Selected by Seth Abramson
National Poetry Month 2009
Letter from the Editors
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Seth Abramson's Poetry Month Pick, April 7, 2009
Lundi rue Christine (Monday in the rue Christine)
by Guillaume Apollinaire (1871-1900),
translated by Donald Revell
The concierge and her mother will let everyone through
If you were a real man you’d come with me tonight
One should be enough to guard the main entrance
While the other guy goes upstairs
*
Three burners lit
The boss lady is tubercular
Afterwards we’ll play backgammon
A bandleader with a bad throat
When you come to Tunis we’ll smoke good hash
*
It practically rhymes
*
Piles of saucers of flowers a calendar
Bip bap bam
I owe 300 francs to the landlady
I’d sooner cut off my dick than pay her anything
*
I leave tonight at 8:27
Six mirrors stare at each other unblinking
I think we’re headed for trouble
Dear Sir
You are a shitface
*
The lady has a nose like a tapeworm
Louise forgot her fur
Me I’ve got no fur but I’m not cold
Consulting a timetable the Dane smokes a cigarette
A black cat crosses the brasserie
*
Those crêpes were exquisite
The water’s running
Black dress black as her fingernails
It’s completely impossible
Here mister
The malachite ring
The ground is covered in sawdust
And so it’s true
The redheaded waitress ran off with a bookseller
*
A journalist I scarcely know
*
Listen Jack what I’m going to tell you is really serious
*
Shipping corporation combine
*
He says to me sir would you like to see my etchings and pictures
And me with only the one small maid
*
After lunch at the Café Luxembourg one time
He introduces me to this really big guy
Who says to me
Listen that would be charming
In Smyrna in Naples in Tunisia
But this is Paris for chrissake where is it
The last time I was in China
It must be eight or nine years ago
Honor depends on timing
The winning hand
Seth Abramson Comments:
Over the past few years, there’s increasingly been discussion of “third-way poetics”—a poetics whose history and phenomenology, if uncovered, would bridge the gap between the experimental and so-called “mainstream” traditions. It’s a notion I’ve been fascinated with myself, and somehow all my investigations into it have led me inexorably back to Apollinaire.
It sometimes seems as though Apollinaire is the trendiest of would-be aesthetic forbearers; so many poets, of so many varying aesthetics, would love to claim him for their own. It’s easy to see why: never has such fundamentally challenging poetry been so joyous and (at least superficially) accessible. Apollinaire’s ability to decontextualize people and objects—while simultaneously acknowledging that people and objects do exist in environments—has had a profound effect on later writers, and certainly on my own writing: from Ed Dorn’s notion of a “public landscape,” to Elliptical Poetry’s belief in “multiple speaking selves,” to the elusive but increasingly popular notion of “implied narrative,” the origin-point of one particular strand of poetics, which may well be the much sought after “third-way poetics,” locates itself in the work of Apollinaire.
My favorite poem by Apollinaire is “Lundi rue Christine” (“Monday in the rue Christine”), a work whose endless juxtapositions and apparent non sequiturs suggest a sort of proto-surrealism—a full seven years before the first literary work historically associated with that movement was published. The poem imagines a single street on a single day, and tests the limits of poetry by attempting to capture all at once the constellation of circumstances and stories native to such an environment. Yet no one person or event is given preference over any other, nor is any context given to or for any single person or event. The consequences, both artistically and semantically, are startling. In the course of the poem’s forty-eight lines, a virtual parade of archetypal figures is introduced, each of which (one assumes) must have some specific and articulable function in the world, a function which might even be synched up with the reader’s knowledge and experience of such figures—if only the poem’s attention would land on any one of them long enough for the reader to do so. Which ultimately seems to be the point; neither Apollinaire nor the poem has any intention of allowing the reader’s consciousness to alight on any one of the poem’s many fragmented scenes. Even the poem’s brief bursts of “poetic language” (“Six mirrors stare at each other unblinking”) seem to function primarily as a commentary on the work of the poem itself. More commonly, words and images float atop a miasma of proximate lives, with each seemingly individuated experience being that of a stranger the poem has no real interest in describing or bringing to life. It’s a poem one can imagine being regarded as offensively bad at the time it was published.
Those who go in for this sort of thing, and I’ll admit I’m one of them, see in Apollinaire an exhilarating attempt to both acknowledge and transcend demotic language; so much of the colloquial city-talk in evidence in the poem would be discernible and even relatable if the reader weren’t so invested in trying to imagine its context. But—importantly—Apollinaire leaves his reader in a free-fall in this respect, midway between the mind’s inherent need to self-contextualize and the requirement, in order to do so, of a semantic unit just slightly longer than any Apollinaire’s artistic vision allows. Ultimately, the street-life of the rue Christine remains foreign at the conclusion of the poem, but not recognizably foreign—not French, for instance—rather born of the sort of strangeness achieved when words are neither seen for/as themselves (i.e., as actual referents) or as belonging to any single individual’s memory, perception, or ideation. Which is not to say the poem isn’t full of internal resonances. In “I think we’re headed for trouble” one hears echoes of the dangers implied earlier by “one should be enough to guard the main entrance”; “landlady” echoes “boss lady”; in the poem’s only rhetorical flourish, “honor depends on timing,” is found the residue of one of the poem’s many images (“Consulting a timetable the Dane smokes a cigarette”). Examples of the poem “speaking to itself” are endless, and to an extent belie the work’s more evident disjunctions.
I think the poem wouldn’t have aged so well, however—and certainly wouldn’t have been as important to me personally as it has been—if it hadn’t also been, while full of strangenesses, also fundamentally human and even darkly humorous (“Dear sir / You are a shitface”). The drug references, the implicit presence of illicit sex, the vulgar language directed by one subject to another both in conversation and in epistolary form (“I owe 300 francs to the landlady / I’d sooner cut off my dick than pay her anything”), the bizarre non sequiturs (“It practically rhymes,” “bip bap bam”), the way the poem captures with maddening precision the archetypal beginning of a conversation (“Listen Jack what I’m going to tell you is very serious”), the middle of one (“He says to me sir would you like to see my etchings and pictures”), and the end (“And so it’s true / The redheaded waitress ran off with a bookseller”), not to mention a raft of comments that could arise at any point in a dialogue (for instance, “I think we’re headed for trouble,” “It’s completely impossible”)—all render the world of the rue Christine a constant surprise and pleasure.
About Seth Abramson:
Seth Abramson is author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, forthcoming 2009) and winner of the 2008 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry . His poems and prose have recently appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Poetry, New American Writing, Conjunctions, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a second-year student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he will begin doctoral studies in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August of 2009.
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