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

SERGE GAVRONSKY: Looking at your work, one is immediately struck and fascinated by the apparently multiple peripheral identities which are yours as poet, novelist, art critic, professor of Aesthetics at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and sécretaire de la rédaction of the magazine L'Infini. You're also a traveler and an internationally known speaker on aesthetics and post-modernism. When you look at this multiple production, does it appear to you as a series of fragments or rather continuities? My first question would then be: is there one or many Pleynets under the same signature?

MARCELIN PLEYNET: I believe there's only one! I feel absolutely no division between my various activities and I would rather think of all of them as a keyboard upon which I can play. My writings on art, for instance, are determined by my poetic language as well as by a literary language which comes in to qualify these particular writings. The relationship to discourse, speeches, lessons, all play on a certain oral function which, as far as I can see, is extremely useful to refine, to develop in order to exercise the many possibilities of language itself. As for trips we all know they educate the young and I hope to go on many more!

SG: Would you care to expand on this concept of orality which Paul Zumthor has mined and which is an ambivalent one when you consider its premise in American poetics. In your own poetry, there seems to be an evident trajectory, starting with Comme to Rime, for example, where the expression has become increasingly franker, I might even say, autocritical and autobiographical. Where the writing, too, has forsaken a certain cultural paradigm, characteristic of the period, so that now, in your latest production, you seem to be more aware of an oral interference which allows you to make explicit a particular problematics alluding to spoken language, for instance, in opposition to that denser, literary écriture one finds in Comme.

MP: For a long time I think that I confused and was confused about the relationship between parole and écriture. I am now working on this subject in a very elaborate manner since I'm working on Homer, a poet solely of the voice, where writing is non-existent. When I refer to my own work, going back to Provisoire amant des nègres, and even to works prior to that--when I reread them now, writing, though it wasn't always clear to me, was always secondary to parole and to orality. Always secondary, always. And if what I've written has an identity (a quality), it's solely and entirely there. It's much more in the way the writing is carried by the voice then the manner in which writing becomes a norm, and authority, in fact, I value everything founded on particularly elliptical forms of language, on syntactical forms, particularly broken and lacking in "respect." Quite obviously, écriture cannot tolerate this sort of intervention, of invention. It is solely an oral partition which authorizes it. That seems to me to be something which inhabits what I have been writing as of the beginning. In a different perspective, I would even say that in my essays, and in texts of a purely speculative nature, parole has always given quality and dimension to a proposition which has always been for me a proposition of meaning. If there is something which characterizes what I've been trying to do in opposition to what was being done at the same time, it is that I began from the difficulty of establishing meaning with a will to founding it, whereas, very frequently, in poetry written by my contemporaries, the project was absolutely the reverse: They started from an explicit meaning with a will toward the suppression of meaning. If I look back at the trajectory which I may have followed, I believe that this will to manifest meaning, which wasn't clear at the outset, tends to clarify itself in time and becomes, in fact, more and more explicit. I recently observed, two or there years ago, when my first three volumes of poetry were republished, that one of my primary preoccupations was to remove myself from Surrealism, that is, its particular decision to evacuate meaning in a sort of Surrealism, idealism ... an esotericism. I was made aware of that in my first three volumes and even in those which followed. There, I hadn't yet quite succeeded. That poetry was still marked by certain Surrealist elements. The next volume of poetry I publish will definitely put an end to that! Let's say that in many of the poems which I've published, there were still traces, remains of a Surrealist rhetoric. The next volume leaves all that far behind. It is, on the other hand, extremely explicit, extremely clear, and I think it will be rather unexpected!

SG: This is particularly interesting since both in France, and now in the U.S., there's a tendency, through a mimetic effect, to insist on the écriture part of it in order to expel not only meaning but voice itself through a whole mechanism which overlays the text with elements which, at another time, would have been associated with automatic writing. This tendency corresponds to a cultural direction in France aimed at the rediscovery of the subject, an "I," and an admission that, if writing does not tolerate infractions, voice indeed lives by them. One can do nearly anything with the voice if you pitch it right.

MP: The situation is slightly more complicated. It goes back to a point of view which could perhaps be defined in the following manner: that part of French culture, the dominant strain, if you will, was perhaps more than ever, as of the end of the war, truly a nineteenth-century culture and it has remained essentially so for many later generations. One can say that the nineteenth-century is the French cultural referent. That particular interpretation is in conflict with an ideology of science, of philosophic knowledge, which quite evidently confronts and resists the problem of voice, with its effects of irrationality which are carried by language and so the result is, on the one hand, a sort of neo-romantic logorrhea and, on the other hand, an increasingly evident retention of the rational. I would roughly place all that under the heading of Mallarmé in that, what is significant for Mallarmé is the coming of Hegel; Hegel having only arrived in France in the latter part of the last century. There we are, as a result, confronting a particular resistance to a great part of French culture. When I first began writing, I struggled against that, as did everybody, and so I looked more in the direction of eccentricity, as in the case of Lautréamont, who took on science through a humorous critique and Baudelaire, on the other hand. As I began to understand the contradictions on that nineteenth-century horizon, contradictions within it, with people like Baudelaire, whole anterior options came to be available and, as a consequence, possibilities of discovering a linguistic invention carried on by the human voice, syntactical inventions, lexical ones too, extremely rich. This also allowed me to get rid of a philosophic inhibition found in French classics, a certain strain going back to Bossuet, to Chateaubriand and culminating in Proust, that magnificent prose, and for me, in what concerns poetry, going beyond the tragic French, to poets like Rabelais and Villon. All that is carried more by the voice than by a scriptural norm all the more, if I may say so, because it was expressed in a pre-classical language. This was the French which was thrown out and which had been rich in virtualities, all the richer in such possibilities given the fact that, if one reads this development backwards, one can see that French has tended to expel all erotic-sexual connotations, of the voice too, and to utilize a quasi-philosophic poetic language going back for its references to the pre-Socratics, that is, going back to find references in Greek volumes about whose constitution we know little. This seems to be the road travelled, as I see it today, up to the book of poems I hope to publish within the coming year.

