Link desire/land/poetry

Poetry is torn between the desire for a land which does not exist and the need for a common ground, between its two contradictory genii: that somewhere else and the commonplace.

Translation by T.Sidoli

"La poésie est partagée tout entière entre le désir du pays qui n'existe pas et le besoin du lieu commun : entre l'ailleurs et le poncif, ses deux génies contradictoires."

J.M.Maulpoix

World. A definition.

"J’appelle monde ce qui est autour de nous, tout près, là-bas, dehors ou au-dedans, le tout de ce qui existe pour nous, à échelle humaine, et dont je puis parler."

J.M.Maulpoix. Adieux au poème. Paris: Jose Corti, 2005, prologue.

Meter and Rhythm. A definition.

Metre is a blueprint;
rhythm is the inhabited building.
Metre is a skeleton;
rhythm is the functioning body.

Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form. London: Routledge, 1996, p.7.

Lyricism

J’appelle aujourd’hui lyrisme cette en allée qui ne va à proprement parler nulle part, mais durant laquelle le marcheur connaît avec exactitude son poids et son vertige.

J.M.Maulpoix, Du Lyrisme. Paris : José Corti, 2000, p.10.

I call lyricism this forward leap,
which does not really go anywhere,
but during which one knowns one's weight
and vertigo with precise exactitude.

To Jean D.

If only I had had the time to be more
succinct, then you would not be reading
this, my third line of verse shit. Nor
would you be about to be remembering
the time you commented on your name,
on how in our two respective tongues
its signifier could at once be a female
or male signified in the domain of la langue.

We both knew who you were, what sex you were.
But the foreigner used your name to unsex you on the spot,
to comment on your lack of feminine masculinity

or was it to make fun of your masculine femininity?
In that each time unique moment when your name was spat,
it was you who was moist with saliva, not your wear, but your coeur.

Disappear

These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim. In darkness, he would see me: my word would be his silence, and he would think he was holding sway over the world, but that sovereignity would still be mine, his nothingness mine, and he too would know that there is no end for a man who wants to end alone.

This should therefore be impressed upon anyone who might read these pages thinking they are infused with the thought of unhappiness. And what is more, let him try to imagine the hand that is writing them: if he saw it, then perhaps reading would become a serious task for him.

Blanchot, Death Sentence. Trans. L.Davis.

Le blog?

« Le Journal n'est pas essentiellement confession, récit de soi-même. C'est un Mémorial. De quoi l'écrivain doit-il se souvenir ? De lui-même, de celui qu'il est, quand il n'écrit pas, quand il vit la vie quotidienne, quand il est vivant et vrai, et non pas mourant et sans vérité. Mais le moyen dont il se sert pour se rappeler à soi, c'est, fait étrange, l'élément même de l'oubli: écrire. »

Maurice Blanchot, L'espace littéraire.

On W.B

You hav’ risen
From the depths of poetic genius,
Far on th’ horizon,
Prophesizing yourself jesus.

Marrying the two Hs,
Into a placeless divinity
Creating fearful symmetry
On the world’s outer breaches.

The true man is imagination,
the prerequisite to perfect creation.

From a Friend

What is a blank space in a blank world?
What is a blank space in a blank word?
Do lines break or do you need to break lines?
Lets just put this as a blank line...

Sachin B.

note on 'Blogging in the Morning'

................... is standing in for blank space.
Blogger does not seem to appreciate line breaks.

Blogging in the Morning

The light grey, thin little laptop is switched on,
the screen a shape all light in the dark room.
The would be pianist is playing on his keyboard,
trying to make sounds, harmonious sound,
instead of the monotonous tap, tip,
tap of the keys on the board.

..................................................I, the pianist
isn’t quite there. The sound has not yet been created.
Rhythm not quite achieved yet. No
intensity, no flood of imagery, just the drip,
drip of the tip,tap, tip of the drop
by drop rhythm and imagery of the laptop
keyboard.

From an other's Tongue

the tongue, representing both a poet's personal gift of utterance and the common resources of language itself, has been granted the right to govern.

Seamus Heaney.

Mise en Poème

III.

Etre poète, c'est savoir laisser
la parole. La laisser parler toute seule.
Ce qu'elle ne peut faire que dans l'écrit. J.D

To be a poet is to
abandon the tongue.
Abandoning it so that it
may speak by itself, which
it can only manage in writing. T.S

Mise en Poème

II.

Rather than starting to write,
I should have wanted to be shrouded in the writing,
and carried by it beyond any possible beginning.
I should have liked to realise that the moment I began to write,

a nameless writing had always already preceeded me.

Mise en Poème

I.

In the poem that I must write today -
and in those that I must write here,
in this very space, for many years to come maybe -
I would have liked to have plunged surreptitiously.
But I will renounce to do so, for I am already in the text,
immersed in it. There is no escape from it,
there is no outside-of-the-text.

Just starting

I will go on,
but first I will have to begin,
but then I shall have to end.