Poets played a major role in the life of our bookshop, giving regular readings over thirty years. The twentieth century is often referred to as the golden age of poetry in the United States, so it makes sense that many prominent poets of its postwar generation launched their works with us. Though their number is impressive in every sense of the term, it is impossible to recount the three decades of their continued presence in one chapter. Should we include their readings on the basis of personal taste, their individual fame, or the intrinsic literary quality of their works? We finally decided to choose the poets who permanently resided or lived on and off in Paris, in recognition of the importance of our opening pages in that they are dedicated to the Third Wave of expatriate writers coming from the States.
Stephen Spender
One illustrious exception is Stephen Spender, born in Britain but a continental writer at heart, fully engaged in the century’s upheavals. At seventy-nine, he was the oldest poet to read at the Village Voice and a rare survivor of the Lost Generation. Essayist and novelist as well, like a number of British writers of his generation, Stephen Spender lived in Paris in the thirties, contributing to the literary effervescence of this bold literary movement. To my knowledge, he was the last living poet to have presented his work at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in a 1937 joint reading with Ernest Hemingway.*
More than fifty years later, Stephen Spender was at the Village Voice on April 16, 1988, to inaugurate his novel The Temple,1 a fictionalized memoir of three young friends, none other than himself, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. In 1929, freshly out of Oxford (for the first two) and Cambridge (for the latter), they went to Germany to enjoy celebrated free speech and free love, away from Britain’s crippling censorship laws and amidst scenic landscapes of forests, rivers, and lakes, disturbed only by sporadic gunshots in the distance. In 1932, they decided to leave their paradise as increasing waves of hatred and violence made them fear the worst for their adopted country.
When it first came out, The Temple was immediately banned on the grounds of its homosexuality, and it was only after a long slumber in a Texan archive that a young researcher plucked it from oblivion. Those youthful years were so ingrained in Spender’s mind that, working on a newly restored edition in 1988, he was still able to set down all the dialogue and telling details from memory.
As he entered the bookshop, Spender appeared as an imposing, noble figure radiating a full rich life, his solemn expression somewhat softened by a puff of curly white hair. François Xavier Jaujard, prominent French translator and publisher of poetry, introduced him, emphasizing the role of W. H. Auden in Spender’s life and poetry and regretting that Spender was little known in France. “It was a shame,” he told us, “that Spender had not been translated by French poets of his stature, such as Stéphane Mallarmé or Michel Leiris, who had superbly translated T. S. Eliot.”
In the crowded room, Stephen Spender opened his talk by acknowledging friends sitting in the audience, including novelist Mary McCarthy, and then refuting Jaujard’s remark that he had been influenced by W. H. Auden: “If I understood you well, you spoke of some kind of leadership of Auden and of his influence on our Oxford and later Berlin group. It is puzzling to me that one should use the word ‘influence’ to describe our relationship. Auden could teach you, immediately discerning ‘a marvelous line from absolute trash,’ but there is a net difference between teaching and influencing.”
He admitted that coming from a more cultivated milieu, Auden was the most sophisticated of the three, and “being the son of a psychoanalyst, he analyzed each of us, his close friends.” There was another disparity between the two of them in their respective tastes in poetry, as Auden had hated Romanticism, including the poems of Shelley and Keats, two spirits who had nourished Spender since childhood. “In the mid- and late twenties,” he reminded us, “these Romantic poets were the very climax of poetry, whether English, French, or German.”
He insisted that he had published this memoir not just out of a desire to see the novel of his youth come out, but equally because “I felt like writing for them, these friends now dead. Their deaths had created a vacuum which, in turn, set me free.” To him, The Temple was a personal testament to the generation they had once shared through their works.
After his reading, I approached Mary McCarthy, who was wrapped in a fur coat, a bit odd on that mild April afternoon. She was the center of a crowd of admirers eavesdropping on her conversation with Mavis Gallant.
I asked Mary McCarthy if she would consider presenting her fictional works at the Village Voice. She agreed to do this but only in the fall, after her return from the States. She was never to be back in Paris again, sadly passing away in New York in 1989.
The eighties were certainly not a decade of Romantic poetry. Coinciding with innovative theories of deconstruction in vogue at this time, new currents of poetry were developing, known as Language poetry. Soon after the bookshop opened, a couple of French customers came by looking for a collection of “American Language poets.” They were French poets putting together an anthology of this avant-garde movement that called attention to the use of language.
