Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

SERGE GAVRONSKY: Let me begin with an easy question! What has always struck me about your work is the extraordinary energy which arises from it and which is a rather rare phenomenon in contemporary French poetics today. Were I to generalize, I might even say that you are an unique phenomenon in French poetry since, of those texts of yours which I’ve read, and the opportunity I’ve had to listen to you in public readings, the nature of your voice sustains the decision in your poetry to exist as an electrifying experience.

JOSEPH GUGLIELMI: That compliment, my friend, goes right to my heart! (Laughing) I don’t think energy is the result of a particular decision; it’s rather like an electric current which passes through or doesn’t. But I would still have to say that, at its natural state, there already exists an energy charge in language itself. Between words, in order for them to make sense, in order for meaning to occur there must be some sort of energy and without it, there’s no poetry, there’s no language.

SG: As you know, since you’re a reader of American poetry, at least in a certain kind of American poetry, the oral aspect is preponderant. There is a “performance” factor, an insistence on the polish of the delivery, a concern for public reception of works read out loud to an audience. I believe this sort of praxis carries over into the content of the work itself since, consciously or unconsciously, the poet begins to “hear” his poetry and that will, at least in part, dictate the nature of his or her poetry and constitutes a sort of up-dated Whitmanesque poetics in clear contradiction to both a Wallace Stevens strand as well as what is referred to in the U.S. as “academic” poetry. This emphasis on the projected voice, on orality as a preoccupation, has been typified by the Beats where the main thrust, on a formal level, has been of an enunciatory nature, where écriture has receded into the background as a singular preoccupation, thereby establishing an identifiable distance between oral American poetry and its surdetermined written counterpart in France. Do you hear this formal equivalence of poetry as voice in your own work?

JG: At least two stages have got to be taken into account in any answer to that question. The first one is the writing and perhaps in that first stage there is already a foreshadowing of orality in that - and let me take as my example Fin de vers - where I tried to write using an eight foot line, a rhythmic eight-footer, not rhymed, of course! And when I read out loud, I try to discover this rhythm in the écriture and I find it and at the same time I transform it into an effort to increase its tension in order to underline its scansion.

When I scan the lines, I try to give them maximum energy (as you noted before), an expressive energy. I’m not adding meaning but expression. In order for the reading to be more “brawny”! That way, the line communicates to the listener through a tension, a scansion.

SG: In reading Titles, another one of your verse collections, it’s clear that you like to insert lines from foreign languages and especially from English. To what does that presence, which is both evident to the eye and audible to the ear, correspond? Even for people who do not read a foreign language, they must be struck by this insertion and, for those who do understand, it is an added semantical and phonic attraction. Could you tell me about the way these insertions function in your writing?

JG: Let me answer in two ways and the first would simply be that I like it, that it’s fun! But in a more serious vein, let me add that, as you know, I’ve been translating American poets such as Larry Eigner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Clark Coolidge and at this moment, an American poet living in Paris, Joseph Simas. This linguistic activity, which is translation, gives me a great deal of pleasure even if at times it makes me sweat! To answer your question then, sometimes I simply use these languages - I was about to say that I stuff them, but I’ll say I place them in my work, I use them to articulate my texts. Sometimes, when I put an American line in my poem it adds an even greater element of energy because American, for me, is a very musical language. All you’ve got to do is listen to a Blues singer or even a Shakespearian actor...there’s a special musical quality which touches me a lot and I try, a little bit, to pepper my own verse with it. A little more energy, power.

SG: When you translate American poets, without speaking about your translations from the Italian, do you feel a difference, which is only noticeable to the translator, a difference between the nature of the English language and the presence of the French that is, when you go from English to French, do you feel a loss, an enrichment, a displacement? How do you react especially since you know what’s happening within each one of the two languages?

JG: When I go from English to French I often feel a loss. First of all, as I’ve just said, there’s a loss of musicality and also a loss on the level of expression. There’s a relief in English writing; a force; an energy (to re-utilize the word) which is often lost in French although something else may be gained. But that musicality is lost and I would say the same thing for Italian. I once experienced the following: one day, there was a meeting of poets at the Pompidou Center - there was a Russian poet, an American and many French poets. But let me tell you, and I was rather struck by that, next to the Russian and American readings, how flat French sounded! I’m certainly not asking for a bel canto, but there wasn’t that song, that sort of folly that is carried by those other languages. Unfortunately, French has a rather flat musical line. It’s a flat language. You know, in the South of France, when you talk like a Northerner, like a Parisian, they say you’re talking “sharply”, “pointedly”. And I certainly don’t have that accent: [Joseph Guglielmi speaks with a pronounced southern accent.]

SG: I whole-heartedly agree with what you say though I know poets in Paris who are particularly satisfied with this type of restriction which the French language imposes on their work and who, as a consequence, opt for problems of écriture rather than talk about the breath line in poetry. This type of reading you were mentioning, at times a bit flamboyant, is rarely found among Paris poets although a certain fellow by the name of Artaud clearly wanted to break with that tradition!

JG: Not to be unjust, I should immediately say that work on language is very important for me. Like you, I too have been very interested in both Francis Ponge and Edmond Jabès. This questioning of language by language itself (in order to simplify a bit) is really the essence of poetry. After that, I do raise the problem of public diction which is a specific problem and one which characterizes my own work, but I certainly don’t neglect, for all of that, the work on language which is the poet’s work as you find it in Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Jean Daive and others. These are people who are interested in all the problems of diction, of reading in public. Perhaps they do not ask the same questions I do, but they do, and with insistence, ask similar ones.

SG: You’ve just alluded to Jabès and I know that you have written extensively on him...

JG: Even a book...

SG: Right, sorry! With Jabès, who is a poet, that is, one who, as of his earliest interests, wrote poems in Cairo, there is something which has always struck me as an apparent paradox and that is, he seems to be a materialist metaphysician, someone who asks questions about Judaism, about Being, Exile and the Desert, all the while insisting, with equal conviction, on the quotidian, on the lives lived by ordinary human beings in their own milieux. As a consequence, his language is at once “philosophic” and current, a spoken language that one might easily associate with prose. He’s marvelously able to synchronize these levels of language, these codes which indicate to the reader separate and apparently distinct orders of preoccupations. But when I think of some of the poets whom we know I do not see a similar complexity of intention, and when the question of Being is raised, it seems to be too highly psychoanalytically motivated that is, too autobiographical; even, and perhaps especially when it is defined in a post-Mallarméan enterprise. Are you yourself touched by some of these themes, by some of these translations of themes into a working poetic language?

JG: All of these questions interest me particularly and, at this moment, I’m preparing a paper on Jabès which I shall be giving at the Cerisy “Décade” in his honour this summer (1987). But I think what touches me the most in Jabès is his subversiveness. He speaks about Judaism but - and isn’t that one of the traits of Judaism, that is, to be subversive? - he exercises an option in interpreting important Jewish texts, interpreting them rather freely and it’s always the same thing after all! If you’re an asshole you’ll come away with an asshole interpretation! If not, then not. I find that Jabès has given to the question of Judaism an absolutely subversive interpretation and I’m certainly not the only one to have said it. Didn’t he entitle one of his recent books, Subversion hors de soupçon? And so, starting from Judaism, Jabès questions écriture, questions politics, ethics, aesthetics. I think he confronts nearly all of the great questions which exist and which shall never be resolved but which remain fundamental.

SG: Many thanks, Jo.