Invitation to the Voyage: Notes on The Modern Poetic Image

“Invitation to the Voyage,” the dark jewel in the crown of Baudelaire’s prose poems, is many things.  For me, lately, it has become a touchstone for understanding what is modern—and, for that matter, postmodern—in poetry.  The modern quality of Baudelaire’s prose poem shows best when we hold it up in contrast against its most significant background: Dante’s Vita Nuova. Both “Invitation to the Voyage” and the mixed prose and poetry of the Vita Nuova are drenched in yearning for a woman who is more than just a woman: she is also a gateway to something infinite and eternal.  But the differences between Baudelaire’s eternity and Dante’s are striking, and go beyond matters of religious doctrine to the far more serious issue of the nature of the literary image.

Aesthete that he is, Baudelaire gives us, in “Invitation to the Voyage,” an image of a place that is somehow the antithesis of the ordinary world—a place that isn’t described in isolation, but through contrast to our busy, vulgar world.  It shines in the beyond, this other, better place where “slower hours” than ours “contain more thoughts, where clocks strike happiness with a deeper and more significant solemnity.”  The nature of the place isn’t defined with any exactness, but evoked by a series of images—tall windows divided into leaded glass panes, a bright, shining array of kitchen copper, the light of sunsets settling richly on the walls—is it an aesthetic place? A place of interiors and artifice? A place of order? Of dignified domesticity?  It’s hard to say, exactly, except that there’s a mood of quiet and order and timelessness.  It isn’t just an indefinite place, though: it is also an impossible one, or contradictory: it might, says Baudelaire, be called “the China of Europe.”

If anything is certain about this place to which Baudelaire would flee, it is that it is a country made in the image of his beloved—a point on which he insists. Everything made in the country, he tells her, “is made in your image”—indeed, it is a country entirely “in your image.”  As the prose poem reaches its climax, we read “These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these perfumes, these miraculous flowers, are you.  They are you, too, these great rivers and these quiet canals.”  The beloved is this escapist paradise, into which Baudelaire himself enters in his mind. Continuing with his image of rivers and canals, he writes “these vast ships that drift down them, laden with riches, and from whose decks rise the monotonous songs of laboring sailors, they are my thoughts which slumber or rise and fall on your breast.”  It is the beloved who, in embodying or signifying the better, purer, more timeless place, brings Baudelaire away from this world and toward the eternal: she leads his river-faring thoughts “gently toward the sea, which is infinite.” This infinity isn’t the beloved, exactly, though: it is a place the poet reaches via love for her, a place where his thoughts can stay only for a while before they weary of it, and “now enriched… return to you from the infinite.”

The debt Baudelaire owes to Dante is profound.  Firstly, there is the way the beloved woman connects to the other, better world.  The best way to describe the relationship of the two in “Invitation to the Voyage” is to lift a passage on the Vita Nuova from the scholar and translator Barbara Reynolds, who says Dante writes of Beatrice in a manner that represents “not personification or symbolism, but the perception that actual persons can be images of qualities beyond themselves.”  That is: a real person, rather than an allegorical figure, an imaginary metaphor, or a symbolic creature is the image and pathway to a world better than the one around us. The concept is new with Dante, and ranks among his greatest inventions.  It is a concept very much alive in contemporary poetry, as we see, for example in Lorenzo Thomas’ poem “God Sends Love Disguised as Ordinary People,” where we needn’t go further than the title to see the notion that real individuals in our lives represent something greater and more eternal than themselves. 

What is more, the specific qualities of the world Baudelaire associates with the beloved hold much in common with the world to which Dante ascends via Beatrice.  For both poets, the beloved is the gateway to a love not only of the beloved herself, but of eternity.  Dante’s initial love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova begins with the senses, with his glimpse of her on the street.  The book recounts the transformations of this love: from a love governed by the sensual attraction, to a love of the poetry of love, to a despair of love at the death of Beatrice, to an abortive revival of earthly love for “Lady Pitiful,” the woman who looks on him compassionately in his bereavement.  Had Dante allowed this new love to flower, the Vita Nuova would have been a startlingly secular book, one in which the pleasures of this life follow upon one another cyclically, one dying love leading to another.  But the new secular love, a “little spirit, newly sent by Love,” that “Its longings and desires before me brings” is banished.  Dante tells of how, before this little spirit could grow, his “heart began to repent sorrowfully of the desire by which it had so basely allowed itself to be possessed for some days.”  Instead, he turns his gaze upwards, to love Beatrice in Heaven—and this brings about the final, most profound transformation of his love.  His love becomes “a pilgrim spirit” and “ascends into the heavens.”  The final poem of Vita Nuova traces the journey:

Beyond the widest of the circling spheres

A sigh which leaves my heart aspires to move.
A new celestial influence which Love
Bestows by virtue of its tears
Impels it ever upwards.

