Defence of Poetry 2002: Jacques Roubaud

January 18, 2006 I

I shall begin my ‘Defence of Poetry’ lecture with these words. I shall begin by saying: ‘I shall begin my “Defence of Poetry” lecture with these words’.

You have to start somewhere.

I am honoured by this invitation. This invitation is a great honour for me. My thanks to the ‘32nd Poetry International Festival, 16 t/m 22 juni, 2001, Rotterdamse Schouwburg’ for this invitation. The ‘Program Leaders’ of this event, Poetry International 2002, Erik Menkveld and Janita Monna, thanked me by e-mail on 15 February, 2002, 10:42, for accepting. I quote: ‘we are . . . happy that you will deliver this year’s “Defence of Poetry” reading’. I take this opportunity to thank them in person.

Fine.

The first question to consider, which I considered as soon as I had accepted this invitation is: in what way am I qualified to defend poetry, or LA (I emphasise) poésie? But that is something I should probably have considered before giving a positive answer to the request (which, I repeat, is a great honour for me). When it occurred to me, it was too late.

I interpreted the question (which I had been asked in English) in my language, French, and I translated the expression ‘Defence of Poetry’ as Défense de la poésie. The word poésie has an article behind it (which is common practice in French, my language), and this particular article happens to be the definite one. There is no other way of translating it. Yet I find this article off-putting. I could not have translated it as: ‘Défense d’une poésie’, using the indefinite article, ‘une’, because that would clearly have been a mistranslation.

All the same, that is exactly how I am going to tackle the question; what I'm going to attempt is a brief defence of 'une poésie’; and by 'une poésie’ I mean "a certain idea’ of what I, Jacques Roubaud, "composer of poetry’, understand today by the term "poetry’.

To clarify a little the point behind this linguistic hedging, I should like to quote from a recent book by a linguist, Jean-Claude Milner, who explains the problem far more clearly than I could: 

When I say that my talk will deal with a certain idea of the meaning of the term ‘poetry’ as I understand it today, I must point out that this is not very different from my opinion about it a decade ago.

This idea has remained quite stable for some time now. It has been particularly influenced by own personal history as a poet (which is a long one: I’m nearly 70) and by history in general (between the ages of seven and eleven, I lived in Nazi-occupied France. My parents and grandparents were what is known as ‘Resistants’; which means that the events of those years played a decisive role in my life (as a citizen, but also as a poet)). But I have chosen the word ‘today’ intentionally because the way I am going to deal with this idea has been deeply marked by recent events, as you will see.

I had written, or at least sketched out, this talk during a trip to the USA (in March), but I then thoroughly redrafted it because of a particular event; an event which is not in the slightest way poetic.


II

In 1996, a leading member of a French political party, the Front National, made the following declaration to a journalist on The New York Times: ‘Les étrangers polluent l’identité française’.(‘Foreigners pollute French identity’)

The newspaper Le Monde asked several people to give their reactions to the agenda of the party in question, and I wrote the following poem:


A few years passed, then the recent French presidential elections (I’m writing my talk between the two rounds of an election in which the candidate of the Front National, Monsieur Le Pen, knocked out the socialist candidate and prime minister, Lionel Jospin, in the first round) showed that my poem unfortunately reflected the reality of the situation (and that it had even worsened).
So I ‘recomposed’ my poem in exactly the same way, but then added to my new version, (thus making it a new poem)


Postscript 2002 (April)



Commentary

Robert Desnos (who died after being released from a Nazi concentration camp, where he’d been sent because of his work in the resistance (his arrest having been facilitated after he had been denounced in a newspaper column by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (please refrain from being sick on hearing his name)) wrote, in 1944, (so far as I remember, perhaps wrongly): ‘Poets should be able to talk about anything, in complete freedom. So, my friends, just try and you will see how unfree you are’.

My two poems are what can be described as ‘occasional verse’ and will certainly be classified as ‘political poems’, a genre looked down on by the poetic community (and even more so by critics and poetic theorists). But I will not enter into this old debate, which I find quite uninteresting. I compose my poems when I compose my poems and it can happen that some of those I compose refer to non-poetic subjects, as in the poem(s) I have just presented to you. I am now going to present a further example, which isn’t by me, but which I included in a small anthology of poetry a few years ago. (128 poems composed in French from Gullaume Apollinaire to 1968).

The name of its author is Paul Valet.


In this poem (as, or so I intended (only intended: let’s not be presumptuous), in mine), I can identify the presence of an idea concerning what is called poetry which I want now to defend: you can put everything and anything in a poem, so long as you proceed in a poetic fashion.

I shall now give you a counter example.

This is a ‘poem’ (with inverted commas around the word ‘poem’; that’s my judgement of this text), published in a relatively recent edition (February or March) of the Times Literary Supplement. It was written by Les Murray, a highly reputed Australian poet, at least in the English-speaking world.


