WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.640 align:middle line:90% 00:00:02.640 --> 00:00:04.382 align:middle line:90% I thought I'd read-- 00:00:04.382 --> 00:00:07.605 align:middle line:84% I'm going to end by reading a few recent poems. 00:00:07.605 --> 00:00:10.003 align:middle line:90% 00:00:10.003 --> 00:00:12.420 align:middle line:84% Recent in the sense that they were written since that book 00:00:12.420 --> 00:00:14.680 align:middle line:84% that I've been reading from has come out. 00:00:14.680 --> 00:00:18.610 align:middle line:84% But I'd like to stop and read three of the Follain prose 00:00:18.610 --> 00:00:19.110 align:middle line:90% poems. 00:00:19.110 --> 00:00:23.490 align:middle line:90% 00:00:23.490 --> 00:00:25.470 align:middle line:84% One of my reasons for reading them 00:00:25.470 --> 00:00:27.792 align:middle line:84% is simply because I love them so much. 00:00:27.792 --> 00:00:29.250 align:middle line:84% I've worked on them for four years. 00:00:29.250 --> 00:00:31.110 align:middle line:84% Their code translated with a woman 00:00:31.110 --> 00:00:33.390 align:middle line:84% named Mary Feeney, a terrific translator 00:00:33.390 --> 00:00:35.370 align:middle line:84% who deserves at least a half of the credit 00:00:35.370 --> 00:00:36.740 align:middle line:90% for these translations. 00:00:36.740 --> 00:00:40.440 align:middle line:84% So the fact that I'm physically here reading them 00:00:40.440 --> 00:00:45.980 align:middle line:84% while she's in Paris-- that shouldn't obscure 00:00:45.980 --> 00:00:47.730 align:middle line:84% any of the credit she deserves for working 00:00:47.730 --> 00:00:49.500 align:middle line:90% on these translations. 00:00:49.500 --> 00:00:52.080 align:middle line:84% And I read them because I love them so enormously. 00:00:52.080 --> 00:00:55.020 align:middle line:84% There are a vast number of good prose poems in French. 00:00:55.020 --> 00:00:57.690 align:middle line:84% It seems like a rather odd animal in English language 00:00:57.690 --> 00:00:59.160 align:middle line:90% or to American poets. 00:00:59.160 --> 00:01:00.900 align:middle line:84% But in French, there's a strong tradition 00:01:00.900 --> 00:01:02.775 align:middle line:84% of them beginning in the middle 19th Century. 00:01:02.775 --> 00:01:05.885 align:middle line:84% And you have Bertrand, Baudelaire, Valerie's written 00:01:05.885 --> 00:01:06.510 align:middle line:90% excellent ones. 00:01:06.510 --> 00:01:08.385 align:middle line:84% Any number of French poets have written them. 00:01:08.385 --> 00:01:11.675 align:middle line:84% And so that for a French poet to begin writing, 00:01:11.675 --> 00:01:13.050 align:middle line:84% prose poems would be a little bit 00:01:13.050 --> 00:01:15.000 align:middle line:84% like what it would be like for a British poet, 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:18.510 align:middle line:84% say, to begin his career by writing a sonnet sequence. 00:01:18.510 --> 00:01:22.420 align:middle line:84% But Follain wrote this from his earliest life as a poet. 00:01:22.420 --> 00:01:24.990 align:middle line:84% He was a poet who published his work 00:01:24.990 --> 00:01:28.410 align:middle line:84% late, who, until very late in his life, never came to Paris. 00:01:28.410 --> 00:01:33.390 align:middle line:84% He worked as a judge and lived most of his life in Normandy. 00:01:33.390 --> 00:01:36.270 align:middle line:84% And very quietly, he wrote these prose poems 00:01:36.270 --> 00:01:38.790 align:middle line:84% which are full of domestic details 00:01:38.790 --> 00:01:42.100 align:middle line:84% from the region in which he grow up. 00:01:42.100 --> 00:01:44.280 align:middle line:84% The other thing that's behind all of them, 00:01:44.280 --> 00:01:46.230 align:middle line:90% Follain was born in 1933. 00:01:46.230 --> 00:01:48.000 align:middle line:90% He died in 1971. 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:52.332 align:middle line:84% Run down by a car on the Plaza La Concorde. 