Lucretian luck of 7 friendships, “clinamenic” randomization of encounters [“‘aléation’ clinaménique des rencontres”] (let us not forget the ludic chaos from the depths of which all history/story [“’histoire’”] detaches itself): which in my case gives the following: my Parisian “friends” accepted the legend of a New York school. But they didn’t “like” Kenneth Koch, in whom they found reasons to “absolutely” prefer John Ashbery, idolized… in their misunderstanding of the strong relation that linked the two poets. Denis Roche, re-­‐translator of the Pisan Cantos and first introducer of Ashbery, was the authority here… My second generalization about the themes in this overall relation concerns translating. War raged, once again, in regard to translation. I’ll point only to this: the Royaumont school (if it ever existed), led by Rémy Hourcade, refused the juxtaposition (the “juxta”) of originals and translations. Po&sie did the contrary (cf. number 9 on Celan in 1978). Literalness, in the course of tradition once again, re-­‐
emerged as the question, the “crux.” Antoine Berman, our friend, for whose L’Epreuve de l’étranger [The Experience of the Foreign] I secured publication at Gallimard, was re-­‐founding translation studies. Our position—always maintained in regard to German poetry—was that of maximal/optimal literalness, always improvable. A word on “the reading.” Opinion [“doxa”] was that America was showing us the example of the reading, salutary not to say salvational, for an apocatastasis of poetry. Then came the model of performances. It was said that the French didn’t “read.” In any case, brought by Claude Royet-­‐Journod to France Culture, Emmanuel Hocquard to the Palais de Tokyo and soon to other venues and occasions, the orality of the poems’ diction became generalized. Who read better: the (atonal) author or the professional? In short order, taste, fashion expanded to the point of culturally promoting extreme readings: all of Joyce, or Homer, in 24 hours, day and night… Twenty years later, as Alexander Dumas would say, and according to a “cultural” organization that assigns poetry to promotional leaflets, to salons, to fairs, to festive 8 celebrations, I’m not sure that public reading hasn’t contributed to the cultural relegation of poetry to “the second or third division,” for the satisfaction, certainly, of a societal or even national need, but as a feeble response to the famous “Wozu Dicher in dürftiger Zeit” [Hölderlin: “What are poets for in destitute times?”], or if you prefer, as the ersatz romantic ambition of “the education of the human race” (Hyperion)… with, as result, the framing in miniature of a “dying poets society”… Plethora and expressivity are, at the start of the 21st century, the mode and the credo of the “poetic” Weltanschauung (in which the great tradition of writing was to receive and “share” the historical existence of languages through poetry). (If I had the time, I would read for you now the succulent and hilarious pages from the cult book by Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives) that lampoons this phenomenon…). Before I outline a finale that answers (responsibly) this question about the use of poetry (or maybe of “poetics”) in 2016, during this negentropic end of the Anthropocene, this “time” of devastation and deterrestration, and to settle now for some sort of overview of the poetic, I answer the question: “At the eve of a fruitful assessment of relations, what do you retain, French poet, from the influence of the exchange (Paulhan would have said the commerce) with “American” poetry, on the assumption that it did not escape you…?” An enumeration: in groupings that will strike you as heteroclite… 1. In the lineage of Whitman, the model of the modernized great epic poem (Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, Louis Zukovsky). 2. Ethno-­‐poetics, in the broadest sense of the term, including the “recuperation” of Native-­‐American rituals treated as poems ; and the possibility of a mythology, or a re-­‐mythologizing of history and of the American continent (or: of an anthropology through “re-­‐mythologization”). The name of Jerome Rothenberg looms large here, preceded perhaps by that of Gary Snyder, and escorted by Clayton Eshleman. 9 3. The narrative: Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery (and, in certain Californian respects Allen Ginsberg). The possibility of a narration, or of a telling (“récit”) in the poem, exoterically autobiographical (non Celanian). 4. Philosophy. The thoughtful or thinking poem (under Eliot’s influence?) especially for Wallace Stevens. 5. Alinea-­‐tion [“Alinéation”]. I put forward together with this somewhat surprising term: the “syncretism” of formalism, objectivism, realism (under the very strong imprint of poets like Creeley, Oppen, etc.), in that it seems to me this “syncretism” presents the crucial problem today of the sign of recognition (“gnosis”) in a poem, seeing how the poem “breaks to the next line” (that it consists in the breaking of line). One can deplore today this enormous influence that simplifies the poem /prose difference… (The poet is the “master of the Hammer”” (Char), scanning reality and the “matter of fact,” while carving out pieces of fact… ) Efficacy, then, of an assertive minimalist operation, which would be at once more authentic (the self), less “lyrical” and more objective/revealing (“Repository of insights and techniques”). Two asides: a) The American warehouse of poems/poets in the 20th century is gigantic. Perhaps only Serge Fauchereau’s book gives a sense of it (even if all of its “chapters”, “sections” (= collage), regroupings are inevitably arbitrary.4 Herein, the names are dropped out of order, even alphabetical, according to non-­‐