This poem comes across to me as being utterly revolting; it dishonours poetry. This is not so much on account of what passes for its ‘content’ (for example: if Mr Murray had proved himself to be more inventive in terms of mathematics, painting or music than Mr. Bin Laden, the fact would have been well publicised, (no one blames him for being incapable of inventing the nuclear bomb)), but more because the words that have been kidnapped here, or ‘high-jacked’ in this caricature of verse, have been degraded into pure propaganda, for an even cruder version of a defence of ‘western civilisation’ than the one which Mr. Berlusconi came up with in a moment of sincerity.


III

In my opinion, there is a vital link between language and poetry. The poetry in a given language enters into the definition of the language. It is language’s memory, the love of language; which, for a poet, implies the refusal of all ways of treating that language which degrade it. It is perfectly all right not to react, except civically, to the political positions of the Front National, and instead consider that a serious poetic endeavour stands as a form of resistance against the sullying of the French language, brought about by the extremely effective discourse which Le Pen has been pouring into French ears for over 30 years.

But there is also another way to degrade a language, which is even more widespread and more effective. It is present everywhere, from advertising slogans to the news, (not just on television), and in political speeches, even among the hardiest opponents of the Front National. I don't mean the ‘newspeak’ which used to thrive in the countries practising ‘real socialism’, but something less obvious, more insidious, more sneaky, more indirect; no less deceitful, but rather lying by omission, by displacement, misappropriation, and so on . . . It’s most dangerous version isn’t so-called ‘politically correct’ language, which is merely ridiculous (though also extremely influential in some countries). It is the form heard when, for example, in some companies the job of dressing up redundancy schemes is called ‘Director of Human Resources’. And it also drives journalists to use the adjective ‘surrealistic’ to qualify any absurd situation. There are numerous examples. I term this ‘mueslispeak’ or, better perhaps, SLOP (Standard Language of Pap). The ears, heads and mouths of the inhabitants of modern democracies are full of it. Defending poetry also means defending language, and, in particular, defending language by using poetry in the fight against this two-fold degradation of language.


IV

To return to the quote which triggered off my poetically civic action, let us now examine it as if it were verse; from a metrical point of view. As follows:

Les-é-tran-gers-pol-luent-l’i-den-ti-té-fran-cais-e.

It is easy to recognise here, (if, at least, the poetic habits of the French tradition have not been completely forgotten), an example of an alexandrine, with its twelve syllables, and a caesura after the sixth ‘syllable’, it is the metre of Ronsard, Corneille, Racine, Hugo, Baudelaire and Mallarmé (let's not forget Mallarmé). The final ‘e’ of the line is mute and so is not counted as a thirteenth syllable. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the alexandrine has gradually been supplanted by free verse in the work of France’s poets (not all of them, but the vast majority of those whose names can be found in encyclopædias and anthologies). The sort of free verse, as used, for example, by the Surrealists, has the following characteristics:

- condition a) The syllables aren’t counted
- condition b) It doesn’t rhyme.

As the dominant form until the 1960s, this version of free verse, ‘standardised free verse’, or SFV, relied entirely on its opposition to the traditional model of rhyming alexandrines. So what happened to the alexandrine in this context? In the world of poetry, it generally took refuge among traditionalist poets, those who are seen as being old hat (or reactionary); and with some original minds (such as Raymond Queneau). But the main area in which traditional verse survived (and still does) lies outside the world of poetry, for example in the fields of advertising and in politics. In such contexts, it is used, as Mallarmé put it ‘to accentuate the diction’. (It works wonders in SLOP). Such use is, of course, rarely conscious. It is effective (when used outside the world of poetry) precisely because it is an unconscious survival. It stands as the memorial of a moment in the history of language, in which the little-known history of poetry and of its trends plays an intrinsic part.

So it isn't surprising to hear an alexandrine in the mouth of a leader of a Fascist party like the Front National, especially when he is trying to coin a striking, memorable expression to illustrate his typically crazed xenophobia; and, above all, addressing it to a journalist from one of the countries, the USA, which Mr Le Pen, the leader of this party, attacks with violent demagogy.


V

Many years ago, when examining modern poetry from a formal viewpoint, at least in most so-called ‘western languages’, I recognised that one form of poetry dominated. It is versified in a uniform manner and can be used universally. It is what I have termed Free International Verse, or FIV.

Typical FIV

Alongside the overall standardisation of the world (economic, financial, musical, ideological, dress-sense, gastronomic, etc) arose during the last quarter of the century, under the obvious influence of poetry written in American English (an involuntary but real offshoot of the domination of that highly militarised state over others), and has led to standardised verse. Free verse, as written in French by the Surrealists and their followers, was still far too dependent on the history of French verse, polemically standing against the memory of alexandrine verse. FIV escapes from these fetters. To be brief, it is written and characterised by a ‘page setting’ which is different from prose, but with line divisions which ‘prudently’ adhere to its syntactic structures.

FIV is generally found in short poems, or sequences of poems.

FIV is verse with a universal vocation: it is easy to translate, and can be practised in all western languages, and probably in all the languages of the world.