Just as Baudelaire’s voyage on the river of the beloved guides him to the infinite sea, Dante’s quest for Beatrice guides him away from the moral to the eternal.

Of course Dante’s is specifically Christian—indeed, when he depicts Beatrice following one Giovanna (the Italian feminine of John) he makes her a female Christ, appearing after John the Baptist, and his association of her with the number nine (the age at which he first saw her, among other things) underlines her specifically Christian perfection, since nine is the square, or perfection, of the trinity’s three.  This is one key difference between Dante and Baudelaire: Baudelaire’s infinity is indefinite and visited only momentarily—it lies outside of any particular doctrine or orthodoxy. In contrast, Dante takes pain to affiliate his sense of the infinite with specifically Christian iconography and dogma.

The pains Dante takes to specify the specific nature of the eternity to which he ascends are at least as important in differentiating him from Baudelaire as the Christian nature of his eternity.  Not only does he work with Biblical allusion, Christian numerology, and other semiotic systems to control the way the poems of Vita Nuova are read: he structures the book in such a way that most of the poems are sandwiched between contextualizing prose passages and little critical interpretations of their meaning—including helpful indications of what he meant in each part of the poem, and where exactly the parts should be divided.  Moreover, he makes his wishes for hermeneutic clarity explicit, writing that poets must be able to “justify what they say,” for "it would be a disgrace if someone composing in rhyme introduced a figure of speech or rhetorical ornament, and then on being asked could not divest his words of such covering so as to reveal a true meaning."  "My most intimate friend and I," Dante adds, "know a number who compose rhymes in this stupid manner."

Dante is, indeed, very clear about the way the love that begins with the senses directed at a woman can lead to a love of the divine (or, one should add, for a woman’s sense-based love of a man to do so—Dante allows for both forms of heterosexual desire, although his views of same-sex desire were less tolerant, as readers of The Inferno know).  So very clear is Dante about the relation of earthly to divine love that his views, announced at the end of the thirteenth century, endure and become a doctrine, still articulated in full force more than two centuries later in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.  In Castiglione they appear as part of the ideological equipment of all civilized gentlemen:

… speaking of the beauty we have in mind, which is that which is seen in bodies and especially in faces, and which excites this ardent desire that we call love, — we will say that it is an effluence of divine goodness, and that although it is diffused like the sun's light upon all created things, yet when it finds a face well proportioned and framed with a certain pleasant harmony of various colors embellished by lights and shadows and by an orderly distance and limit of outlines, it infuses itself therein and appears most beautiful... like a sunbeam falling upon a beautiful vase of polished gold set with precious gems. Thus it agreeably attracts the eyes of men, and entering thereby, it impresses itself upon the soul, and stirs and delights her with a new sweetness throughout, and by kindling her divine goodness excites in her a desire for its own self…. Love gives the soul a greater felicity; for just as from the particular beauty of one body it guides her to the universal beauty of all bodies, so in the highest stage of perfection it guides her from the particular to the universal intellect. Hence the soul, kindled by the most sacred fire of true divine love, flies to unite herself with the angelic nature, and not only quite forsakes sense...

The attempt to delimit specific meaning and to control it is central in Dante and, as the legacy of European literature for centuries after he wrote demonstrates, largely successful.  It is also entirely understandable for someone who wrote about eternity in a time when religious orthodoxy was enforced at the end of pikes and halberds.  And this is by no means something limited to Catholicism or to the middle ages: in the seventeenth century, the great English protestant writer John Bunyan prefaced his Pilgrim’s Progress with a poetic “Apology” in which he goes to pains to prove that his allegory contains nothing but “sound and honest gospel strains,” perhaps like those sung by Cromwell’s soldiers on their way to behead that Catholic sympathizer, Charles the first.

