by Cal Bedient

IT, Dominique Fourcade, tr. Peter Consenstein.
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer,
     ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian

from Lana Turner:A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, No. 2

On the page the Parisian writer Dominique Fourcade is more philosophically hip than any living American poet, more intelligent, odder, spikier, bolder at experimenting with outrageous "utterance." Fourcade's deference in his book-long poem IT to the American poets Michael Palmer and, especially, to Susan Howe is all too generous; Fourcade himself is it, the whiz.

He has flourished like a great, gawky sunflower in the long, rich summer of French philosophy that began at the end of the 1960s. He hasn't gone wanting for the near influence of brilliant native thinkers about words and worlds. But to say so isn't at all to take away from his originality, his entirely individual and rather horrible enthusiasm to collide with the truth. By temperament and gift, Fourcade is, to adapt his own phrase, belligerently vital. He lions his influences; they're hidden, devoured.

Rilke aside, perhaps only a Frenchman could find "the greatest suffering," as Fourcade does, in a question about ultimate reality. In IT, the latest of his books to be translated into English, he says it is "hell to be separated from IT." And what is IT? The book is a stab, a hundred stabs—staccato, relentless—at answering the question.

Nonetheless, to make a beginning: IT is the reality you displace and disfigure whenever you attempt to speak it. IT? "Victim of my voice." IT, moreover, is anything objective, not in the false scientific sense but in the bare sense of being that which, by the time it makes the spirit aware of it, is already (and in a sense unknowably) outside of it. For instance, a feeling, or the shock of sexual difference: "Which IT that of major suffering or the sway of your breasts." Moreover, IT can be sensed only through the mishmash of its divisions. An example: the crude sex-scrawls of gender. In this anything-but-settled book, IL (IT) is sometimes LUI (HE) and sometimes ELLE (SHE). It is also either too close up or too far off, and thus never clear. And, like the traumatizing cloud of force that Freud thought passes through individuals at their origin (an idea Lyotard compellingly elaborated in "the jews"), IT is always a beautiful outrage, "blow-torch rose carved out of the void" (Click-Rose).

In IT, the torment of life is, then, the unutterability of an unspeakably excessive reality. In relation to IT, no one is ever anything more than fluff, scatter-headed; and no one is ever not in relation to IT. Accordingly, to write is "blond ambition." You knew this; you knew this. "Word upon word opens on to the same abyss."

And now that you have a notion of what IT is, what do you know, exactly? "Noth .... "

Coming out of the daffy impulsive tradition initiated in France by Diderot (as does Olivier Cadiot, who appears elsewhere in this issue), Fourcade gives himself to "outrance-utterance," the extremity of articulation-at-the-edge, improvistatory jumps that land, if not on nothing, then to the side of sense. "Opentude," he calls it in Xbo (Sun & Moon Press, 1993); "it is a flightive thing." "Be careful," he warns in IT, with bravado: "I come from the outside and it will be fatal." Again: "And we are shooting in the American night."

In a book written later, Everything Happens (The Post-Apollo Press, 2000)—poem, essay, riff —Fourcade was to advance a happier poetics: he reveled in the notion that writing can be "quicksilver, a revolution every second of every syllable." In this perspective, art dictates a "total conviction (almost to the point of scandal)." Everything Happens is flooded with a fearful joy in the conclusion that, if everything happens (or so announced the Manet motto to which Olivier Cadiot drew Fourcade's attention), there is no inexistence. Happening is immediate, and happening is all. (Emily Dickinson knew this: witness the "rugby" of her poetry, "the surprise in real time"; witness "her spacings her dashes from nowhere ... her dash-ing wings." Back in the American day.) So, then, don't look into your heart, that sick introvert; instead, love the sick extrovert in you, improvise, kick ass, float along.

