I thought I'd read--
I'm going to end by reading a few recent poems.
Recent in the sense that they were written since that book
that I've been reading from has come out.
But I'd like to stop and read three of the Follain prose
poems.
One of my reasons for reading them
is simply because I love them so much.
I've worked on them for four years.
Their code translated with a woman
named Mary Feeney, a terrific translator
who deserves at least a half of the credit
for these translations.
So the fact that I'm physically here reading them
while she's in Paris-- that shouldn't obscure
any of the credit she deserves for working
on these translations.
And I read them because I love them so enormously.
There are a vast number of good prose poems in French.
It seems like a rather odd animal in English language
or to American poets.
But in French, there's a strong tradition
of them beginning in the middle 19th Century.
And you have Bertrand, Baudelaire, Valerie's written
excellent ones.
Any number of French poets have written them.
And so that for a French poet to begin writing,
prose poems would be a little bit
like what it would be like for a British poet,
say, to begin his career by writing a sonnet sequence.
But Follain wrote this from his earliest life as a poet.
He was a poet who published his work
late, who, until very late in his life, never came to Paris.
He worked as a judge and lived most of his life in Normandy.
And very quietly, he wrote these prose poems
which are full of domestic details
from the region in which he grow up.
The other thing that's behind all of them,
Follain was born in 1933.
He died in 1971.
Run down by a car on the Plaza La Concorde.
He had lived down through two world
wars fought on French soil.
And he was-- behind all of these poems
is the sense that the war is something that simmers as
if on a back burner of the stove and at irregular
and horrible intervals, war breaks out,
not some long distance away where it becomes
a kind of national embarrassment, but actually
right there in the village.
And within two or three weeks, all the men between about 16
and 50 are gone.
When you have left are servants, women, children, older men,
hired hands who are debilitated in some way.
And you have this sudden suddenly
strange and straightened and odd social circumstance.
This is behind all of these poems.
And I think one of the things that poems are about--
they seem to me though they're in no explicit way political
to be many of the best--
to be some of the best writing about the experience of what
it's like for whole society to be at war that I've ever read.
That's one reason why they're so often--
the scenes in Follain's poems are--
in the prose poems are women going
about domestic details, women surviving through this period.
Because for many of them, the men who went off--
half of them or more won't be back.
And the whole question of continuity and readjustment
and moving out of the period of war and into a period of peace
is something that is going to fall
by a kind of terrible default into the hands
and into the imaginations of these women.
None of his prose poems have any titles.
So of the three I read, they just begin.
"Women, dishwashers would be babbling on.
You could hear glasses and balls colliding.
Through unflinching window panes,
you could see a large storehouse containing several wheels.
One from a tricycle, another from a child's stroller.
For so long, with such ceremony, pushed beneath the sycamores.
Sometimes the women would stop.
Holding porcelain plates in their hand,
they'd tilt their heads, squinting a little,
trying to remember a forgotten name or a date.
At their feet, the cat licked milk from a saucer.
The future was nonetheless full of hideous landscapes.
Bloody barracks bitten by the wind, stupor and freight cars
with barred doors.
For the time being, it was unheard of.
There was the neatness of the table settings and shining
kitchen utensils touching the softened
skin of the dishwashers.
These women who, in a couple of hours, would say,
it's getting dark, let's turn the lights on.
You can't see a thing in here."
In only one of the 94 prose poems, almost all of the prose
poems that Follain published in his lifetime
that we translated, is there anybody who is
in the first person singular.
At one point, there's somebody who
speaks as an I. In the rest of the poems, the presence
of Follain in the poems is a little bit like that
of a narrator who does a voiceover in a film.
You're aware that he's directing your gaze,
you're seeing exactly those things
that Follain wants you to see.
And in that sense, you're in very intimate touch
with his personality.
Or no, not with his personality, with his perceptions,
which may be something even more deeply imprinted.
You have almost no sense of personality.
No sense of the speaker as a character.
One thing that this enables him to do
is to enter the lives of other people with great ease.
Late in his writing life, he had always
written about his childhood in Normandy
and about objects and people and tools
that he had found that he would find around that region.
Late in his life, he began to write about things that
had happened before his birth.
His ability to imagine what kinds of life
had been lived around a bowl that had been in a kitchen
for 40 years-- what kinds of continuity,
what kinds of survival would surround that.
The kind of thing implied a little bit
by that last prose poem made it possible
for him to move further and further back
in time so that he was talking about things which he couldn't
himself have remembered which he might have heard from a mother
or grandmother.
So that in this poem, also another feature of his ability
to imagine himself being other people,
which I think comes from his unwillingness
to impose his own personality on the poems
is that he finds it easy to be people
who are quite different from what he is in life.
In many of his poems, the principal characters are women.
And their interior and psychic lives
are explored fairly confidently.
He seems to understand what a gardener's life is
like when he's standing in a garden, moving a rake.
Things of this kind.
This particular prose poem begins in 1880.
About 23 years before Follain's birth.
"In 1880, here counts a lot in the impression women make.
It can add to their attraction.
In the morning, through a half opened window,
you see those long falls of hair--
black, Auburn, brown, red, blonde, that make the creature
look like some enchanted animal.
The hair spills all the way down to the loins
which, according to the preacher,
God fathoms as easily as the heart.
Straight haired women envy naturally curly hair.
They talk of it as if it were money.
Oh, what thick wavy hair she's got, they say.
Raising his head from time to time
to see the morning sky glint or darken,
the gardener tends his beds.
His rake grasps along with the noise a comb makes,
full of static in the morning with the frizz
tufts coming back to life.
The hair is arranged in front of a bevel dresser mirror
as the smell of lilacs floats through the window.
It takes concentration to get the hairpins right.
There are days when strict buns refuse
to be built up after you've unwoven the long braids made
for hours of sleep."
One other that I love because in some ways,
it's not typical of Follain.
It's a little story.
And so often, his prose poems are
really meditations on objects.
But this is a very strange little story.
It starts with a couple walking through the woods.
"We're lost, the husband says to his wife and her flowered hat.
They no longer know which way to go.
The night builds up, birds fall silent.
They make a wild guess.
A clearing turns up.
A peasant woman there shows them the right way.
They're saved!
The countryside is full of life again.
They meet cows and calm mares.
Let's hurry up, one of them says.
Time's flying.
The other replies, I know.
I know.
They come to houses at the edge of town.
The windows are full of Haggard people saying nothing.
For the couple, this is a new kind of fear.
They blanch and quicken their pace.
So goes the story of their life."
Well, he's a very strange and marvelous poet.
And I would-- and I recommend to anybody
who's interested by what he's doing not only his prose poems,
but his first poems as well.
They have been beautifully translated
by WS Merwin in a book that's available from Athenaeum called
Transparencies of the World.
And anybody who is interested by Follain
should run down anybody who's in your way
to the library or bookstore and get a hold of it
because it's a spectacularly beautiful book full of things.
The kind of book you can read over and over
and over again for years with great love and pleasure.