An observation of Brodsky's about the
faceted subjectivities and the loss of a centralized subject
in so much modernism, from the time of Eliot
on forward, and not only in anglophone culture,
certainly, is that it runs so much against the grain of what
is purported to be modernism, which
would be the modernism of anti-romantic reaction,
a modernism of the cleansed poem, the poem cleansed
of ornamentation and with a linearity,
of a sort of Bauhaus logical cant.
The poem stripped down, the poem as a machine, as William Carlos
Williams once spoke of it, borrowing from imagery
of Le Corbusier, the house as a machine, a very
unattractive idea, indeed.
And the poem as a machine is also not an attractive idea.
A machine made with words, is what Williams called it.
I think Williams was just trying to be modern.
But certain sort of ferocious constructivists
have actually tried to go there, to make the poem
as a machine made of words.
The problems with that are obvious.
I want to put together a couple of unlikely people,
starting with Aimé Césaire and Fernando Pessoa,
just in a kind of sketchy fashion.
Aimé Césaire, a poet born about a century ago,
wrote extremely influential essays and became aligned with
those intellectuals who were trying to take back
their culture from the colonial forces of both the English
and the French, and, in their own ways, the Americans,
peripherally.
He was, of course, a poet of extraordinary influence.
But what is most interesting is certainly,
from one point of view, is how--
and this is exemplified by many poets in Latin America
and elsewhere--
he took the vanguardism of the new Europe, which
naturally, being a surrealist, was also
sympathetic to anti-colonial liberation movements
and radical political movements in the new world,
but also in central Europe, and elsewhere.
And took the rhetoric of the surrealists and, in a sense,
pidginized it.
He colonized the language, so to speak, of the colonizer,
by means of these vanguardist practices that'd
been established.
He made it his own.
So what he established was not simply a provincial surrealism,
but, in fact, a mode of Black rhetorical speech and protest,
with a tremendous power of subversion.
So he deconstructed voice, and, in a funny way,
just as Fernando Pessoa was to do, resurrected it again.
So Césaire's European surrealism is creolized.
And he ends up with a mix of Europe, Caribbean, Whitman,
jazz, and such things as Yoruba praise song from Africa, all
in a particular mix.
In a sense, he can be said to reverse Mallarmé's sense
of the job of the poet, which is picked up by Eliot and repeated
in "The Wasteland," to purify the language of the tribe.
In a sense, Césaire's glory becomes to pidginize
the language of the tribe, to corrupt the language
of the mother tongue, to make it inclusive and impure
and various, in both its means and its goals.
He's inscribing a kind of rift in the master
tongue and its grammar, by means of a multiplication
both of forms and of voices within the work,
to create a language of subversion and resistance.
Naturally, some of this had its beginnings
among the vanguardist movements themselves
and some of the modernists.
And Césaire and his heirs never failed to pay homage to that.
On the contrary, heirs such as Kamau Brathwaite--
are any of you familiar with Kamau's work?
He really inherits that extraordinary insurgency.
Kamau himself was born on Barbados.
And has carried it out to even more formal--
an extreme form of radical notation, let's say.
And also, like many of the other Caribbean folks
and the intellectually of vast learning
has him writing, oh, political writing and so on.
We have NourbeSe Philip.
We have now a generation of women poets
and prose writers also coming out of the Caribbean.
And taking things such as the discoveries of the Harlem
Renaissance turning them to their own uses.
And then in turn, through people like Nathaniel Mackey,
the African-American poet, returning them
in a different form to the United States.
So we get our jazz back and our Whitman back through them.
And they in turn influence not only African-American practice
but other practices through that, so
a very, very interesting cycling or circularity or circulation
of the songs that is to me exemplified
in Cesaire's work, which is a kind
of echo chamber of accents.
His French-- we won't be reading him French.
But the translations of Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith
do very much get the fact of the [INAUDIBLE]
of the French he's working with.
Let me read you one or two things here.
I pulled these out not out of a collective
but-- well they're in that collective.
But I just pulled them out of Pierre Joris and Jerry
Rothenberg's great anthology of 20th century poetry that
focuses on innovative modernism and innovative evangelism
around the world.
This is called "Ex-Voto for a Shipwreck" by Cesaire.
"Hele Hele the King is a great king.
