Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France
Norma Cole
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1886224390
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is my scan.
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Norma Cole has combed through books, little magazines, and correspondence to gather an exciting body of writing by our French contemporaries. There are letters, poems, interviews, critical pieces, and texts that cannot be classified. The authors include Anne-Marie Albiach, Jöe Bousquet, Danielle Collobert, Jean Daive, André Du Bouchet, Dominique Fourcade, Liliane Giraudon, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jacques Roubaud, Agnès Rouzier.
The texts (whether excerpted or complete) were selected for their interest as writing and for the conversation they enter into by appearing together. A conversation that creates new contexts for each individual text, but also widens the perspective in which a great deal of writing imported from France, for instance poésie blanche -- the writing of the "blank page" -- can be read. This conversation, rigorous and vigilant, addressing issues such as biographical and historical circumstances, and the relation of writing to other writing (reading), has been taking place for some time. Here are some pieces of it, most of them appearing for the first time in English.
Introduction, Norma Cole
"Par ces rappels, je n'entends rien prouver, mais seulement orienter l'attention."
--Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini
There are conversations embedded in these pages, a kind of cross-talk through time and space. Texts, interviews, critical pieces, journal entries, letters, worknotes and at least one simple list make visible and audible an openwork of embodied voices in conversation, in the deliberate breaking open of intentionalities, isolating single elements at one extremity, multiple folds, complex rhythmic architechtonics in the process of being constructed and deconstructed at the other. Most of these pieces have been published in France in literary journals, as books or as parts of books, although at least one has been circulated privately as a "report." One text, a guest becoming ghost, was revoked when the author, although pleased with the translation, decided his own text needed to be completely rewritten. Some of the writing here will extend the available work of writers previously translated and now familiar to North American readers, while a number of texts will introduce new work and new names.
Dialogic threads echo and reverberate through considerations of body and book, silence as both restraint and production of meaning, the neuter or neutral as the unassigned in relation to sociopolitical complexities of address, the sentence of syntax and precedent. Sets of references indicate points of orientation and question assumptions of assignment. Their generosity and hospitality are striking as is their rigor of investigation. Writing is action, the phenomenological self entering language, already a specific set of conditions within conditions. Writing and its silences are made up of specific concrete decisions. Circumstances and events (such as two world wars and the Algerian struggle for independence), from detail to detail, date to date, are not backdrop but determining facts appearing at different focal lengths, from naming to silence, testing the orders of apprehension as well as of writing.
Here is a range of writing at varying stages of coming into being, self-aware, proposing a stance very different from the taxonomy of "text/paratext." In Beginnings, Edward Said asserts, "One of the critical distinctions of modern literature is the importance given by the writer to his own paratexts -- writings that explore his working problems in making a text." The opposite impulse is at work here, for what is of interest is how the texts read together intentionally or inadvertently, addressing each other and writing beyond the limits of this or any single volume.
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Norma Cole lives in San Francisco. her books of poems include Mars, Moira, Contrafact, Desire and its Double, & The Vulgar Tongue. Her translations of French poets have appeared in many publications.
Project for a Revolution in New York
Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic
The spiral sometimes does not spare us and so the circle disappears, volume is seen (volume) which for me would be of "mental" tenor. syntactic structure. non-given of impulse by the non-stopping of elocution of movement. into these circular places of appearances, reincarnated but impassible are placed memory, retrospective, affectivity, vision, speech, absence what you call persiflage "waiting for our steps on the gravel" is the persiflage of opening: persif lage being that decadence of volume.
Present, and that it repeats itself in an almost programmatic way. In the beginning I didn't know why. But it seemed evident to me that the alternating "pieces from the notebook" (prose) should not be separated from the poems. From the poem, I should say. Because, in time, I saw that this little dark working into language pursued itself like an incessant murmuring inseparable from amor fati, from love of fate. Of course, I am referring to the fate of language. This maternal thing in which I.
Felt that some people experience prose as a cheaper cut, in opposition to the poem object, or "verse" standard. But, no, I don't buy that. For me, the stakes are the same. Arising from the same rage, the same desire. The alternating verse-prose says what it says "in saying it." It participates in a poetic form. "In poetry. you must locate yourself in poetry." It was not I who said that. I move ahead in the sand, often without even being able to speak in my own name. JG: But this melange, is it to.
Less Proven~al, in any case I am if you go back a few generations. (I would gladly place the troubadour Rubaut among my ancestors, but I have not succeeded in determining as yet all the missing links in my genealogy.) @2.11 The second branch of the alternative, namely that Le Pen is not French according to his own definition received stunning confirmation recently. While in New York for a reading at the Poetry Project at Saint Mark's Place, and after I read my poem, someone brought me a pen with.
Blanc. I'll use the example of "Chemin de l'ermitage." I don't exactly know how, I found a photograph of a carnival in a small town and I began to experience great pleasure from this photograph and that pleasure permitted the text. (Silence.) But since then, I haven't found a single object of pleasure. So I think I can overcome the anxiety that keeps me from writing, but for the time being I haven't the means. I haven't found what stimulates me ... JD: ... what neutralizes the anxiety... A-M A:.