Isabelle Garron, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009), trans. Eléna Rivera

 

I don’t have words
but your gestures
abound 

amid the ads
demands
doors

chasms of each sta
tion the voice—
consistent 

also in the announcement
made about a delay
for 

. train ahead

Described by Cole Swensen in her cover blurb as a “massive work of tantalizing minimalism” is Parisian poet, critic, editor and associate professor Isabelle Garron’s latest work in English translation, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009), translated by Eléna Rivera (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021), following Garron’s collections Corps fut (Flammarion, 2011), Qu’il Faille (Flammarion, 2007) and Face event contre (2002), translated by Sarah Riggs as Face Before Against (Litmus Press, 2008). Produced as an expansive work, the nearly three hundred pages of BODY WAS is a book-length sequence of small moments, gestures and expressions stretched to incredible lengths; stretched not as a way of thinning, but as a way to articulate and pause, each moment fragmented into portions, and where lightning strikes in such slow-motion that every spark appears, if in the briefest sense, self-contained: brilliant, held and heard. “then a shadow / on bodies,” she writes, early on in the collection, “bore / ours in count / er // form naked // in the full / moo // n black [.]” This is an incredible collection of short bursts, a lyric of a single, extended thread or tether, segmented into line and word breaks, offering small points of thought, image and sound. The collection begins with an overheard death, and moves across domestic patter, conversations on the daily immediate, of arrival and being, and someone waiting to be born. “we arrive     .it is night    .you will be born this morning [.]” The fragmented sense of line and lyric, as well as the unexpected placements of punctuation, force the reading to simultaneously suggest a rush, but also a slowness, to catch every element as it stands. Segmented into suites and variations, BODY WAS exists not as an accumulation, but as a singular whole, writing segments that articulate the slippery movement of time itself, both immediate and immediately past-tense. There are elements of this collection that read as a set of improvisations, comparable to works by Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams or Fred Wah, yet composed in a loose narrative structure that would even allow a reader to pick up at any point. As Rivera writes to open her short afterword, “Points in Time: Where the Body Was”:

It takes a certain amount of courage in this age of the internet, where a plethora of words abound, to let the stillness and blank page speak. What I admire in Isabelle Garron’s Body Was is its combination of lyricism and silence, the rhythm of the language and the way that she is able to let events, the overheard and experienced, move in and out of silence, into the body of the page. What remains of experience is stored in the body and what is written is already what was—the moment is gone. Time keeps moving. What was experienced is no longer the present. The experience is carried in the body. The body makes the text.

 

Eléna Rivera, Epic Series

 

She gives deeper joy, consumes more swiftly.

 

 

She eats as though she was starving. Hair
in place. her mother associated all that was
ugly with what was hateful. She hated her
stomach (which “She” do you mean?). She sat
in the corner where we put her, facing a wall.
Your friendship was her sorrow. Pain went
both ways. The stolen, stolen was the measure
of grief. Her house was bombed in half. Had
to run. Had to run. Had to run. In half a
person cannot be. Nor fully be. No fill.
She asked if she could eat more. (Again
which “She” do you mean? Make yourself
clear.) She said yes—sausages, eggs, toast.
Disgust. The Rise was reflected in all these
eyes that stared. Took sides for survival.
The glass is empty and being filled was
never understood. SATIATED. The woman
dressed in tattoos said that word, said there
was nothing like it. She held the girl in her arms.
you can’t white that out. (“Wale; or The Corse”)

I’m intrigued to see Eléna Rivera’s latest, the full-length Epic Series (Shearsman Books, 2020), a collection built out of three sections—“Wale; or The Corse,” “Unknowne Land” and “The Wait: for Homer’s Penelope.” I first encountered Rivera and her work through picking up a second-hand copy of her chapbook Wale; or The Corse (Buffalo NY: Leave Books, 1994) at Montreal’s The Word Bookstore somewhere in the 1990s. As the poem writes: “There is no access when the destruction / is so great.” Upon first encountering the work, I ascribed it as connecting, even unintentionally, with the language writing I was aware of through the Kootenay School of Writing, at that time only peripherally aware of anything that might have been happening in Buffalo, or any other non-Canadian space. Born in Mexico City and raised in Paris, Rivera is the author of numerous poetry titles including Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and The Perforated Map (Shearsman Books, 2011), as well as numerous works in translation (including two above/ground press translations of work by Sandra Moussempès).

Rivera composes three extended suites of poems utilizing words, and language itself, as the building blocks for something greater than itself. Epic Series is a book of unfolding, and accumulated dismantling, structured as a triptych, each section of which appeared previously as self-contained small press publications. The second section of Epic Series, “Unknowne Land,” for example, won the Frances Jaffer Book Award and appeared with Berkeley, California publisher Kelsey Street Press in the spring of 2000, and “The Wait: for Homer’s Penelope,” appeared as a chapbook through Mill Valley, California’s Em Press in 1993. Given the nature of composition and publication, stretched out across years, the three pieces fit together remarkably well, and it is curious to wonder if the pieces were always intended to connect, or if the connections between them only revealed themselves from such a distance of years, or even through the possibility of joining together for this collection. As a whole, Epic Series is certainly epic, a series and sequence covering a vast distance and across a broad canvas. “A landscape can be viewed from any window,” she writes, as part of the second section. Rivera writes her epic through an array of formal considerations, from dense lyric to stretched-out fragments to the prose poem. The notion of the “epic” is even punctuated through her third and final section, writing out “Homer’s Penelope,” providing a voice to the figure of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, traditionally associated with marital fidelity. “Memory can be disputed,” Rivera writes, as part of Penelope’s poem, “bears a distaff. / Marks made in a desperate attempt to find my own.”