SG: There are a number of clarifying elements you've just mentioned and they lead at least to two further lines. In the first place, a Hegelianized Mallarmé which unquestionably marks a redefinition of écriture in France. But also another one, which may be closer to your own evolution, and that is Russian Formalism, something which may have been too loosely grouped under the Structuralist category and a pre-eminence accorded to linguistics which has had, as one of its effects, the exclusion of the body from the text. Structural linguistics was so interested in the analysis of an almost surrational mind which was for us, at times, the unconscious, that it imposed a rhetorical stance on a whole generation of French poets who came to associate it with the very definition of poetry itself. If linguistics at one time seemed to be the source of poetry, one of the consequences of that was to obscure the erotic, the body in orality. No eroticism through syntagmatic consciousness! And I think that people who were attracted by that...

MP: Certainly. And yet I believe this passage through Formalism has been very useful for us and has to be extremely useful; it is indispensable, and I'm not at all embarrassed by what was then called theoreticism which reigned here, whether we're talking about Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis through Freud and Lacan, or a certain Marxist approach, certain Marxist analyses. The question in all of that is never to place any discipline, whatever it may be, in a surdetermining position vis-à-vis literature and literary writing itself. As of that moment, all disciplines are very useful and I can easily exploit any one of them, as I do my own activities, as part of the keyboard. As long as I remain master of the keyboard, and there's no superego telling me how to play it, then all these disciplines are extremely useful. Psychoanalysis is unquestionably useful as long as it isn't placed in a surdetermining position vis-à-vis literature. It's literally impossible to do without it! I cannot see how a contemporary, a fortiori an artist, can do without it, could bypass it as an instrument at his disposal. As I see it the only problem is just how it's going to be used. If the artist submits to its authority, well, quite clearly, that authority will speak on his behalf. But, on the other hand, if he uses what he sees and not necessarily as an artist, but as a human being, then all will turn out properly. Let's not forget, it's the subjective constitution of the individual who writes which is the determining fact. Everything must then exist in a totally free practice and with the least amount of fear.

SG: As my final question, would you discuss your novelistic concerns? In your last, and from what I know, your only published novel, Prise d'otage (1986), there's a number of aspects you've already touched upon, elements which you've just named and which one can find in your text, but which are often found there with a sense of vengeance whereas, in your poetry, at least up to Rime, there has always been a degree of restraint. What was veiled in the poetic text is here rendered explicit...

MP: Implicitly inexplicit! Though heavily charged with autobiographical elements... As far as the novel goes, it too is always in the same perspective since the artist must make use of the full keyboard. The novel allows in a discursive manner for the treatment of certain trivialities of biography which poetry can only do elliptically, except if one wants to renew with the great tradition of classical rhetoric. But I don't believe our century lends itself to such long rhetorical movements, those extended musical movements. We live in a society where the consumption of discourse implies speed of action. Poetry, as a result, cannot do it. However, the novel can do it and it's a way of situating one's position as writers in our time. It may be our only option today of doing what Dante did in The Divine Comedy, that is, to place a certain number of his contemporaries in Hell, Purgatorio or Heaven. Today, there may be no other possibilities outside the novel for that. I cannot see poetry doing that today, because it cannot enter into those lengthy rhetorical developments which was its proper nature during certain periods in the past. Thus I believe the novel has a dual responsibility: to take into consideration both biographical material and the place and the position of the artist within that biographical material. If I take my own novel, it clarifies certain misunderstandings which may have concerned me and, for example, a belief that I was at one time a Communist, at another, a Maoist and that today, as I've heard some of the young critics express it, a Catholic! The novel makes it clear as to my identity: I'm an anarchist. And I believe that there's no other position for the artist, for the creator.

SG: Is it impossible for this anecdotal, biographical, narrative material, to enter poetry after Villon without falling into the style of a Saint-John Perse?

MP: Except if one is willing to re-establish a rhetorical pattern...

SG: According to what you've just said, the advantage of a novelistic narrative is to allow the inscription of the body in prose whereas it had been ellipticalized in poetry.

MP: There's that and, in what touches Villon or Dante, the manifestation of the place of the creator in his biography as well as in his own story. That is an experience which is transcended by a religious experience. For Dante, that's perfectly explicit. Dante distributed his story and himself in his story starting from a theological grid. That's obviously impossible for us to do today. And something else appears which we also cannot take into consideration and that is a belief in the psyche, in a psyche of sorts. That is, in the importance of psychology. Freud's contribution was the language of the psyche; we're no longer within the psyche. From that point of view, novelistic narrativity allows one to treat that particular logic of the psyche and to remove oneself from the facility of psychology and to treat, through narration, that logic which is particular to the psyche. As for me, I believe that this is the determining point of the novel today because that logic of the psyche, which is also the logic of the writer, my logic, my own logic, has now found a grid through which, however different it is from the theological one, can act as a substitute. It allows for a distribution of the order of values within a logical determination.

SG: Don't you think today that such an enterprise has been facilitated by the re-inscription of the subject in the text? At a certain moment, not long ago, with Lacan, the identity of the subject was other than the one now defined novelistically. Today at least, we have that particular advantage...

MP: Absolutely...

SG: The filling out of the absent subject allows us to express ourselves in a different manner.

MP: It allows the writer to assume his own identity.

SG: And in public! And with that, let me thank you for all your answers!