00:01:52.332 --> 00:01:53.790 align:middle line:84% He had lived down through two world 00:01:53.790 --> 00:01:55.890 align:middle line:90% wars fought on French soil. 00:01:55.890 --> 00:01:58.500 align:middle line:84% And he was-- behind all of these poems 00:01:58.500 --> 00:02:03.720 align:middle line:84% is the sense that the war is something that simmers as 00:02:03.720 --> 00:02:07.260 align:middle line:84% if on a back burner of the stove and at irregular 00:02:07.260 --> 00:02:11.220 align:middle line:84% and horrible intervals, war breaks out, 00:02:11.220 --> 00:02:15.600 align:middle line:84% not some long distance away where it becomes 00:02:15.600 --> 00:02:18.600 align:middle line:84% a kind of national embarrassment, but actually 00:02:18.600 --> 00:02:20.160 align:middle line:90% right there in the village. 00:02:20.160 --> 00:02:23.190 align:middle line:84% And within two or three weeks, all the men between about 16 00:02:23.190 --> 00:02:24.540 align:middle line:90% and 50 are gone. 00:02:24.540 --> 00:02:29.220 align:middle line:84% When you have left are servants, women, children, older men, 00:02:29.220 --> 00:02:31.445 align:middle line:84% hired hands who are debilitated in some way. 00:02:31.445 --> 00:02:32.820 align:middle line:84% And you have this sudden suddenly 00:02:32.820 --> 00:02:35.740 align:middle line:84% strange and straightened and odd social circumstance. 00:02:35.740 --> 00:02:38.423 align:middle line:84% This is behind all of these poems. 00:02:38.423 --> 00:02:40.590 align:middle line:84% And I think one of the things that poems are about-- 00:02:40.590 --> 00:02:44.130 align:middle line:84% they seem to me though they're in no explicit way political 00:02:44.130 --> 00:02:45.540 align:middle line:90% to be many of the best-- 00:02:45.540 --> 00:02:47.998 align:middle line:84% to be some of the best writing about the experience of what 00:02:47.998 --> 00:02:50.640 align:middle line:84% it's like for whole society to be at war that I've ever read. 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:52.590 align:middle line:84% That's one reason why they're so often-- 00:02:52.590 --> 00:02:56.543 align:middle line:84% the scenes in Follain's poems are-- 00:02:56.543 --> 00:02:57.960 align:middle line:84% in the prose poems are women going 00:02:57.960 --> 00:03:01.230 align:middle line:84% about domestic details, women surviving through this period. 00:03:01.230 --> 00:03:03.930 align:middle line:84% Because for many of them, the men who went off-- 00:03:03.930 --> 00:03:06.210 align:middle line:84% half of them or more won't be back. 00:03:06.210 --> 00:03:09.150 align:middle line:84% And the whole question of continuity and readjustment 00:03:09.150 --> 00:03:12.120 align:middle line:84% and moving out of the period of war and into a period of peace 00:03:12.120 --> 00:03:13.620 align:middle line:84% is something that is going to fall 00:03:13.620 --> 00:03:15.990 align:middle line:84% by a kind of terrible default into the hands 00:03:15.990 --> 00:03:19.650 align:middle line:84% and into the imaginations of these women. 00:03:19.650 --> 00:03:21.540 align:middle line:84% None of his prose poems have any titles. 00:03:21.540 --> 00:03:25.125 align:middle line:84% So of the three I read, they just begin. 00:03:25.125 --> 00:03:30.640 align:middle line:90% 00:03:30.640 --> 00:03:34.720 align:middle line:84% "Women, dishwashers would be babbling on. 00:03:34.720 --> 00:03:38.380 align:middle line:84% You could hear glasses and balls colliding. 00:03:38.380 --> 00:03:40.120 align:middle line:84% Through unflinching window panes, 00:03:40.120 --> 00:03:43.990 align:middle line:84% you could see a large storehouse containing several wheels. 00:03:43.990 --> 00:03:48.280 align:middle line:84% One from a tricycle, another from a child's stroller. 00:03:48.280 --> 00:03:54.970 align:middle line:84% For so long, with such ceremony, pushed beneath the sycamores. 