How could I ever get past this point? a hammer oscillates.
They were not “wise” so were strung up on photographs?

I could not separate myself from them. My own murder.
The back and forth motion made me nauseous.

I cannot stand apart from my own kind.
I too open like a ring to bleed.

CA RESS
KISS

It becomes clear fairly quickly, through looking not only at this current collection, but throughout Rivera’s published work-to-date, that she is a poet very much engaged with form, and experimentations in and through form, from the classical to the experimental. Given what her writing has accomplished, I’m curious as to why her work isn’t better known than it is; it makes me wonder if the wealth of her work as a translator overshadows her own writing, which would be something quite frustrating, indeed. Both her own writing and her translation exist as two elements of an ongoing engagement and study on form and language. In her piece “The Perforated Map, and Writing the Unknown,” an essay that explores where her considerations of geography, language, culture and form meet, and prompt some of her structural explorations, she writes:

"The body is a field," Robert Creeley wrote. The body is a map. "In America space haunts, not architecture," I wrote in Fugitive. And so I approach what haunts me : Books like Susan Howe's Europe of Trusts, Leslie Scalapino's Way, Inge Christensen’s Alphabet and Michael Palmer's Sun ; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée written in multiple languages, calling on all nine of the muses for a fluid interplay of literature, identity, history, film and biography haunts me : poets like Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker and Arthur Rimbaud haunt me ; Emily Dickinson and H.D. haunt me ; Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”, Virginia Woolf, and many others left unaccounted for, haunt me.

 

Eléna Rivera, Scaffolding

SEPT. 9^TH THE TRANSLATION

“To read what is hidden” the conversation

begins with that, the silence, the cloaked waiting

It must be paid attention to no matter

what—it demands to be first as is its right,

and too much accretion woven around it

will hide instinct’s way if ego’s unwilling

to bond with, to taste the dialogue’s intense

distance—that entering of mind’s divisions,

bringing one tongue forward reading the other’s

silence without unraveling completely,

having a sense of direction a desire

to meet the poem’s density where thickness

clings to a cloaked rendering that doesn’t end

but meets with isolated words: tuff, gorse, edge

Somewhere during the later 1990s, I picked up a second-hand copy of poet and translator Eléna Rivera’s small title Wale; or The Corse (Buffalo NY: Leave Books, 1994) at Montreal’s The Word Bookstore and was immediately struck by the flow of her lyric, and the structure of the book-length poem, and spent years curious about how what she might end up doing next. Given that, I’m very pleased to finally be able to get into her most recent title, Scaffolding (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), a collection of eighty-two sonnets composed as a kind of “day book” project over the space of nearly a year (the dates run from mid-July through to the end of the following April). Composed around the sights, sounds, buildings and figures, both contemporary and historical, of New York City, where Rivera now lives, Scaffolding is well-named, with a collection of sonnets entirely centred around structure. As part of an interview around the book published on the Princeton University Press blog soon after the book appeared, she spoke on the combination of title and her use of the sonnet: “The sonnet form is a kind of ‘scaffolding,’ a structure, for the substance and sounds of the poem, as is the hendecasyllable line. I also like the darker meaning of the word, ‘an elevated platform on which a criminal is executed;’ there was something that felt dangerous about these poems, about what I was doing.” Earlier in the same interview, she wrote:

I’ve always been interested in form, the interplay between form and content, between the inner and the outer. I wanted to experience what it would be like to write discreet poems over time. I had been engaged with writing long poems for a while. I’d work on a piece, playing with different possibilities, until the form would come to me and I knew then that the poem had found its direction (the amount of time I have, and the concerns of the poem, are what dictate the poem’s length). I was interested in the book as form (a love of the epic) and made one-of-a-kind books, and books in hand-letterpress editions (fascinated by the weight of the single lead letter). At first the sonnet seemed the complete opposite of what I had been doing, but really it wasn’t that different, the form got smaller, tighter, and I filled it rather than found it; it shaped the conversation, the music of it. I really became fascinated by the fourteen-line form, what such a compact container could give rise to, and once I committed myself to it I felt compelled to continue.

While some have argued for the limitations of the sonnet, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has argued, as others have, the sonnet’s infinite possibilities and endless mutability, which most likely suggests why the sonnet is still in such use. With the form of the sonnet and the idea of scaffolding, Rivera’s Scaffolding exists as a kind of catch-all, able to hold anything and everything, picking up multiple elements from her knowledge of New York City to compose collage-sonnets tight enough that even a bird might land upon them.

OCT. 29^TH

It’s madness this falling in love with sadness,

that faint sound a song that keeps resurfacing

between thoughts that Icarus carried too far

seen from the river’s edge painting by Bruegel

She’s able to swim with help from a large dog

(over and beyond tale of the falling youth)

I envy the comfort that she takes from him

(falling brusquely into a dream) bathed in a

sunlit world where “the whole pageantry” deepest

when at my desk voluntarily holding

“it” the absent, the falling, the dangerous

just balances at the edge of the tale, of

dangerous dropping places where “knights” “ladies”

plummet and cannot recover from madness—