That his majesty deign to look up my anus
to see if it contains diamonds.
Let his majesty deign to explore my mouth
to see how many carats it contains.
Laugh tom-tom.
I carry the King's litter.
I roll out the King's rug.
I am the King's rug.
I carry scrofula for the King.
I am the King's parasol.
Laugh, laugh, tom-toms of the kraals,
tom-toms of mines that laugh up their shafts.
Sacred tom toms laughing about your rat and hyena teeth right
of the missionaries' faces.
Tom-toms in the forest, tom-toms in the desert.
Weep, tom-tom.
Weep, tom-tom, burned down to the impetuous silence
of our shoreless tears and roll, roll softly
no longer than a speck of coal.
The pure carbon duration of our endless major pangs.
Roll, roll heavy speechless deliriums.
Russet lions without manes.
Tom-toms which would protect my three souls, my brain,
my heart, my liver.
Hard tom-toms which very loudly uphold my star.
Wind dwelling over the blasted rock of my Black head.
And you brother tom-tom, for whom sometimes all day long I
keep a word now hot now cool in my mouth,
like the little-known taste of vengeance.
Tom-toms of the Kalaari.
Tom-toms of Good Hope that cut the cake with their threats.
O, tom-tom of Zululand.
Tom-tom of Chaka.
Tom-tom, tom-tom.
King, our mountains are mares in heat
caught in the full convulsion of bad blood.
King, our planes, our rivers are vexed
by the supplies of future factions drifting
in from the sea and your caravels.
King, our stones are lamps burning in the hope widowed
from its dragon.
King, our trees are the unfolded shade taken by a flame
to big for our hearts, too weak for a dungeon.
Laugh, laugh then tom-toms of Kaffraria,
like the scorpion's beautiful question
mark drawn in pollen on the canvas of the sky
and of our brains at midnight, like the quiver
of a sea reptile charmed by the anticipation, anticipation
of bad weather of a little upside-down laugh of the sea
in in the sunken ship's gorgeous portholes."
You can certainly hear praise song in that.
But most importantly, it is that sense,
in a metaphorical way, of what pidgin was meant to do,
which was to create a language of mobility,
a nomadic language that would speak
beyond national boundaries, and that would be improvised,
and that would be in its own way both an international language
and a secret language.
The language not understandable in the centers of power.
I'll just read a tiny bit from a "Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land," which was maybe
his most influential work.
"Islands, scars of the water.
Islands, evidence of wounds.
Islands, crumbs.
Islands unformed.
Islands, cheap paper shredded upon the water.
Islands, stumps skewered side by side
on a flaming sort of the sun.
Mulish reason, you will not stop me from casting on the waters
at the mercy of the currents of my thirst.
Your form, deformed islands.
Your end, my defiance."
Let's see.
There's a word that's used in cultural theory
about that is Calibanizing and cannibalizing.
Turning the language back as Caliban does.
The language of the master back in a storm of productive fury
and critique.
From an anglophone writer of the time.
Naturally, he was francophone.
I just want to quote this little bit of Kamau Brathwaite
from a book of his called X/Self.
This came before--
Kamau has now launched himself out
into the wild forests of composition
on the computer with the infinite possibilities now
of different type faces and juju magic of the electronics.
But he was edging toward that in a book
like X/Self, where there's echoing,
there's multi-phonics and the jazz sense of that.
His final volume of a trilogy he did at that time.
And it celebrates mixed origins.
Oddly enough he was a poet who was early on
is influenced by Elliott and by Pound.
But at the same time ideologically
overtones Elliott in particular, which
is his personal horror of ugliness and impure blood
and so on.
Though his poetry is not horrified by it.
But Elliot himself is.
By mixing European, and Amerindian,
and African, and Maroon sources.
So here is the "Young Caliban howling
for his tongue" in Kamau Brathwaite's words in X/Self.
"The new man is nubile and has made his choice
as priest, or politician, police, or poet, choir boy,
or cocksman.
Da Vinci was the last of the genies,
and he knew it, though we didn't seem to believe in it then.
Now the word belongs to Machiavelli and Philip
II of Spain and to that calculating Calvin.
Is them that working all night long
in the high light executive suites
on all the national security commissions and all
the full plenary sessions.
Is then what was ripe what is wrote in the paper.
Is then the master gunners in the sweating three-piece
suits."
