Beard of Bees Press: Three e-book Reviews
Exchanges of Light (Echanges de la Lumiere) by
Jacques Roubaud, tr. Eleni Sikelianos. 2005.
Reviews by Amy Newlove-Schroeder.
The
great French poet Jacques Roubaud, known in part for his
relationship to OuLipo, has produced a piece that is part poetry,
part dramatic verse, part Neo-Platonic philosophy. Exquisitely
translated by Eleni Sikelianos, this excerpt from Echanges de la
Lumiere is both wide-ranging and yet closely focused, expressed
in language that is always lyrical and intensely moving. Drawn from
a full-length work in six parts, Sikelianos has translated the first
section, or chapter: each section comprises six characters meeting
to discuss, "in the manner of an 18th century
philosophical dialogue," the meaning and tangible manifestations of
light.
The six characters, all of whom are identified by a name and an
initial (M. Goodman, or Basil of C, for instance) are differentiated
by philosophical inclination and style of diction. Basil of C speaks
about God more than anyone else; M. Goodman is the representative of
pseudo-rational thought: "I have chosen that we assemble in this
place for a few evenings, at the moment when the lamps are being
lit"; " William H. is the most "poetic" and non-linear of the six:
"Night you come the light pushes / against the
emptied slopes of day." Because the characters are given no
distinguishing marks, apart from their dialogue, the work is as
ephemeral and indefinable as light itself. We meander from
statements like "Light doesn't turn the street corner" to "Light has
already, while you were giving it boundaries, while you made light
of the impossible, turned the corner of the street." We are
reminded, inevitably, of Beckett - but Roubaud's work is less rooted
in the need to demonstrate the absurdity of life than in the desire
to linger over one of the great poetic tropes: light, and its
meaning. Do we arrive at any sturdy meanings here? No, and we hardly
expected to. William H. expresses it best:
Night
you
came
the
lights
have grown
over
the grass, the slopes
emptied
of
light, the
lights have
arrived in the absence
of light
dark
of light lost
of light that was
beautiful
We
are left then, both wanting to read more of Roubaud's Echanges de
la Lumiere, but also wistfully satisfied, as though we had spent
the day watching light play over water, until the sun made its slow
movement over the edge of the horizon.
To Build a Cathedral by Theodore Enslin. 2006.
Much in the leisurely manner of Roubaud's explorations of the nature
of light, in his 10-page poem, Enslin ponders the work of Viennese
composer Anton Bruckner. Following Goethe's assertion that "music is
frozen architecture," Enslin envisions Bruckner actually building a
cathedral, rather than writing a piece of music. The epigraph reads,
"What is done and yet undone," thus cluing us in to the chief theme
of Enslin's poem, the open-ended nature of art. Bruckner is an ideal
candidate for this sort of consideration, as he left many pieces
unfinished, to be completed later by students.
Enslin focuses closely on the ways in which art is made not only by
the artist, but also by those who receive the artwork (in other
words, he's working within the realm of reader response theory.)
Later there were those who entered
not quite trusting where they were
the silences of what was left
a need in part fulfilled
Carefully yet tenuously exploring the nature of the creative
process, Enslin examines how time works in the midst of art-making:
"Where did time go unanswered / 'The mornings of genius are
long' / length is no answer to ask." Enslin makes no
affirmative statements here about the nature of art-making, except
that it is never complete: "The cathedral is never finished."
Employing short lines and simple diction, Enslin's poem is
meditative, but never heavy-handed. He is musing, here, not
dictating. "A gap distance which conceives a presence / how it
might cohere in separation / Bruckner could not know
always where to go." If the poem confirms anything, it
confirms the mysteriousness of art-making - and the way in which the
art is never finished until the audience receives it. "[T]he builder
owns no power." While Enslin's poem cannot exactly be considered a
breakthrough in aesthetic theory, he does amply illuminate the
postmodern open-endedness of art-making, the manner in which no one,
neither the artist, nor the audience member, has full control over
the autonomous work of art.
7 Poems by Rae Armantrout. 2005.
This selection of Armantrout's poems places us squarely in territory
that will be familiar to her fans. Considered by some to be a "lyric
language poet," Armantrout does here what she does best: Terse,
quick, always poignant poems that evoke so many of the problems of
living in our contemporary age. Always smart, witty yet emotionally
engaged, Armantrout can manage in to do in a handful of words what
many can't do in entire books.
In these poems, Armantrout makes use of a potpourri of references to
popular culture: the jingle from a bladder control ad, the buzz
words of Fox News ("balanced reporting") and "the camp melodrama /
of Dan Rather." She's up to something quite specific with all this
dabbling in the free-ranging world of television signifiers: The way
in which our minds have grown to echo the ever-changing,
ever-shifting pictures on our screens.
Since we're being escorted
from moment to moment
by what's already
familial
we should be able
to follow this track
back
home
to our previous thought.
The
use of the conditional "should" is what's critical in the above
quotation, as in we should be able to, but we're not. In the
Armantrout's view, we can't ever quite seem to get back to that
previous thought. Instead, we're constantly freelancing on the
razor's edge, unable to make one instant of time connect to the
next. "The opposite of nothingness," she tells us, "is direction."
This small collection of poems might be best described as a sampler,
or maybe an appetizer, designed to whet the appetites of those who
haven't yet read this poet's marvelous work. Contradiction,
confusion, the dislocation of the self - all of Armantrout's themes
are well-represented here. "Everything that stays / once meaning has
cleared out // is true?" She asks, and we know the answer.
No, but we'd like to read a lot more about it.