00:03:54.970 --> 00:03:58.480 align:middle line:90% Sometimes the women would stop. 00:03:58.480 --> 00:04:01.060 align:middle line:84% Holding porcelain plates in their hand, 00:04:01.060 --> 00:04:04.270 align:middle line:84% they'd tilt their heads, squinting a little, 00:04:04.270 --> 00:04:08.530 align:middle line:84% trying to remember a forgotten name or a date. 00:04:08.530 --> 00:04:13.840 align:middle line:84% At their feet, the cat licked milk from a saucer. 00:04:13.840 --> 00:04:18.250 align:middle line:84% The future was nonetheless full of hideous landscapes. 00:04:18.250 --> 00:04:23.500 align:middle line:84% Bloody barracks bitten by the wind, stupor and freight cars 00:04:23.500 --> 00:04:25.720 align:middle line:90% with barred doors. 00:04:25.720 --> 00:04:29.570 align:middle line:84% For the time being, it was unheard of. 00:04:29.570 --> 00:04:32.980 align:middle line:84% There was the neatness of the table settings and shining 00:04:32.980 --> 00:04:36.220 align:middle line:84% kitchen utensils touching the softened 00:04:36.220 --> 00:04:38.050 align:middle line:90% skin of the dishwashers. 00:04:38.050 --> 00:04:42.550 align:middle line:84% These women who, in a couple of hours, would say, 00:04:42.550 --> 00:04:46.540 align:middle line:84% it's getting dark, let's turn the lights on. 00:04:46.540 --> 00:04:48.100 align:middle line:90% You can't see a thing in here." 00:04:48.100 --> 00:04:56.250 align:middle line:90% 00:04:56.250 --> 00:05:02.400 align:middle line:84% In only one of the 94 prose poems, almost all of the prose 00:05:02.400 --> 00:05:04.350 align:middle line:84% poems that Follain published in his lifetime 00:05:04.350 --> 00:05:07.312 align:middle line:84% that we translated, is there anybody who is 00:05:07.312 --> 00:05:08.520 align:middle line:90% in the first person singular. 00:05:08.520 --> 00:05:09.937 align:middle line:84% At one point, there's somebody who 00:05:09.937 --> 00:05:12.478 align:middle line:84% speaks as an I. In the rest of the poems, the presence 00:05:12.478 --> 00:05:14.520 align:middle line:84% of Follain in the poems is a little bit like that 00:05:14.520 --> 00:05:17.430 align:middle line:84% of a narrator who does a voiceover in a film. 00:05:17.430 --> 00:05:20.070 align:middle line:84% You're aware that he's directing your gaze, 00:05:20.070 --> 00:05:21.750 align:middle line:84% you're seeing exactly those things 00:05:21.750 --> 00:05:23.100 align:middle line:90% that Follain wants you to see. 00:05:23.100 --> 00:05:25.170 align:middle line:84% And in that sense, you're in very intimate touch 00:05:25.170 --> 00:05:27.330 align:middle line:90% with his personality. 00:05:27.330 --> 00:05:30.070 align:middle line:84% Or no, not with his personality, with his perceptions, 00:05:30.070 --> 00:05:32.190 align:middle line:84% which may be something even more deeply imprinted. 00:05:32.190 --> 00:05:34.770 align:middle line:84% You have almost no sense of personality. 00:05:34.770 --> 00:05:38.178 align:middle line:84% No sense of the speaker as a character. 00:05:38.178 --> 00:05:39.720 align:middle line:84% One thing that this enables him to do 00:05:39.720 --> 00:05:41.970 align:middle line:84% is to enter the lives of other people with great ease. 00:05:41.970 --> 00:05:44.580 align:middle line:90% 00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:47.275 align:middle line:84% Late in his writing life, he had always 00:05:47.275 --> 00:05:48.900 align:middle line:84% written about his childhood in Normandy 00:05:48.900 --> 00:05:51.420 align:middle line:84% and about objects and people and tools 00:05:51.420 --> 00:05:53.922 align:middle line:84% that he had found that he would find around that region. 00:05:53.922 --> 00:05:56.130 align:middle line:84% Late in his life, he began to write about things that 00:05:56.130 --> 00:05:57.870 align:middle line:90% had happened before his birth. 