J.R. Carpenter, Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast

  

between the ship and the quay
lies two metres of incompressible ocean 

two metres of light between the edge
of the sea and the horizon

I only recently received a copy of J.R. Carpenter’s Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023), a curiously-bilingual title by the Canadian-expat UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher. Carpenter is the author of a handful of books and chapbooks (such as one from above/ground, a while back), including the recent Measures of Weather (Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There aren’t too many Canadian writers working so purposefully across multiple languages in such a way: Erín Moure [see my review of her latest], Oana Avasilichioaei [see my review of her latest] and Nathanaël, for example, might work different threads of multiple languages through certain of their works, but less a simultaneously-produced mirror text, or counterpoint, a structure that seems closer to the novel L'homme invisible / The Invisible Man (Penumbra Press, 1981) by Franco-Canadian poet and writer Patrice Desbiens. As part of a note at the back of the collection, Carpenter writes: “In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.”

Constructed as a quartet of sequences, of increments and precisions—“La côte incrémentielle / The Incremental Coast,” “La côte technique / The Technical Coast,” “La côte grammaticale / The Grammatical Coast” and “Route de La Recherche / Route of La Recherche”—Carpenter composes her accumulated moments across a great distance; composing a line, a study, around an invisible centre, slowly given shape. Further to her articulations around the weather and attending language, Carpenter discovers the lyric held within such small points, distilled into a lyric of stillness, lines and absolutes. “here I enjoy an excess of precision:,” she writes, “a kind of maniacal exactitude / a descriptive madness [.]”

I leave for another world
as for a coasting voyage 

I make a sketch of the land
commencing with those parts 

which were the least liable
to change in appearance 

I savour the sway of formulas
the reversal of origins 

The ease which brings the anterior coast
back from the subsequent coast

One might think that Canadian poets, albeit but occasionally, sure to love to write about explorers, with examples including Vancouver poet George Bowering’s classic George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), the late Montreal poet Robert Allen’s Magellan’s Clouds: Poems, 1971-1986 (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1987) or Barrie, Ontario poet damian lopes’ poetry-multimedia installation Project X 1497-1999, his work that explored the “discovery, technology and colonialism by using the internet to re-examine Vasco da Gama’s first voyage from Portugal to Africa and South Asia in 1497-99,” although none, one might say as well, in any kind of straightforward way. For Carpenter, the details of her particular explorer are utilized as building blocks into something else, something other; utilizing the structures of language, document and philosophy, blending and repurposing elements to allow for a new line composed down her own articulations of coast, as she offers as part of her note at the end of the collection:

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’ throughout. The détourned philosophy is intermingled with sketches and excerpts from the scientific writing by the French hydrographer Charles François Beautemps-Beaupré, Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying (1823). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She become shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré 1791-1793.

I have retained certain antiquated syntax from these texts. I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, polyvocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.”

This work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.