"Once you've felt it, the expansion, you start to consider the method, without even needing to be fully conscious." By that point, the method is already in force. If a method is necessary at all, it's because "only a method can make everything happening plausible, otherwise it is unfounded; art today stands so little to reason." But in all four of the Fourcade books so far translated into English the method is hardly more than improv and a voluted development, an exfoliating proliferation like those fireworks that keep bam-ing out of their own previous outbursts. A dynamic exhaustion of the subject (at least it feels like exhaustion) is all that's possible. And just for that reason, it is art, today, that stands most to reason. Art's superiority lies in being the game that is on to the game. Only what is wildly juiced can approximate to what is by nature outrageously excessive.

But, despite being similar in method to Everything Happens (which, however, has longer, more excited prose runs), both Click-Rose (Sun and Moon Press, 1996) and IT shudder at the unlikelihood of coming into immediacy.(1) Click-Rose lashes about "on the white of the page without leaving hell." Why? Because Rose (a religious connotation tints it, but ever so slightly) is not on the page. Rather, Rose hisses "in space like a hot iron in water." A variant of IT, Rose is, among other things, or non-things, "Rose of unwriting." As the unstoppable, undifferentiated Real, it is "Rose the world's deafening spout into the sink" ("quite different dishes drying / Crime of the beautiful"). Nonetheless, you write "about" it. "You are writing away oh you are writing away look it's drizzling you are writing away."

"Don't read on I've laid the foundations for a tough poem," Fourcade warns in Click-Rose. IT is tougher still, less often reassuringly visual, and downright cussed in its wordplay. Not definable except as undifferentiated force (but, then, what is force?), "IL" doesn't even get to flaunt its petals. It has no smell, or has every smell. Despite himself, despite his lui, the poet pursues it (IT) in 101 internally disjointed cantos. Courts it, even. "Oh IT please wave back to me," he pleads in an ironically naive moment. Silly man ...

The "method" in IT is effectively described in Click-Rose: "And once again you prompt me to fold the poem out into all its poems one may one must." ("You," here, is "the rose with variable coefficient.") At one extreme, the folds are intelligible (if potholed) prose poems—e.g.,

in the middle of the afternoon i saw IT washing far off in the nude that its body be made of cinder does not surprise me; it's nevertheless this body that attracts every particle suspended in writing ... the more I progress the more blurred it gets, and IT was not by the river as i first believed—it was washing within the wind of light, and it is this same wind woven with light that infinitely reassembles its body. (xxviii)

At the other extreme (as here in canto, xxxvii), the folds are "mad" patches of word-play:

the wowowoman man
the wo
manliness
of the disphony of your breath holds me
in explosive mimosaliness

With respect to both the book's syntactic slippages and its symptomatically "wrong" orthographic wave-lengths and god-awful, grammar-mangling nelogisms, it is of course to be remembered that IT is vastly indifferent to literacy.(2) Language becomes unglued in its curiously absent presence. Fourcade writes like a man dancing and shouting and aching for attention (and he'll say crazy things to get it) in front of a (literally) stone-faced stranger who (isn't it perfectly apparent?) can neither see nor hear and pays no mind and does not mind and has no mind.

Metalinguistic, metasexual, just plain metadifferential, ITS essence, then, lies in not having an essence. As Hegel noted, matter's dispersion and weight are not essence. IT is but the hypothetical source that appearances tag "like a fence." You see the tags, not the fence. You smell only the unreally real roses, "their menses so acidic precocious chromatically audacious abundant even in death" (Click-Rose). Supreme aporia, then, IT is the mother of all problems, cruel, inelegant.

So, opposed in this to Everything Happens, the logic of IT is not the logic of presence. "If there is a necessity to mimesis," Jean-Luc Nancy says, "then it is because logos does not present itself of its own accord." But, in that case, why not conclude that mimesis is double fakery, a fabulation of fabulous appearances behind which "the" logos is disguised? Fourcade accordingly mocks words as "majorettes their thighs their little skirts" (xlii) and disparagingly says that "the word is nuclearistically made of shade." All the same, it is by means of words that he pushes IT away when it is "so close so TOO MUCH," and by means of them that he summons it back again, or at least through the device of the poem.