00:05:57.870 --> 00:06:02.520 align:middle line:84% His ability to imagine what kinds of life 00:06:02.520 --> 00:06:07.560 align:middle line:84% had been lived around a bowl that had been in a kitchen 00:06:07.560 --> 00:06:09.630 align:middle line:84% for 40 years-- what kinds of continuity, 00:06:09.630 --> 00:06:12.787 align:middle line:84% what kinds of survival would surround that. 00:06:12.787 --> 00:06:14.370 align:middle line:84% The kind of thing implied a little bit 00:06:14.370 --> 00:06:16.243 align:middle line:84% by that last prose poem made it possible 00:06:16.243 --> 00:06:17.910 align:middle line:84% for him to move further and further back 00:06:17.910 --> 00:06:20.610 align:middle line:84% in time so that he was talking about things which he couldn't 00:06:20.610 --> 00:06:23.370 align:middle line:84% himself have remembered which he might have heard from a mother 00:06:23.370 --> 00:06:24.900 align:middle line:90% or grandmother. 00:06:24.900 --> 00:06:29.777 align:middle line:84% So that in this poem, also another feature of his ability 00:06:29.777 --> 00:06:31.360 align:middle line:84% to imagine himself being other people, 00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:35.250 align:middle line:84% which I think comes from his unwillingness 00:06:35.250 --> 00:06:37.230 align:middle line:84% to impose his own personality on the poems 00:06:37.230 --> 00:06:39.060 align:middle line:84% is that he finds it easy to be people 00:06:39.060 --> 00:06:41.365 align:middle line:84% who are quite different from what he is in life. 00:06:41.365 --> 00:06:43.740 align:middle line:84% In many of his poems, the principal characters are women. 00:06:43.740 --> 00:06:45.330 align:middle line:84% And their interior and psychic lives 00:06:45.330 --> 00:06:48.660 align:middle line:90% are explored fairly confidently. 00:06:48.660 --> 00:06:50.675 align:middle line:84% He seems to understand what a gardener's life is 00:06:50.675 --> 00:06:52.800 align:middle line:84% like when he's standing in a garden, moving a rake. 00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:54.810 align:middle line:90% Things of this kind. 00:06:54.810 --> 00:06:59.220 align:middle line:84% This particular prose poem begins in 1880. 00:06:59.220 --> 00:07:04.650 align:middle line:84% About 23 years before Follain's birth. 00:07:04.650 --> 00:07:10.110 align:middle line:84% "In 1880, here counts a lot in the impression women make. 00:07:10.110 --> 00:07:12.750 align:middle line:90% It can add to their attraction. 00:07:12.750 --> 00:07:15.690 align:middle line:84% In the morning, through a half opened window, 00:07:15.690 --> 00:07:18.480 align:middle line:84% you see those long falls of hair-- 00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:24.540 align:middle line:84% black, Auburn, brown, red, blonde, that make the creature 00:07:24.540 --> 00:07:27.570 align:middle line:90% look like some enchanted animal. 00:07:27.570 --> 00:07:30.690 align:middle line:84% The hair spills all the way down to the loins 00:07:30.690 --> 00:07:32.760 align:middle line:84% which, according to the preacher, 00:07:32.760 --> 00:07:36.600 align:middle line:84% God fathoms as easily as the heart. 00:07:36.600 --> 00:07:40.410 align:middle line:84% Straight haired women envy naturally curly hair. 00:07:40.410 --> 00:07:43.260 align:middle line:84% They talk of it as if it were money. 00:07:43.260 --> 00:07:48.090 align:middle line:84% Oh, what thick wavy hair she's got, they say. 00:07:48.090 --> 00:07:50.190 align:middle line:84% Raising his head from time to time 00:07:50.190 --> 00:07:53.610 align:middle line:84% to see the morning sky glint or darken, 00:07:53.610 --> 00:07:56.400 align:middle line:90% the gardener tends his beds. 00:07:56.400 --> 00:08:00.060 align:middle line:84% His rake grasps along with the noise a comb makes, 00:08:00.060 --> 00:08:02.490 align:middle line:84% full of static in the morning with the frizz 00:08:02.490 --> 00:08:05.370 align:middle line:90% tufts coming back to life. 00:08:05.370 --> 00:08:08.490 align:middle line:84% The hair is arranged in front of a bevel dresser mirror 00:08:08.490 --> 00:08:12.340 align:middle line:84% as the smell of lilacs floats through the window. 