As it turned out, in the spring of 1986, these two French poets—Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud—would present 21+1 Poètes Américains d’aujourd’hui. Among other poets, it featured Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, all of whom would later give individual readings at the Village Voice.
Stephen Spender, April 16, 1998. © Roberta Fineberg
To my great surprise and disappointment, this collection was not bilingual, but only published in French translation, an aberration, given that the music of the original language would be definitively lost in this work. In his defense, Hocquard explained that one could only understand these new American poets in France through translation. He further maintained that “a poem translated into French is a French poem. It must stand on its own without the crutches of the original text. The American poem need not be present, considering that translation is a writing practice of its own, and it was up to the translator to take full responsibility for his text in French.”2
This group of French Language poets was joined by two American poets living in Paris: Joseph Simas, founder of the magazine Moving Letters, dedicated to experimental poetry, and Cole Swensen, who in her own prose and poetry explored exciting ways to invent language. Both of them translated these French poets into English.3
In 1987, a sign of the times was the launching of the first Paris International Poetry Festival at the Place Saint-Sulpice, just around the corner. The Anglophone poets invited to participate in this unprecedented public event were all actively involved in the life and the readings of our bookshop: David Applefield, Pierre Joris, Carol Pratl, Joseph Simas, Cole Swensen, Alice Notley, British poet Douglas Oliver, and American novelist and poet Harry Mathews.
Harry Mathews
As it happens, by the time Harry Mathews gave his first reading at the Village Voice in 1986, he had lived on and off in Paris for more than thirty years. Bilingual and likewise steeped in French literature and culture, he had arrived in the city in 1952, the year his friends Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton were preparing the launch of the Paris Review (1953).
In turn, Mathews founded his own review, Locus Solus, the title of a novel by the French writer Raymond Roussel,4 an irreverent innovator of the language in a surrealist vein who, Mathews said, had enabled him to write fiction “with constraints and sustained intensity coming from the form, the structure of language.”5
His friend, the American poet John Ashbery, another pioneer who experimented with language, also a member of the Paris Review group in the fifties, was back in Paris in 1992 for a retrospective of his poetry and art works at the Pompidou Center. He gave a reading of Flow Chart6 at the Village Voice on June 26, 1992, an event that members of the French intelligentsia from the Cultural Affairs Ministry attended.
Mathews’s own prose and poetry are feats of inventiveness, with words stretched to their infinite possibilities as seen in his cult novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium,7 and his short story “The Dialect of the Tribe,”8 which he discussed at our bookstore on May 13, 1986. Written in the form of a fictitious letter to Georges Perec, French author and close friend of his, this extravagant and comical story recounts the daunting task of translating an invented tribal tongue into English.
Wondering how to make a tribal idiom intelligible in another language, Mathews addresses the question of the writing act: the transformative process at work in translation equally concerns creative writing which, he explains, “is an infinitely arduous translation which every writer has to struggle with.”9 Here is one more acrobatic exercise in language, familiar to Mathews who had translated part of La disparition, Perec’s three-hundred-page experimental novel without the vowel e, an extraordinary challenge deftly met by both the author and his translator. 10 Mathews’ audacious forays into language challenge the reader, but they are also games for the author, who admitted “I write to entertain myself.”11
Not surprisingly, he was the first American writer to be accepted as a member of the Oulipo, the experimental Atelier for Potential Literature that aimed at renewing French poetry through language. Besides Mathews, this exclusive club included Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and the mathematician and poet Jacques Roubaud. They regularly met to invent creative ways of combining new words into sentences and to manipulate language by introducing esoteric terms, puns, mathematical permutations, and “hidden forms,” all tossed together like ingredients in a caldron for Country Cooking, the title of Mathews’s own collection of stories that includes “The Dialect of the Tribe.”
Introducing Harry Mathews’s first reading at the Village Voice, Edmund White mentioned that before embarking for France, his New York friends had recommended he look Mathews up in Paris, “a great artist,” they insisted. Upon his arrival, Edmund went directly to the Pompidou Center to get his address, but “there was no artist listed by that name. ”12 [laughter] This humorous quid pro quo was in line with Mathews’s playful games of mirror and “hide and seek,” characteristic of the Oulipian spirit but also of his own arcane narrative inventions.