A constellation, I guess, of voices.
And Kamau himself is from Barbados [INAUDIBLE]
remember may have lived since 1933, a decade before I was,
exactly.
The figure of Fernando Pessoa, who some of you
undoubtedly will know, in odd juxtaposition, somewhat roughly
contemporary actually with Colonel Cesaire,
Portuguese poet who worked in a welter of projections
of voices.
He created what are called heteronyms:
figures, fictitious poets, who were real--
Ricardo Reyes, Álvaro de Campos.
Let me read a little passage I wrote about him just to--
that's the easiest for me.
"There's a future of negativity whom
I must at least mention in relation
to the questions of concern here.
And that is the great Portuguese poet Fernando
Pessoa, who was born in 1888 and died of drink in 1935.
Under the assumption that he is still little known here,
certainly much less than he is throughout Europe
and the Portuguese speaking world,
I'll summarize a few details just
to gesture toward his work.
My main guides are a little text on Pessoa
by the novelist Antonio Tabucchi.
And Richard Zenith's very informative introduction
to his volume of excellent translations
entitled Fernando Pessoa and Company.
I see that you have Richard Zenith's doing
the selective prose over there.
Yeah.
There's a companion volume of selected poetry.
"Pessoa spent his life constructing
a labyrinth of selves and non-selves
and placing them in conversation and argument
with one another and one another's work.
These he called heteronyms.
And they must be distinguished from the familiar personae
of modernism such Pound's "Mauberley",
Rilke's "Malte Laurids Brigge", H.D.'s "Helen",
Valéry's "Monsieur Teste", Eliot's "Prufrock".
By the way Pessoa spent his life constructing their groans,
replacing himself with them and erasing his traces
through them.
By the end we seem to be witnessing an elaborate shadow
puppet play where the puppeteer has vanished
or become a shadow of himself.
As Zenith states, no one took the game as far
as Pessoa, who gave up his own life
to confer quasi real substance on the trinity of co-poets
he designated as heteronyms.
Giving each a personal biography, psychology,
politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique.
Alberto Cairo, considered the master by the other two,
was an ingenuous unlettered man who lived in the country
and had no profession.
Ricardo Reyes was a doctor and classicist who wrote odes
in the style of Horace.
Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer,
started out as an exuberant futurist with a Walt
Whitman-esque voice.
But over time, he came to sound more
like a mopey existentialist.
As Zenith notes, the supreme fiction was Pessoa's orthonymic
creation, the poet known as Fernando Pessoa,
not to be confused with Fernando Pessoa,
if indeed there can be said to have been a Fernando Pessoa,
since none other than Álvaro de Campos denies that he, Pessoa,
ever existed.
Not just a labyrinth of discourse,
but one with mirrored walls and a hydra-headed creature hidden
deep within.
Or perhaps the labyrinth is simply empty.
Here's a poem, a nihilistic parody of a symbolist voyage
imaginaire by the very same Álvaro de Campos,
bisexual dandy and aesthete."
"Pack your bags for nowhere at all."
Before I read it, I should also add that these creatures--
Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reyes,
and so on-- as they left Pessoa behind,
started writing vast correspondence among
themselves, often with critical opinions about each other,
but also about this creature Fernando Pessoa, if, in fact,
as they posited, he did or did not exist.
So it's a world almost of the kind of solitary nut job,
in a certain way.
Fernando Pessoa lived a somewhat solitary life in Lisbon,
and who ended up by throwing everything
he had written into a trunk that it's still taking them
years and years to try to peel apart and construct
a collected works out of.
Seemed to be two or three steps away
from a kind of actual psychosis, an actual living
outside of the psyche and of the class of [INAUDIBLE] artist.
This is Álvaro de Campos.
"Pack your bags for nowhere at all.
Set sail for the ubiquitous negation of everything with
a panoply of flags on make-believe ships--
those miniature, multicolored ships from childhood.
Pack your bags for the grand departure.
And don't forget, along with your brushes and clippers,
the polychrome distance of what can't be had.
Pack your bags once and for all.
Who are you here, where you socially and uselessly exist,
and the more usefully the more uselessly?
The more truly the more falsely?
Who are you here?
Set sail even without bags for your own diverse self.
What does the inhabited world have to do with you?"