Here, in the insistence on a clearly defined meaning, we see the principal point of difference between Dante and Baudelaire, and the point at which we can begin to pinpoint what is modern about the latter poet.  Baudelaire’s prose poem is suggestive, not definitive.  It evokes meanings, but does not delimit a specific meaning.  Baudelaire was not the first to work with elusive poetic images: indeed, he draws upon a rich Romantic heritage, including the works of Coleridge, whose theory of the symbol (as opposed to the allegory) can serve almost as a statement of poetics for Baudelaire and his kin.  Coleridge uses the term “symbol” inconsistently over the course of his career, but it is his sense of the word in The Statesman’s Manual that is important here.  In that work Coleridge tells us that, unlike the allegorical figure, the symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal.”  It connects us to the ever-changing yet timeless eternity that Coleridge calls “the infinite I AM.” As the scholar James C. McKusick puts it, with Coleridgean symbol, “the form of the sign is determined by the form of the referent” – and when the ultimate referent is the infinite I AM, as it must at some level be in true works of imagination, the form will, like its referent, be dialectical, a process of coming together and diffusing.”  That is, with symbols, we never come to a definite meaning, but watch the process of meanings come together and fall apart; are evoked and dismissed and replaced continuously in the rapt mind of the reader.  We’re pretty far from Dante’s ideal situation, in which the meaning of the poetic image can—indeed must—be paraphrased by any poet aspiring to a state beyond stupidity.

The emphasis on an ultimately elusive poetic image grows over the course of the nineteenth century, reaching a kind of apogee in the works of the French symbolists of the fin de siècle. Mallarmé, for example, tells us that the poem ought to present an array of “resonant meanings and associations” rather than specific referents.  As he put it in an 1891 interview published in L’Echo de Paris, “the contemplation of objects, the images that soar from the reveries they have induced, constitute the song…. to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol.”  This art of suggestion rather than delimitation is at the very heart of the symbolist enterprise: Paul Verlaine insists, for example, that the poet “must not/select [his] words without some vagueness.”

In the early twentieth century the notion of the modern poetic image as suggestive rather than definitive becomes codified by that great tribe of rationalizers of the irrational, the Surrealists. André Breton cites Baudelaire as an inspiration in the First Manifesto of Surrealism, where he proclaims that the most powerful poetic image is that which presents the greatest degree of arbitrariness; that 

which takes the longest to translate into everyday language, either because it contains an immense amount of apparent contradiction; or because one of its terms is strangely hidden; or because proclaiming its sensational nature, it has the appearance of ending weakly… or because it is of a hallucinatory nature...

He then cites examples, including Lautréamont’s “the ruby of Champagne,” Louis Aragon’s “the frosted gleam of freedom’s disturbances” and his own “on the bridge the dew with a she-cat’s head rocks itself to sleep.” The grand point of such images is not that they communicate a meaning already determined by the poet, but that the mind, “at first confining itself to submitting to them, soon perceives that they stimulate its powers of reason… it goes onward, borne by these images which delight it.”  The night of confusion through which such obscure images take us is, for Breton, the confusion that leads us to discovery, to new and unpredictable insights, and so it becomes “the most beautiful night of all, the night of the lightning-flash: day, compared to it, is night.” 

Après les Surrealistes, le déluge: the decades between the First Surrealist Manifesto and the present brim over with poetic language and images that cultivate the indefinite, that seek by their strange beauty to refute Dante’s assertion that the poet ought to be able to write a clear prose summary of his meaning.  From the New Critical heresy of paraphrase to the midcentury American “deep image,” from the drifting syntax of John Ashbery to the elliptical juxtapositions of Anne Carson or Graham Foust, to Michael Stipe’s ambiguous lyrics (styled after Patti Smith, herself a student in the school of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) our proximate heritage consists of a thousand versions of the poetics of evocation, rather than definiteness.  It is a tradition inviting us to discovery rather than educating us in dogma, and in that sense the modern poetic image is not an illustration of an idea, but something altogether different: it is an invitation to the voyage.

Afro-Caribbean Women's Surrelism Update: New Translations of Lucie Thésée!

So you're looking for the latest in midcentury Afro-Caribbean women's surrealism?  You've come to the right place!  Well, almost.  You'll need to click over to Circumference: Poetry in Translation to see two new translations of Lucie Thésée's work, "Poem" and "Rapture: The Depths," by Jean-Luc Garneau and the present humble blogger.