Asked by the audience how he would qualify his experience as an experimental writer in France, Mathews replied: “Nobody in France makes a fuss about being a writer,” adding that “readers in this country were used to a bigger range of words. French readers understand what I mean in my writings and support them. In the US, when my first works came out, people couldn’t understand my motives for writing such books.”
First published in the Paris Review in 1962, Harry Mathews remained associated with this literary magazine all his life. In 1973, its headquarters moved from Paris to New York, but maintained an influential presence in France through its editors in the capital. Mathews was one of them from 1989 to 2003, the year of the commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary.
However, with the passing of its founder George Plimpton, the celebration was postponed. In 2006, Philip Gourevitch, Plimpton’s successor and the Paris Review’s new editor-in-chief, chose Paris, the cradle of the review, to organize belated festivities. On March 3, at the Village Voice, he presided over a number of readings of fiction, essays, and poems that highlighted the broad range of literary contents and styles published in the Paris Review over five decades.
The most compelling story we heard that evening involved William Faulkner’s humorous account of his quarrel with Hollywood’s MGM studio that turned into a comedy of errors.13 In fact, it ended with the studio firing Faulkner. Olivia de Havilland, the poignant young Melanie in Gone with the Wind, marvelously read this hilarious and absurdist exchange at cross-purposes. At the age of ninety, still a most impressive and elegant woman, she had lost none of her dramatic talent as she graciously reached out to the audience crowded in the bookshop.
Harry Mathews, October 10, 1994. © C. Deudon
Marilyn Hacker
Paris, elegant gray
godmother, consolation,
heartbroken lullaby,
smell of the metro station,
you won’t abandon me.14
—marilyn hacker
Marilyn Hacker is probably the most Parisian of all the American poets who have read at the Village Voice, not because she has lived in the city since the early 1980s, but in her ceaseless work to capture Paris in all its states: from its bright street corners and hidden back alleys to the fugitive changes of light in the city. Of course, she is not the only poet to use all the possibilities of the language to convey impressions of its classical beauty, its capricious skies and sometimes cruel paradoxes, but she is the poet who always chooses the right word for the subtlest detail of a scene or the nuance of a feeling. Referencing Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag reminds us that “the distinctive genius of poetry is naming.”15
Hacker perceives her daily Parisian surroundings not only through her eyes, but through all her senses, the prism of a particular light or a sudden memory metamorphosing the most ordinary sight into a layered vision, as seen in “White voile in open windows, sudden green / and scarlet window-box geraniums / back-lit in cloud-encouraged clarity / against the century-patinaed gray / is such a gift of the quotidian.”16
She also knows the history of her neighborhood, le Marais, nearly invisible as it is, concealed in its stones and stored in the memory of its people. In her poem “Street Scene V” the quiet evening is suddenly disturbed by the loud popular songs of a group of German tourists in a café under her window, bawdy refrains perhaps heard during the Nazi occupation. Across the street, people are “pulling their curtains,” trying to stifle the sounds and perhaps the painful memories of those in the building who were wrested away and never seen again.*
Marilyn Hacker, April 9, 1997. © C. Deudon
Marilyn’s Paris is a woven texture of surprises and contrasts, of silvered dreams and raw realities, of more nooks and crannies to be discovered. Two streets away from her “tourist-infested neighborhood,” the poet stumbles upon a hidden country scene, frozen in the past: “Behind a shop front, two gray women were/turning clay on wheels that softly whined / . . . / on a clothesline / two work shirts flapped above a cobbled yard . . . ,” and just around the corner, “the Cyber Bar,/and, in the rue du Temple, Monoprix.”17
Another theme of predilection from her rich repertoire is friendship, particularly among women. In fact, many of her poems are snapshots of intimate moments, of longing and mind-wandering through memories of love and separations written down in the privacy of her Parisian home: “I have a reading lamp and an open book. / Last glass of wine, last morsel of Saint André / . . . / What will I say to you when I write to you?/ I’m home, I’ve cleaned the kitchen, taken/charge of my solitude / . . . What do I tell myself . . . ? / Life’s not forever, love is precarious. / Wherever I live, let me come home to you / . . . where you/meet me and walk with me to the river.”18
One day, I received a note from Mavis Gallant19 with a faded copy of one of Marilyn’s poems. It read: “This is the poem I told you about, which I find haunting . . . It seems to me a fine example of deep emotion transfigured by art.” Sent by fax, what is left of it is one miserable blank page of now-invisible words erased by time. I do not remember which poem Mavis was referring to, but such a tribute from a writer regularly compared to Chekhov was a lofty acknowledgement of Marilyn’s art.