The poem summons yet defers reality, rather as IT defers it (that is, reality defers itself), and so is free of the riveting limits of logic: "the poem's location fades ceaselessly away within the poem" (liv). Together, words and poem conspire to both excite and repulse reality in their rotor-wash. To begin with, words are by nature "myosostis," forget-me-nots: "Writers / We are amnesiacs" (Xbo). That's too bad, and not. It may be alienating that words can't recall the unspeakable trauma of the cloud of force, but it's obviously a kind of blessing, too, since trauma is trauma. (In more than one sense, "the unspeakable is the suffering" [lx]: one suffers in not being able to speak it, but it is that which makes one suffer at the core.) Moreover, verse adds an emollient of its own. "The act of starting a new line / and the line breaking / the line? remorse?" "Remorse never." Again, the positivity of the poem is that, like IT, it has no "final intention."

This is Fourcade being sanguine. For the most part, he is not one to gild poetry as such; far from it. The heartlessness of the poem is "the intense impossibility of ever being a written piece of life and of death." Moreover, there is a lose-lose circuit in utterance: "my voice suffocates in this word," "my voice suffocates this word." Again, or therefore: "the voice is an endless loop." And so one may think of the poem as "neither hand nor arm only immense sleeves of white to act / in immense mournings." (lxxvii).

"In the cloud-writing of my era the question of writing is asked incessantly." Yes, though there are more pressing issues—e.g., the rampant, male narcissism of religious zealotry and of capital's greed. But for modernity, writing is indeed an inevitable subject of investigation, inseparable from the question of whether any consolidating form can be still be borne. (Fourcade, of course, would answer no.)

In any case, Fourcade is to be admired for treating the relation of language to reality with so cutting and grubbily original a passion, and with such a run and wealth and clout of material, both philosophical and experiential. (Experiential? "This commanding and commanded word. . . has a skin for nylon stockings / scent / not smelled since childhood / of nylon stockings burnt with a cigarette" [xcv]). Barechested cacophony—no one does it better. And, not least, Fourcade is endlessly resourceful. Dashing here, dashing there, he exhausts the field. Varied despite its obsession and because of the obsession's all-encompassing character, IT can salute "the sweet, sweet pitter patter of plovers" and "identify in the only photo of IT found to date, in the background, a bush of bitter blackberries, astringent," and grind down into "the grueling sections of IT / signifying nothing"—all this, even, in the same short poem (xcvii).

By forming a sharp contrast, Fourcade helps to expose the old-timey, marshmallowy sentimentalities of another twentieth-century French poet of the book, Edmond Jabès—such reassurances as "the hand that takes the hand's place the word / indicating where the hand belongs." Heart warmer? Not Fourcade. Anti-anodyne, he's even more "astringent" than playful, which is saying a lot, we are shooting in the American night.

 

JACK SPICER also knocked and knocked at poetry to get the unnamable (i.e., the untotalizable), (i.e., the trans-temporal), to speak up. But he theorized it differently, arguing that it was sending messages through him, but not necessarily to him ("our poems write for each other being full of their own purposes"). Some fans of his work have treated the theory ultra-respectfully, as if it weren't just a restatement of the old idea of inspiration as filtered through Yeats's "Instructors." But, for all Spicer's insistence that he could be forced to wait hours before the messengers would give him the next line, his poetry openly claws at the topic of reception. It's less inspired (the high note) than persistent.

Like Fourcade, Spicer wants to be the maestro of the brink, a poet of contact with the (alas) unknowable reaches of reality; but of course there is no music there, the baton is snatched away by the wind. But, working the edge between the sayable and the unsayable, there is, at least, metaphor. Its appeal is that it complicates two toward infinity and without resorting to suggestion. "A metaphor is something unexplained—like a place in a map that says after this is desert." In a passage of rare beauty (and not just for him, though he repudiated the beautiful), Spicer wrote: A silver wire which reaches from the end of the beautiful as if elsewhere. A metaphor.  Metaphors are for humans  // The wires dance in the wind of the noise our poems make. The noise without an audience. Because poems are written for ... the ghosts of the poems.  We have it second-hand .... // It is not a simple process like a mirror or a radio. They try to give us circuits to see them, to hear them .... // The wires in the rose are beautiful ("A Textbook of Poetry"). Published in 1960 in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, these reflections are Fourcadian. More broadly, Spicer and Fourcade share the ground where meaning and nonsense, gender and the undifferentiated, the past and the future, the unbearably unconnected and the all-connected, figures and ghosts, meet like plates in a geological fault.