00:08:12.340 --> 00:08:15.720 align:middle line:84% It takes concentration to get the hairpins right. 00:08:15.720 --> 00:08:18.540 align:middle line:84% There are days when strict buns refuse 00:08:18.540 --> 00:08:22.950 align:middle line:84% to be built up after you've unwoven the long braids made 00:08:22.950 --> 00:08:24.150 align:middle line:90% for hours of sleep." 00:08:24.150 --> 00:08:29.790 align:middle line:90% 00:08:29.790 --> 00:08:32.130 align:middle line:84% One other that I love because in some ways, 00:08:32.130 --> 00:08:33.360 align:middle line:90% it's not typical of Follain. 00:08:33.360 --> 00:08:34.690 align:middle line:90% It's a little story. 00:08:34.690 --> 00:08:37.770 align:middle line:84% And so often, his prose poems are 00:08:37.770 --> 00:08:40.919 align:middle line:90% really meditations on objects. 00:08:40.919 --> 00:08:43.007 align:middle line:84% But this is a very strange little story. 00:08:43.007 --> 00:08:45.090 align:middle line:84% It starts with a couple walking through the woods. 00:08:45.090 --> 00:08:48.980 align:middle line:90% 00:08:48.980 --> 00:08:54.230 align:middle line:84% "We're lost, the husband says to his wife and her flowered hat. 00:08:54.230 --> 00:08:56.930 align:middle line:84% They no longer know which way to go. 00:08:56.930 --> 00:09:00.890 align:middle line:84% The night builds up, birds fall silent. 00:09:00.890 --> 00:09:03.200 align:middle line:90% They make a wild guess. 00:09:03.200 --> 00:09:04.580 align:middle line:90% A clearing turns up. 00:09:04.580 --> 00:09:06.560 align:middle line:84% A peasant woman there shows them the right way. 00:09:06.560 --> 00:09:07.550 align:middle line:90% They're saved! 00:09:07.550 --> 00:09:09.650 align:middle line:84% The countryside is full of life again. 00:09:09.650 --> 00:09:12.560 align:middle line:90% They meet cows and calm mares. 00:09:12.560 --> 00:09:15.290 align:middle line:84% Let's hurry up, one of them says. 00:09:15.290 --> 00:09:16.850 align:middle line:90% Time's flying. 00:09:16.850 --> 00:09:19.640 align:middle line:90% The other replies, I know. 00:09:19.640 --> 00:09:21.410 align:middle line:90% I know. 00:09:21.410 --> 00:09:24.470 align:middle line:84% They come to houses at the edge of town. 00:09:24.470 --> 00:09:28.040 align:middle line:84% The windows are full of Haggard people saying nothing. 00:09:28.040 --> 00:09:32.180 align:middle line:84% For the couple, this is a new kind of fear. 00:09:32.180 --> 00:09:35.570 align:middle line:84% They blanch and quicken their pace. 00:09:35.570 --> 00:09:37.880 align:middle line:84% So goes the story of their life." 00:09:37.880 --> 00:09:46.320 align:middle line:90% 00:09:46.320 --> 00:09:49.130 align:middle line:84% Well, he's a very strange and marvelous poet. 00:09:49.130 --> 00:09:53.728 align:middle line:84% And I would-- and I recommend to anybody 00:09:53.728 --> 00:09:56.270 align:middle line:84% who's interested by what he's doing not only his prose poems, 00:09:56.270 --> 00:09:57.938 align:middle line:90% but his first poems as well. 00:09:57.938 --> 00:09:59.480 align:middle line:84% They have been beautifully translated 00:09:59.480 --> 00:10:03.380 align:middle line:84% by WS Merwin in a book that's available from Athenaeum called 00:10:03.380 --> 00:10:05.180 align:middle line:90% Transparencies of the World. 00:10:05.180 --> 00:10:07.500 align:middle line:84% And anybody who is interested by Follain 00:10:07.500 --> 00:10:10.830 align:middle line:84% should run down anybody who's in your way 00:10:10.830 --> 00:10:12.830 align:middle line:84% to the library or bookstore and get a hold of it 00:10:12.830 --> 00:10:15.590 align:middle line:84% because it's a spectacularly beautiful book full of things. 00:10:15.590 --> 00:10:17.382 align:middle line:84% The kind of book you can read over and over 00:10:17.382 --> 00:10:20.260 align:middle line:84% and over again for years with great love and pleasure. 00:10:20.260 --> 00:10:22.000 align:middle line:90%