systematic, circumstantial readings and encounters, more or less copious, diasporic. I have not mentioned Cummings, Roethke, Cid Corman, Berryman, Lowell, nor Kelly, 4 I am not talking about poetry journals. Even if the case is clear: it is for and by the journal Po&sie, our journal Po&sie, that the exchange (relation) has happened and is happening. 10 nor Quasha, nor the Waldrops, nor Palmer, etc., etc., who would nonetheless be in the anthology under rubrics that are fragile and mobile. b) My 2nd aside concerns the issue of generations…; selective preoccupation of anthologies, that configure them, maybe… as caricatures? The Anglo-­‐Saxon world has invented the generation, I would even say the mowing down of generations, in order to journalistically accelerate circulation… It would be important not give in to this sales pitch. First of all because five or six generations are always contemporary (in the span of our mortality, which subsumes them) and because the great events/ masters (Pascal), that make for mutation/ change, and sometimes for paradigms, are both rarer and more crucial than any funereal procession might indicate. * My finale picks up on my premises… for a “Manifesto”—against the trend of an era without “manifestos”. The assumptions—or, if you prefer, the prejudices—of the ”I believe that,” which underscore the catastrophist, philosophical, aggressive and hurried tone of this mini-­‐manifesto, involve: * a mutation (or “disruption”) without precedent, which is making a recent understanding of “writing” obsolete, taking it past the era of Blanchot and structuralism (of metaphor/metonymy), to arrive at an “exit from language” (Godard) (or from logos on to software [“du logos pour le logiciel”] ; or, from the “natural” to DNA). * the observation (not acknowledged, regrettably) of a definitive omnipotent (“totipotent”) economic regime of cultural capitalism, which evacuates poetry from 11 the Debate, from the anthropological gigantomachy in progress (“as once long ago” from the Platonic City). * …and consequently of a furious resolve to be resilient (against plethoric expressivity, against the poetically correct, against the predominant dogma of “sensation” and lived/felt experience in small blows of intercut phrases)… for a reexamination of the poetic process (when doing is saying) in the service of an expansion of the realm of poetics-­‐while-­‐waiting-­‐for-­‐the-­‐poem, i.e. a thinking of figuration that would trans-­‐figure existence without any spiritualism, in a re-­‐
founded nominalism; for a return to things once again, despite technological, globalizing imagery; in other words, a re-­‐attachment to the terrestrial, to immensity and to beauty (and thus to beauty in language)—an alliance-­‐allegiance with radical ecology. I too am “radicalizing myself”—radicalness is ecological, or fails. Let me remind you that the end of the world happened very early this year, earlier than previously, on August 8th. 5 What dark resolve prompts these misological necrologies of literature (like the one that accompanied the death of Bonnefoy in [the newspaper] Libération)?... Obstinate resilience, I said?... Yet to resist, one must enter clandestinity. Shifting ahead: perhaps “poetry” must change its name! Dissimulate its star; hide within literature and the arts and everywhere—like leaven in dough (or like the seed in chaff, even if this “evangelical” hope is itself out of season, from season to ultimate hell). In dough, how to get or give rise to an improbable harvest without too much GMO? Thinking of Pessoa, let us propose that “poetry” morph into heteronym, give itself pseudonyms, multiply its aliases, so that it might foment uprising—to which it 5 [Translator’s note: The reference is to Earth Overshoot Day, 2016.] 12 would be difficult to commit without “the energy of despair”! We have nothing else to do; and we assert that poetics is one of those aliases, preparatory. And if the “cultural” can only spread poetic correctness in a societal society of the spectacle, as visualized on SCREEN, let us compromise here and there with the “poetically correct” to defeat its program of rejoicings. The 21st century will be poetic or will not be, I’ve formulated as much by usefully transforming Malraux’s injunction… Therefore, it will not be.