Spicer calls the poetry of this aporia "metasexual," a term that accommodates Fourcade's dizzy he-she-itness (that apparent mess). For each, the task is to feel, to spy, to summon the inhuman in the human. True, Fourcade is more given to sensualizing what is both dreaded and longed-for ("the word's sweaty back when you touch it at night")—he's French, after all; but he, too, seeks the faceless sun of being (he idolizes Michael Palmer's Sun): I am thirsty for words to devour space I am enthralled with devouring space / I surprised IT shifting apart within the sound of its self-designation.

Enter ghosts. First, figuratively in Fourcade: "IT, in its form, is a revenant." Then all but literally in Spicer—sort of literally. Whereas Fourcade is sometimes willingly entangled in the thick of material reality ("clumsily I incorporate simultaneous calls from everything real"), Spicer feels drawn to the nonappearing atoms of the dead. The only way to live with death is to compromise it and insist on its promotion of life in ghosts. At least the latter enjoy a minimal transcendence in an endless after. Unsexed, they can't die. Secure and terrible in their priority, the great community of the living-dead own the language. In fact, it must be they who "dictate" the poems—though why they should care to do so (and "a lot of the stuff that comes through isn't important") is a question. If you were a ghost would you want to spend your days and nights trying to din into a poet's all-too-chaotic head a "message" that he or she didn't understand? Wouldn't you rather flutter about in flimsies and scare people properly? It's self-flattering, this theory that one has been chosen as a rare conduit of special communications.

But, truth to tell, and not surprisingly, Spicer is undecided as to the exact nature or even category of ghosts. Are they perhaps merely tradition, the sum of past poems? Are they figures for the intangible, trans-temporal, ideal reader? Possibly even alien intelligences ("Martians")? Or just plain old ghosts? Whatever they are, they have escaped the lot of actual people, those creatures of error, forgetfulness, stink, and shame. Or have they? Spicer vacillates; ghosts remember "every cup of blood they have lived"; but, alternatively, they are "India-rubber erasers created to erase their own past." They belong to a putative outside, yet thrive by "broadcasting" poems privately into a poet's head when it's "empty as a radio"—a head for which words, like crude blocks, and the ghosts, weird encoders playing with the blocks, are the only reality.

When Spicer is saturated in his ghost-mythology, his desideratum is "not to be a human being, not to be a soul." (He tries to ignore himself into poetry.) But instead of maximal transcendence, there is, in actual practice, nothing: "the death // Of every poem in every line" ("A Textbook of Poetry"). (Here, again, we are sent on a few decades to Fourcade.)

Spicer writes ("talks" is almost the adequate word) about little else but his theory of ghostly communications, except himself in pale-faced relation to it. Even so, his theory is his most interesting subject (in a way, his only identifiable subject), and "A Textbook of Poetry," even with its unblushingly didactic title and expository little prose paragraphs, is the best of his longish "serial" poems. Most of these last are sorry things.

Much has been made of Spicer's theory of seriality (i.e., "a poem is never to be judged by itself alone"; "a serial poem ... has the book as its unit") and by no one so much as by Spicer, but it is more to be deplored for its encouragement of a cock-and-bull disarray than celebrated for its successes. It usually served Spicer as an excuse to be locally cavalier, even flippant. It means that "you don't cut ... the path will catch up with what strayed off of it" (see The House That Jack Built: the Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan University Press, 1988, pp. 52 ff.) The hidden compass of "the book" will guide the language through (but, again, it's a real question why the messengers would trouble themselves about a book's unity [Yeats's didn't]. Is the spiritual world to be reduced to the type of the struturating poet?). In my judgment, however, Spicer's serial books lack a catcher; the carelessly cut grass lies cast about on the attacked field.