More of the translations Jean-Luc and I have been working on appear here and here in Poetry.  There's a little essay about them here, and the New York Times did a little feature on one here.

Where Are All the Afro-Caribbean Surrealist Women Poets When You Need Them?

You're probably wondering where all the Afro-Caribbean francophone surrealist women poets of the mid-twentieth century are when you need them.  Well, at least one of them, Lucie Thésée, appears in the pages of the June issue of Poetry, in my translation.  She's a bit of an enigma, but what we do know about her is fascinating, and the poems are very strong in the original French.  I only hope I've done justice to her.


Here's part of a brief note I wrote about her, which is included along with the poems:

In 1941, his writings banned by the Vichy government and looking for any safe harbor, André Breton found himself in Martinique.  Fine weather notwithstanding, he might almost have been at home in Paris: the place was buzzing with Surrealist activity. Aimé Césaire and his circle were just launching Tropiques, a literary review dedicated to Surrealism, Négritude, and anti-colonialism.  Martiniquean Surrealism was primarily a game for men, despite Suzanne Césaire's theoretical contributions to the journal. But the poetry of an almost completely unknown schoolteacher, Lucie Thésée, appeared in many issues of Tropiques, and eventually made its way into the larger Francophone world.

Despite the anthologizing of her work in various collections devoted to writing from the French colonies, and praise from the critic Léon Damas, we still know surprisingly little about Thésée. Certainly this has nothing to do with any shrinking-violet quality on her part: Thésée was a courageous woman, even to the point of recklessness. With Martinique under Vichy rule, Tropiques was singled out for persecution. The military government accused the journal of being "racial and sectarian," a vehicle of hatred and division. A letter was sent back to the military officials, saying:

"Racists," "sectarians," "revolutionaries," "ingrates and traitors to the country," "poisoners of souls," none of these epithets really repulses us. "Poisoners of Souls," like Racine…"Ingrates and traitors to our good Country," like Zola... "Revolutionaries," like the Hugo of "Chatiments." "Sectarians," passionately, like Rimbaud and Lautreamont. Racists, yes. Of the racism of Toussaint Louverture, of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes against that of Drumont and Hitler. As to the rest of it, don't expect for us to plead our case, nor make recriminations, nor hold discussion. We do not speak the same language.

Lucie Thésée's name appears beneath these courageous phrases, near Aimé Césaire's.


*


In other news, there's a new review of The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (a book I co-edited with Steve Tomasula and Davis Schneiderman) in the American Book Review.

A Piqueray Dossier: More Belgian Surrealism!

So there I was, rooting around trying to put some order into the Augean stable that is my hard drive, when I ran across a little document called "A Piqueray Dossier" that I'd put together a year or two ago for an editor pal of mine who'd taken an interest in Belgian Surrealism.  Since I know the world is crying out for more information on the Belgian Surrealist poets of the mid-twentieth century — rare is the day my phone stops ringing with calls from Hollywood agents, Defense Department analysts, and representatives of major pharmaceutical corporations, begging for any scrap of information I might send their way — I'm posting it here.  Now get off my back!

A Piqueray Dossier

Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray were identical twins, born in Brussels in 1920.  Lovers of jazz and surrealism, they associated with key figures of the movement, including André Breton and René Magritte (with whom they held regular "surrealist working meetings" for many years), as well as with the musician Chet Baker and the composer Francis Poulenc.  In 1957 they became joint editors of the influential avant-garde journal Phantomas, whose contributors included Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, René Magritte, Kurt Schwitters, and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others.  They published a dozen books (listing "Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray" as authors — the Piqueray brothers did not believe in individual authorship), as well as numerous works in journals, and several works co-authored with Paul Colinet.  Gabriel Piqueray died in 1992, Marcel in 1997.  Au-Delà Des Gestes et Autres Textes, a 250 page selection of their work, was issued by Editions Labor in 1993, and sound recordings of their work were released on the Sub Rosa label in the collection Le Groupe Surrealiste Revolutionnaire (Vol 3).

