an air
sentence
animals
in locus immobile
which is used
to batter history
fear
nothing else
Parisian
writer Claude Royet-Journoud’s Four Elemental Bodies (trans. Keith Waldrop; Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2013),
collects a tetralogy of four works, the first three of which appeared
previously as Reversal (Providence
RI: Hellcoal, 1973), The Notion of
Obstacle (Windsor VT: Awede, 1985) and Objects
Contain the Infinite (Windsor VT: Awede, 1995). Collected as a single unit
for the first time, Four Elemental Bodies
is a collection of lyric point-form, poems structured as a series of
sketched-out sequences of stripped language. His is an infinite puzzle of
impossible fragments that come together to form something whole and yet, like a
series of Russian dolls, a single project constructed from a sequence of
smaller units, each of which is made up of a further series of smaller units,
and so on. In English translation, Royet-Journoud is also the author of “The Maternal Drape” or the Restitution (trans.
Charles Bernstein; Windsor VT: Awede, 1985), Theory of Prepositions (trans. Keith Waldrop; Iowa City and Paris:
La Presse, 2006) and The Whole of Poetry is Preposition (trans. Keith Waldrop; Iowa City and Paris: La Presse,
2011), the second two I’ve been fortunate enough to read, and each sparked a series of responses, much of which I am still attempting to process.
a sentence
abandoned
that’s where
they set out from
As the blurb
on the back of the cover highlights, Royet-Journoud “is one of the most
important contemporary French poets whose one-line manifesto: ‘Shall we escape
analogy’ signaled a revolutionary turn away from Surrealism and its lush
imagery.” It’s interesting that the publisher highlights this line that opens
the fifth section of “Reversal” when the entire four-part suite of combined
texts is rich with equally jarring lines, traces of perception and observation,
from “silence is a form” and “repossession of the neutral / when the body is a
sentence yet to come” to “distance is the place” and “behind the image / there is
no further recourse / the inertia of things empties out emotion.” His entire
ouvre, it might seem, is rife with phrases, lines and sentences that might
spark a change in perception, each placed on the page with a terrifyingly
pinpoint accuracy.
silence is a
form
____
air that he
calls imperceptible
no separation
the animal
site
____
verticality
of hunger
mother nearer
____
a fistful of
blue in the corner
____
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