As opposed to the French Surrealists’ free verse, it owes little or nothing to the measures and rhythms of the traditional prosody of the languages it so enthusiastically colonises. No provincial slavery! In order to examine the oral presentation of FIV, (its written presentation can be seen in magazines and books) at the international poetry festivals (or festivals featuring poetry) which I have attended over the past few years, I decided to listen to the largest possible number of readings and try to follow what was going on if I had the written text, or else a translation in one of the languages I can more or less understand (but some phenomena do not require an advanced understanding of the words). This is what I concluded: practically all of these multinational poets who read their own work in such circumstances solve the problem of how to present it orally in an extremely simple way. They read it exactly as if they were reading prose. It is obvious that there are several ways of orally (and aurally) reconstituting what the written score of a poem provides. One of them could be the manner I've just described (though I don't see what it has to going for it, unless you're following the written text of the poem; and little even then). (It would be more interesting to do this with metrical verse, or rhymed metrical verse, in front of an audience aware of the laws of prosody).

But in reality, there isn’t the slightest intention in this herd-like practice of reading. It is quite simply the way everyone does it. Things should be done as usual, nothing should be strikingly different from this new universal law. This also has consequences on the writing of such poems.

There's one slight exception – a certain number of poets (I'm tempted to say, especially American ones, but my investigations have not advanced far enough to be categorical) make a clear distinction from prose: they emphasise the ends of their poems by raising their voices slightly (like actors at the Comédie Française twenty-five years ago). In this way, we're sure that we’ve got is poetry.

The absolute rule about what can be said in a poem written in FIV is accessibility. Not only must the poem in FIV contain no difficulties of comprehension or of linguistic construction, it must also avoid anything particularly striking, unless it's lexical (and in a tone acceptable in a travel agency), and certainly not adopt the incomprehensible manner in which traditional poetry used to chop up and divide what it had to say. Hence the total rejection of anything formal, the domination of narrative verse, of ethical exclamations (limited to subjects recognised by CNN), etc. It is easy to see what the consequences of such limitations are. 

In such a context, why maintain the distinction between poetry and prose, as limited by the distinction between verse and non-verse? But it's a fact that (still in this context) it is not thought good to drop the visual characteristics which mark out FIV. Why is this? 

You may object that if you are invited to an international poetry festival then you must in some way mark yourself out as a poet, and that the simplest exterior sign which is most easily recognisable to all organisers of international festivals is, of course, the use of FIV. You might well so object and you'd be right. But I think there’s more to it than that: the very existence of this modest way for poetry to survive (extremely modest: except when there is some exceptional political context, audiences for any given poet are meagre) is linked to what I have already termed (in a different context) a ghost-effect. The overall devaluation provokes a tearful attention to its few places of survival. It becomes something decorative, a way for the ‘cultured’ (so long as the proceedings do not cost them more than a tiny fraction of what they’d pay to see an opera or exhibition) to prove the height of the culture. But if, and only if of course, the poets are serious and well behaved. So their poetry must be serious and well behaved, too. Within these formal boundaries you can say anything that is feminist, multi-culturalist, anti-racist, anti anti-personnel mine-ist, you can Chernobylise at length, or burble on about peace and your grandmother, so long as no one suspects you of playing ‘formal games’ or of being ‘difficult’, which would be ‘elitist’, ‘non-democratic’ and probably in breach of the rights of man and an insult to NGOs. Unfortunately, it is hard to avoid thinking that FIV is verse naturally suited to SLOP. To conclude this point, FIV is the essential form of SIP (Standardised International Poetry), whose servants are POWs (Poets of the World).


VI

Recently, SIP has been under attack on several fronts, which I shall mention only in passing:

- The weakening of the poetry/prose distinction and, in the field of what is still considered to be poetry, a weakening of versified poetry
- The progress of multi-media poetry, of computer-assisted composition, etc.

Such developments are highly important, but of course lie outside my own vision of poetry, naturally limited by my advanced age and the nature of my poetic experience.

I would merely like to indicate one way, which is at once quite distinct from SIP (with its FIV and other manifestations) and also avoids any stick-in-the-mud rejection of all innovation. I am referring to writing under constraint, the best established representative of which is the OULIPO an international group to which I belong. Here I shall give just one example of such compositions. The constraint in question is simple, logical (and can thus be translated into all languages); and I applied it in the same context as the one which triggered off this talk. The manifesto of the Front National, with its stated intention of ridding France of foreigners who pollute her by their very presence on her soil, contains the following definition, framed by its leader:

Le Pen's definition: A person is French if both of his or her parents are French.

Excited by this definition, I composed the following poem, which has already been translated into several languages, including I am proud to say (because it's rare for me) German.


I had to sign it ‘Provencal’, since I am not French myself, being vaguely Provencal, or at least I have been for the last few generations. (I would love to include the troubadour Rubaut among my ancestors, but I've been incapable of finding all the missing links in my genealogy).

The second possible solution, that Le Pen isn’t French according to his own definition has been confirmed in quite a striking way .

When I was in New York to participate in a reading during the St. Mark's Place Poetry Project, I read out my poem. When I'd finished, someone gave me a biro whose trademark was Le Pen. When I examined it I found that it had been "made in Japan".

Quod erat demonstrandum.