When seriality combines with what Peter Gizzi calls Spicer's "punk" aesthetic (which I'd detail as his slapdash assemblages, his laugh-at-everything MERZ element, and his not always intentional vulgarity of mind as well as tongue), it produces pages and pages of poetry that to me are more irritating than triumphant. Like serial music, Spicer's compositions are counter-effects to the emotional saturation of romantic work; they are acidic toward harmonic totalization, if somewhat dependent on proto-structural tonalization; and certainly it's okay to be thus abrasive. Spicer even adds some charm, if small charm. Still, the romance-negating activity, which dominates in his work, was not really what he was after. (He was no Ashbery.) What he wanted was the fruitful negativity of becoming post-mortal. In not being able to reach it, he scattered the work, somewhat like Fourcade, but he lacked the latter's rambunctious metaphors and linguistic turns, his confidence, concentration, and intelligence, the drive that takes the place of classical composition.

Gizzi suggests that Spicer finally coincides with contemporaneity, ours; but much of Spicer's work strikes me as now about twenty years out of date. (Granted, most contemporary poetry is itself about a hundred years out of date.) I have in mind not the diluted Yeatsian metaphysics, not the half-hearted cult of magic, not the pom pom of the series, but the often straight-out, bloomless language and deliberate lack of difficulty or unusual penetration or breath-stopping sincerity that would go over well at, say, the American Poetry Review. Obviousness limits much of Spicer's work (e.g., "Prometheus was a guy who had his liver eaten out by birds. A bum who rode a black train. Who was curious," etc.), and a punkish quirkiness much of the rest.

Of course, a few of the early poems, which Spicer famously disowned as "one night stands," are very good. They have his signature nonchalance—they are "human in the casual swift gesture, their inspired informality," as 'Annah Sobleman said to me in conversation, and it "takes confidence and laissez-faire to be so relaxed." "Cantata" is a small classic:

Ridiculous
How the space between three violins
Can threaten all our poetry.
We bunch together like Cub
Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream.
Rain threatens. That moment of terror.
Strange how all our beliefs
Disappear.

This is Panic at Hanging Rock twenty years before Peter Weir's great film and ten years before the appearance of the book it was based on. But of course it was right and necessary for Spicer to reach for more. Even that hoot of a poem "Any fool can get into an ocean" ("But it takes a Goddess / To get out of one. / What's true of oceans is also true, of course / Of labyrinths and poems") had to be surpassed. For all its brilliance, so did "For Billy": They will be waiting in the same room for you: / Time with his big jeans / Love with his embarrassed laugh / Cock with his throat cut wearing a bandana. You can process the writing quickly, like e. e. cummings gone straight. With their primer-level vocabulary, the early poems had not yet quite the craft of the "off" note that the adolescent Spicer used to admire when listening to Billy Holliday sing in a bar near his high school (Fairfax, in Hollywood): "there wouldn't be one note which wasn't off, but she'd just exactly know where to go off and where never to go on." Poets, too, he was later to conclude, need to "sing off key ... all poets sort of know that, nowadays" (The House that Jack Built, pp. 140-41). No, Spicer had to get artfully crazier, and he did. In this, he followed his instincts, and if the results usually were not altogether happy, the work was new and prickly and occasionally, in the strong sense of the word, extraordinary.