The answer to the poem's final question
is, of course, everything.
There's a poem-- hope I put a thing here--
by the actual nonexistent Fernando Pessoa.
Here it is.
I'll read two of them here.
This one is called "I'm sorry I don't respond."
"I'm sorry I don't respond, but it isn't, after all,
my fault that I don't correspond to the other you loved in me.
Each of us is many persons.
To me, I'm who I think I am, but others see me differently
and are equally mistaken.
Don't dream me into someone else,
but leave me alone in peace.
If I don't want to find myself, should I want others to
find me?"
He had a number of really pathetically abbreviated,
almost, love affairs.
I think he kissed a woman once or twice.
And they would draw these things out
into meetings in a cafe over periods of time
and eventually, in a sort of Kafka-like fashion,
Pessoa would always confess that he
was afraid that he had too much company
as it was going on in his room, and that he
couldn't carry on this affair with a living person.
This is one called "Autopsychography."
"The poet is a faker who's so good at his act,
he even fakes the pain of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words will feel in what he wrote
neither of the pains he has, but just the one they don't.
And so around its track this thing
called the heart winds, a little clockwork train
to entertain our minds."
But what's interesting about it and what's
poignant about it, of course, is that Pessoa deconstructs
that particular romantic self that Wordsworth, among others,
works particularly hard to construct,
the self of a new integrated consciousness,
takes it apart as one among many poetic fictions.
And yet, the final irony is that he believes so deeply
in these creatures who are projected out of it, much more
deeply than in Pessoa himself, that a kind
of poignant authenticity is reinstated
as these creatures begin to echo back and forth
and talk to one another.
As Álvaro de Campos sends a poem to [INAUDIBLE] itself.
And in the midst of this irony, irony kind
of disappears and something else appears in its place
that's not post-modern at all.
Oh, hell.
I'm just getting started.
I'm turning into Fidel Castro here.
Well, we're supposed to go to 5 o'clock.
Let me outline -- can't be helped --
Does the library closes at 5:00 PM?
I don't think it does.
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
We can always [INAUDIBLE].
Because we're all still hanging in here.
OK, well, we can go a little further then.
I don't want to oppress people.
Another odd juxtaposition I was interested in making along
with, I realize, a couple of hours
of notes on my own collaborations with poets
and painters is an interesting thing
I've been thinking about recently.
Which, of course, is I don't know how many of you may be
familiar with the work of Edmond Jabés,
the great post-Holocaust writer born in Egypt.
As Nasser began to expel the Jews from Egypt after the Suez
Crisis, he ended up living through a complex series
of events in France.
The day after he arrived in France, in Paris,
there's an extraordinary turn in his life.
Edmond and his wife, Arlette Jabés,
both came from the highest Egyptian Jewish society.
He was from a banking family.
Arlette was a princess going back hundreds of years.
She lived in a palace.
She once told me, you know, if Edmond and I had not
been exiled from Egypt, I'd just be
still out there playing golf.
Anyway, they arrived in Paris in what was it, 1957 or something
like that, and the day they arrived,
Edmond went out for a walk, and he saw a graffiti on a wall--
Paris is the home of graffiti, but this was not
a very good one--
which said "Jews go home."
And it said it in English.
And so he said, "What a strange world this is.
I just left home, and now it's telling me to go home,
and what home would that be?"
And besides which, it's not even in French, it's in English.
Why is it in English on this wall in Paris?
So Jabes realized that the only home of maybe the Jew,
the wandering Jew, the exilic Jew, the diasporic Jew,
was the book.
It was the only place where he existed,
and he thought perhaps the only place where poets exist,
or in Fernando Pessoa's case, cease to exist.
And he began to write, I don't know what you would call it,
an allegory of the Holocaust called "The Book of Questions."
He would write this as he commuted
to his work on scraps of paper that he
would put in his pockets, and write throughout the day
as he tried to pretend he was a man who could actually
earn a living.
But he was not good at that at all.
But kind people took him on in jobs, like film [INAUDIBLE]
and stuff like that.
And one person had him work in an art gallery.
He worked there for 18 months and didn't sell a painting.
And he told the guy, "You have to fire me."
And the guy said, "I won't fire you."
And Edmond says, "I have to quit because I've never
sold a painting."
Anyway, he would get home at night and Arlette,
his wife, in the days when wives did such things,
would type up the notes into the pages of this book.