Here’s some general background on Belgian surrealism from a 2001 article called “The Secret History of Belgian Surrealism” by Michel Delville, a sharp-eyed and eclectic critic (his book The American Prose Poem is my favorite treatment of the topic, and he’s done interesting work on — get this — Captain Beefheart):

Correspondance, the first Belgian Surrealist magazine, was founded by Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte in 1924, the same year as Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto.  Since that time, Belgian poetry has remained one the European avant-garde’s best-kept secrets.  The names of Nougé, Chavée and Dumont are conspicuously absent from most anthologies and literary histories, and Belgian surrealism is generally considered as a non-literary phenomenon and almost systematically confined to the paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.  Unlike many other Belgian writers who moved to Paris to make a career (the examples of Georges Simenon, Henri Michaux, Pierre Alechinsky and many others come to mind) most Belgian surrealists published their work in their home country, and this may explain their lack of recognition outside a small circle of connoisseurs and specialists.  Perhaps it is the sense of being relegated to the margins of francophone culture that accounts, at least in part, for the radical, convulsive spirit that runs through the history of the Belgian counterculture, from proto-Dada poet Clément Pansaers to Noël Godin, the now world-famous entarteur who recently hit Bill Gates with a cream pie...

And here’s a note from the critic Philippe Dewolf (crudely translated by the present writer) on the nature of the Piqueray’s joint authorship and collective sensibility:

It has been noted that their sensibilities and their characters are essentially different. On occasion, of course, a few words or lines by one of them appear in the other's text, but not often. Usually, only the signature is in common. As Marcel Piqueray explained in 1944, their names had been and would remain inseparable: “one signature, one station signal, as they say on radio; one overall station signal for the Piquerist state of mind.” Five concerns characterize this state of mind: the quotidian, angst, tenderness, the fantastic, and humor.

So you get the general idea: there’s a well-developed surrealist scene in Belgium, in contact with, but blessedly un-beholden to, André Breton’s scene in Paris.  The Piqueray brothers, working together, are at the heart of this, in part due to their editorship of Phantomas.

            Michel Delville stresses the kind of thick-fingered, deliberately clumsy, strangely comic element of les frères Piqueray, but in truth, this is only really one side of their work, as Dewolf’s statement about their main concerns implies.  Much of their work is a little understated.  Consider these three prose poems:

Hierarchy: A Night

“Can you see anything?” shouted Danour.  He raised the faint and flickering lantern to his face.  His squinting features showed his worry.

“I think this road winds on down the mountain,” Lora answered. “Too bad it’s so dark tonight. No time to be stuck on the summit, with all this wind – it’s not going to be comfortable.”

Danour laughed. “To hell with comfort” he said. “The important thing is for us to get down to the valley.” The words had hardly left his mouth when he stubbed his toe against a human body. It moved. A voice spoke.

“I don’t want to butt in here, but let me tell you this: you’d better not try to go down there.”  The speaker struggled to sit up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

Danour brought his lantern over to have a look at this unexpected dispenser of wisdom. It was a man, about forty, with a big moustache and a bowler hat. As the man stood up he went on explaining: “You see,” he said, “at first the summit was covered with lost couples and young families. The brave ones, though, were able to find their way down into the valley. The rest followed.  By now they’ve worked out a system: every family’s got its place, packed in side by side from the top on down. You and the missus here will be the final link – you can settle down right here.”

“Now, he added, “let me get some sleep.  I’m really tired. Good night.”

Down in the valley, it sounded like someone got a foot tangled up in the strings of a harp, then became overly-apologetic, making careful and elaborate excuses.

The Raft Of The Medusa

for Geneviève, for Nathalie, for Jacques

I speak of the folding, Y-shaped cane, a tool often used by hunters and horse-racing regulars – the former to make their aim more deadly, the latter as a portable, revolving chair, to follow more easily the movements of their circling horses.

They say that Formality, everywhere, uses his all the time, being so stunned and so breathless at the merest suggestion of the chanciness of life.

Professionals

Having scaled the wall, they leapt over the bristling shards of broken glass, hoping to land softly in the slop-pile left over from last year’s meager scrapings.

As they fell endlessly, they came to the conclusion that they must have picked the wrong wall. Growing used to the void, they started to think of other things.

The first of them is almost a Kafka parable.  So’s the third, come to think of it.  There’s a kind of social satire that bleeds off into metaphysical satire.  I guess that’s in the second one, too.