After "A Textbook of Poetry," Spicer's most remarkable work is the nutty serial poem "A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud." (The two poems are both in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, which easily makes it Spicer's best book.) Unlike most of his serial compositions, "A Fake Novel" doesn't tarnish quickly after an initial ability to interest. But neither, on the other hand, is it altogether persuasive. You couldn't say that the parts are in final form. You couldn't say what that would be, exactly. Fey, nonchalant, seriously unserious, this "Fake Novel" which is not a novel is written with an impudence worthy of Gertrude Stein, and it is both worse and bone-in-the-throat sharper than what she would do. So Rimbaud was born "in the Charlieville [sic] post-office," but not in "the Dead-Letter Office," which was in another part of the building. (Spicer is here recalling his earlier, random play with the post office as metaphor: messengers and forms alike deliver "letters" to poets; poets read their letters aloud in post offices—e.g., at his friend Robert Duncan's house in Berkeley; "how little alone one is in a post office"; the world is divided into "pawnshops and postoffices," and so on.) All the same, a poet's letters are both to and from the dead, and the poet himself is always both alive and dead: Rimbaud is now fifteen and is shooting horses. Since he is now dead, the years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 are unimportant both to his death and our lives. It is as if one planted grass in the post-office. Poetry? "A machine to catch ghosts." "Inside every Rimbaud was a ready-made dead-letter officer."

"What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest? / A ghost." Hence Spicer's excuse to make hay of Rimbaud's life. All the same, if only at a point or two, Rimbaud is magnificently allowed some damage:

     Literature suffered whenever he breathed. Literature could hear his chest moving. Great armies of sign painters came to carry him away.
     Shouts by the bamboo birds woke him up. They built houses on him while he lay dreaming. There was a raft floating by (a black raft, a black raft.)
     When Rimbaud was sixteen he never dreamed of Africa.

As for the plentiful silliness of the poem, I confess to a weakness for a little of it, especially when it's macabre: The watch rats (they were really called wharf rats but Rimbaud called them wharf rats) ran along the Meuse River. They explained. The river ran to an ocean that ran to a number of oceans / "We get into the cargo," said the wharf rats, "and then we get out to sea. We make journeys and it is history. Our ages are 6, 17, 24, and 75." / What they meant was that all this time Rimbaud was being born a little wharf rat was crawling from his skull, into his skull. And if most of the affrontive play is forgettably frivolous (e.g., "His arms are attached to his shoulders"), the best of it is carried by and even contributes to the sombreness of Spicer's "vision," his daunting metasexual view of poor forked humanity: Like painting a person’s cock and his heart. Or her cunt. They don't matter. A mobile. A construction. Characteristically, Spicer expresses an awe of and respect for the dead: There was a blank book where the ghosts or the ages of them kept listening. To what the others said. As in the gold in an earring. And a consequent intensity about, if not a reason for, writing: The way he looked at things as if they were the last things to be alive.

To be alive is, in Badiou's word, an "over-existence." Spicer was focused and fixated on simmering down to mere existence, like that of inorganic life, "of which organisms ... are the evanescent modalities" (Badiou, Logics of Worlds). Metasexual? More, meta-élan. But Spicer's approach to ghosthood foiled him, his work had its own élan, which, of course, is why he wrote it.

Both Fourcade (the pre-Everything Happens Fourcade) and Spicer fight the medium they work in, as if trying to make a holy robe out of a parachute that is still slowing their descent into death. And you thought the age was post-metaphysical? Poems with "blued fingernails," that is what these poets specialize in. "The word bites the abyss which is in it / The abyss the word / Which is in it" (Xbo).

 

Notes:
1) Rose-déclic was originally published in 1984, IL in 1994, Tout arrive in 2000.

2) I might add here that, although the original text prompts, it does not always excuse, some especially awkward moments in the translation: I refer not to the obvious, repeated mistake of "lightening" for "lightning ," but to grotesqueries such as "ferociousissme" (for the original "férocissime") and gaucheries such as "when HERs voice expires" ("quand sa voice à L expire") and "they remain femininely calm" (for "elles restent d'un grand calme").

 

About the Author
Cal Bedient is the author of three books of poems, Candy Necklace (1997), The Violence of the Morning (2002), and Days of Unwilling (2008), and of five books of criticism, the latest of which is The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Mobility (2009). He is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and a co-editor of the University of California’s New California Poetry Series and of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.

Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion

Editors: Calvin Bedient, David Lau