And he created this extraordinary theater
of voices--
imaginary rabbis, scraps of poetry,
all sorts of different forms, dialogues among people,
read through a prose narrative.
At the heart of "The Book of Questions"
is a Holocaust tale of Sarah and Yukel,
two Jewish lovers who die.
But it's a tale that's left untold.
It's told at the margins because Jabes,
like many post-Holocaust writers such as Paul Celan and others,
had to deal with the fact of unrepresentability.
That the annihilation of 8 million people in the camps
was something that was unspeakable and untellable,
at least to their minds.
And so he created this extraordinary book
that ended up going book after book after book,
so it was in seven books in all.
This is the first three volumes translated very beautifully
by the poet, the prose writer, Rosmarie Waldrop.
And Rosmarie dedicated a good part of her life
to translating Edmond's work.
And she arrived, in fact, in Paris in 19--
oh, hell.
When was it?
It was in the '70s I guess.
And went to a party with George Tisch,
who now lives in Detroit, in his apartment in Paris.
And there she met--
it was around 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning--
the French poet Claude Royet-Journoud.
And she said to him, "Claude, I have a question to ask you,
which is that I have translated 50 pages of a poet known
in the Americas, a poet and prose writer, Edmond Jabes,
but I don't know where he lives.
I have no credential as a poet or a translator
to approach him."
Rosmarie had not published much work at that point.
And Claude turned to her and said, "Well, that's
very simple.
We will call him up."
So she called up Edmond on the phone, 1 o'clock in the morning
he called her up, and that was the launching of this project.
They met the next day and Jabes realized
that she was impeccable.
And therefore, because of this chance meeting,
we have known about Rosmarie, crazy enough
to translate these books.
And then she spent years finding a publisher.
With much hesitation, Wesleyan published them.
And then they kept wanting not to publish any more of them.
[INAUDIBLE] And now, of course, it's
one of the shining stars of their back list, what they say.
In any case, a theater of voices that exemplifies, for me,
an address to the social crisis of the catastrophes
of the century.
An interesting, wild parallel to that, for me,
is the accumulation of books of Susan Howe.
And I'm thinking of all of her work together.
Both Jabes and Susan Howe deal with, I'm thinking,
things like articulations of [INAUDIBLE] in time but also,
more recent books of hers, including "Pierce-arrow"
and others, deal with disappeared voices.
In the case of Jabes, of course, of the
disappeared Jews and others in accounts.
In Susan's case, the erasure of women's
voices from earlier American history,
but also the marginalizing of certain forms
of poetic textuality.
She's written on Emily Dickinson, where
she talks very eloquently of the destruction of Emily
Dickinson's texts by scholarly normalization.
They both talk about the voices that exist
at the margins of the page.
They both mix in an impossible, pidginizing way,
perhaps, to get back to Cesaire.
All the different genres so that their books
are radically undefinable.
We find a kind of poetic impulse at the heart of it.
It's unquestionably that.
It's unquestionably the mechanisms
of poetry rather than, say, conventional narrative, that
give them the means to create these extraordinary structures
where what is silenced can be represented.
In Susan's case, often what is erased
is left to erase so that you have illegible texts in places.
So the reader has to begin to read a crossed out text that
cannot be read.
So how do you read it?
You read the meaning of illegibility
and you read the meaning of historical erasure.
In any case, it struck me as I was
getting ready to talk about these things, the persons
of the poem, that in fact, these two sets of work
by such vastly different poets--
I mean, Edmond, an Egyptian Jew, Susan Howe,
a mixture of old American WASP culture.
The Howes being a family that goes way back
in American history, classic king, New England
literary culture and a crazy Irish mother
from the Irish theater who's a lover of Samuel Beckett--
an impeccable credential, it seems to me.
In any case, from these vastly different backgrounds
at a certain moment in time that's pretty contemporaneous.
And Susan certainly started working without any knowledge
of what Edmond Jabes was doing.
They created sort of exemplary texts of the impossible, where
there is a central passion and an identifiable author
in the sense that no one else could have written either
of these works.
And yet, it's all a matter of voice.
It's all a matter of a decentered echo chamber
effect or a labyrinth, whatever metaphor you would like to use.
That's about a third of the way, but I can stop there.