            Sometimes the prose poems seem more concerned with defamiliarization, though.  The image in this next one (if not the treatment of the image) always seems kind of William Carlos Williams-ish to me:

Hidden Light

This stately, low-wheeled carriage loaded with bright yellow boards never ceases to amaze people when they see it coming around the corner of the deserted street, pushed by a man in an apron.

It is such a strange vehicle, too majestic for this kind of cargo, such an unexpected and improvised means of transport – but somehow you know you've seen it before, though you can’t remember where. You’re so sure of this that you’re fixated by the sight of it, trivial as can be, as it rolls silently down the middle of the quiet street, through the middle of neighborhoods of accumulated memories through which we must walk, to understand.

They’ve got a bunch of poems that do something similar with the image of a beautiful woman, whose presence somehow charges the surrounding atmosphere with newness, beauty, and all that.  But I never thought of those prose poems as among the Piquerays’ best work.  Well, there’s this one, a sort of variant on the type I’ve just described.  I think it’s quite good, although a lot hangs on the end line:

Delerium’s Kingdom

In the distant, snow-choked valley sits the blonde, entirely naked, her hands clutching her knees tightly to her chest.

A city-suited man stands before her, his flapping scarf masking his face as he holds his arms outspread, as if to embrace her.

Little by little, first her legs, then her naked torso, and at last even her forehead and her fingers begin to blush with a glowing red. It is achingly beautiful: a color born of crackling woodfires.

For the man, now, there is nothing but the translucent nakedness of the woman, her closed eyes inventing the sky.

Snow is an aristocrat.

And speaking of aristocrats — some of the prose poems tell tales set in a strange, faux medieval or fairy-tale world (one of the favorite terrains of the surrealists).  Here’s one:

The Affective Distance Game

"Vendôme..." sighed the Marquise, leaning from the battlements of her turret.

"My jewel!" the Duke cried from the foot of the tower. He pulled a few ivy leaves from the wall and pressed them against his lips, tasting their bitterness. Faint voices came to them from far off in the splendid summer evening.

Some said, "Limousin! Golden Age! Rocamadour!" Others called out gently, "The Princes of the Blood! Saint-Amant-Roche-Savine! Ribérac!" Still others asked, “Blois? Marie-Adelaïde? Milady?”

"No, no, this is awful!" cried the Marquise, in answer. A great commotion was heard from up above. Then, suddenly, nothing.

Thinking this must be some kind of a joke, the Duke raised his eyes toward the turret’s battlements, and took a few impatient steps toward the moat. He laughed heartily:

"Bridgit! – What’s she up to? Oh, she's in for it now!”

But still silence reigned.

From the distant woods he could hear the faint sound of young ladies dancing.  Then came new voices, with an echo like the omen of a terrible sorrow.

It was a group of lords, rounding the bend with a little band of armed men. They bore the corpse of a young man.

Seeing this, the Duke turned abruptly back to face the castle, its battlements now shining violently in the moonlight.

“He played the game,” the armed men explained, “And fell dead the moment the Marquise sobbed out her last answer.”

But the Duke was no longer listening. He had stepped lightly to one side. “Good God,” he murmured, “I could have sworn they didn’t love each other that much…"

Striding up to the tower, he stepped on a square of blue silk, spotted with a little blood: it was a woman's handkerchief. He quickened his pace.

Arriving at the summit of the turret, he found all the players gathered there. He went straight to the little knot of princesses.  In their arms they held the corpse of the Marquise, her dead face bathed in the purest light.

Much of the Piquerays’ work that appeared in Phantomas involved a kind of Pessoa-like creation of different poetic personae — a great game for editors to play.  This is where a lot of the absurdism and oddball humor comes into play.  Some of this is scatalogical, some straight-up goofy.  This, I’m sure, is what an anonymous reference book writer had in mind when he wrote:

If there is a quality specific to Franco-Belgian literature, it is a corrosive humor raised to its highest point by the surrealists. It is also the attribute of Phantomas, a literary and pictorial review emphasizing the ludic and enlivened by the “Sept types en or” (Seven Golden Guys): Paul Bourgoignie, François Jacqmin, Joseph Noiret, Pierre Puttemans, Theodore Koenig, and Marcel and Gabriel Piqueray. Phantomas is perhaps the best illustration of this Belgique sauvage, which contrasts a little too easily with the official Belgium.

When I was thinking about what might go into your magazine, I thought of this strand of their work.  In fact, it might go into the summer issue, with the traditionally lighter, funnier, stuff.  I worry, though: it’s weird stuff, and not weird in any of the ways we’ve come to expect (if we expect it, is it really weird?  Maybe such stuff is just pseudo-weird...).  Then again, it isn’t as weird as mIEKEL aND (whose weirdness, I should add, is entirely laudable).

            Anyway, here’s a series that I think represents this side of l’oeuvre Piqueray, a group of poems called “The Sproks,” presented as written by one Guy Pezasse, an alter-ego of the Piqueray brothers:

The Sproks

Tale of an Experiment

Whenever

He gets a chance

The man

Tears a head of lettuce

Into thousands pieces

And stuffs them into a very strong

Cup of filtered coffee.

And then

He takes

What remains of the lettuce

And dumps it

Into a vat,

Dripping with coffee.

Example of an Activity

This man’s uncle

Sometimes carries

An immense mattress

On his head.

And he staggers

With this mattress

From the top of the stairs

To the coal bin,

Where he lays it down

And throws himself on it

Pumping legs in the air

In excitement.

An Action Among Others

The same uncle

Who lives on the seventh floor

In the center of town

Is sometimes

In the habit of filling,

At dawn,

A large pan

With strong black coffee

And balancing it

On the window sill

With the help of his nephew;

Then sending it

Careening into the street,

Not giving a fuck

About it.

Tale of Another Action

It is this same gentleman

Who, with the help of his uncle,

Fills an immense cast-iron

Stove

With gooseberry jam.

When they’ve done this,

The gentleman and his uncle

Throw handfuls of jelly

At each other’s faces

For fun.

An Activity Among Others

What also happens

Sometimes,

Is that the gentleman,

His uncle

And his nephew

Tear many heads of lettuce

into thousands of pieces

Then pour strong coffee

On them,

In a vacant lot

On a slope,

With

Coal heaps

And piles of shattered windowpanes

At the bottom of the slope.

Then

They speed down the slope

On their bicycles

Without braking,

Their legs spread wide,

Feet held away from the pedals;

And then,

At the bottom of this slope,

The tires make a crackling noise

In the coal

And a farting noise

In the shattered windowpanes.

Then the gentleman,

His uncle

And his nephew

Jump off

Their bikes

And pelt each other

With old heads of lettuce,

Very strong coffee,

Coal,

And shattered windowpanes

Until they take up shovels

While leaping

On mattresses

Filled of plaster

And pumping

Their legs in the air

In the gooseberry jelly

Of their excitement.

Well!  It’s different from the more conventionally beautiful, evocative prose poetry, for sure.  I think that’s part of the point, to de sacralize and de-aestheticize poetry (“The Sproks” is a manifestation of that particular page of the Dadaist-Surrealist team’s playbook).  I always think of the series as having a kind of strange, Buster Keaton-y slapstick, combined with a satire of bourgeois propriety, and even a satire of scientific method.  Michel Delville has this to say about “The Sproks”:

To me, the “Sproks” poems have always resembled a cross between Satie, Beckett, Buñuel, and Laurel and Hardy. The proximity of food, garbage and shit in the poetry of the Piqueray Brothers points to a poetics that does not shy away from describing fantasies of infantile regression and puts them to the service of a popular art that delights in imagining how the most banal situations can degenerate into absurdist extremes. Such manifestations of the eccentric, the repellent and the abject create a space where the shock aesthetics of the revolutionary avant-garde meets the verbal games of the poète-farceur, who considers poetry as a form of linguistic slapstick comedy. For all its apparent timelessness and impersonality, the poetry of the Piqueray Brothers remains rooted in their cultural and social background, and one suspects that many of the Non Inhibited Poems were inspired by the chink of beer bottles, the smell of fried sausages and the sight of people pissing in the streets on their way back from the local café. As Louis Scutenaire once put it, in Belgium “on boit de la bière et on mange de la viande / Et tout le monde est une bande d’abrutis” (“we drink beer and we eat meat / And we’re all just a bunch of morons”).

So there you go: a guided tour through the Piqueray world.  I find them delightful, and think of them as a real find (as far as I know their work doesn’t exist in English except in the translations Jean-Luc Garneau and I have put together).