Speaking of her poetry at a reading on April 9, 1987, Marilyn admitted that “metric poetry was not part of our generation,” yet her seemingly free-flowing verse is an elaborate architecture of words arranged according to the “strict constraints of the classical poetic forms,”20 as Edmund White pointed out in his introduction to one of her readings. He then praised her as “a formidable poet, combining in her craft Elizabethan wordplay, the classical precision of the sonnet, the villanelle, or the rondo, together with contemporary narratives and slang.”
A prolific and award-winning writer, Marilyn Hacker delves into a wide range of themes and realms, but Paris remains the vital source of her inspiration and the distinctive core of many of her poems. At a number of her talks at the bookshop, someone in the audience would invariably thank her for making them rediscover a Paris they did not see anymore.
Margo Berdeshevsky is another poet inhabited by her adopted city. She finds her distinct poetic voice in her immediate surroundings as she experiments with different forms of writing, mixing words and collages of photos, graffiti, and artworks that complement and enhance the original imagery of her metaphors. On January 10, 2008, at the launch of her recent collection of poems But a Passage in Wilderness,21 Berdeshevsky was introduced by Marilyn Hacker who described her insights as “a perception of existence at its most tragic, yet as a chain of blossoming possibilities.”
In the poem “Whom Beggars Call,” the poet summons up a typical Parisian scene. On a Christmas Eve, browsing through her local market overflowing with rich, abundant food, she spots a homeless man crouched against the wall of a church, “drowning in plastic, and bottles, and bread, and blood. I watch my coins, how they slip his loose claw. It’s because I have purposely eluded making a skin contact . . .”
On her way home, haunted by the man, “his lips, his water-eyes,” her hand and his claw “skin to skin,” she realizes the boundaries of her own life: “Your tall and educated walls—Break them . . . Your all that is the wound, unhealed.” Remembering the words of Saint Augustine, “a heart that understands cuts like rust in the bones,”22 her experience of a seemingly ordinary encounter becomes an existential revelation on a holy day.
Marie Ponsot happened to be in Paris the weekend of our Poetry Festival at the Village Voice in 1993 and accepted our invitation to read. Now in the city where she had lived for many years, she returned to places once important to her and fittingly chose to read “For My Old Self, at Notre-Dame de Paris: fluctuat nec mergitur”23 a poem suffused with nostalgic emotions from memories of her former Paris life.
Years later, on the fateful night of April 15, 2019, awestruck by the sudden apparition on my computer screen of flames darting out of the cathedral towers, her poem came back to me. Wanting to read it right then, I went to get it down from my shelves. Indeed, the poet’s description of “the dark madonna cut from a knot of wood” was truly heartbreaking. At that very minute, the centuries-old Madonna was being consumed into ashes.
Incredulous and longing to hold on to what had been, I recited the poem out loud in an effort to drown out any and all reporter voices and take solace in her invocation: “I call to thank her, loud above / the joy she raised me for, this softfall. Sweet time.”
Perhaps hoping to keep this memory of the “sweet time” of her Paris years, Ponsot subtitled her poem “fluctuat nec mergitur”(“tossed by the waves, but does not sink”). Poets are said to be visionaries.
Kathleen Spivack, another unconditional lover of Paris, had sat in the same classroom as Sylvia Plath in the poetry workshops of their renowned mentor, poet Robert Lowell, in the late 1950s. In her compelling memoir With Robert Lowell and His Circle,24 Spivack recalls her formative years as a young poet and her friendship with some of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century, including Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, of course, but also Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Stanley Kunitz, among others.
The daughter of Viennese parents who had left their country in the early ’40s for the United States, Kathleen remains emotionally attached to Europe and particularly to France where she has lived part-time over the years as a teacher of American literature and creative writing at a number of universities.
A poet of impressionistic scenes of seemingly simple domestic life, as in The Beds We Lie In and Moments of Past Happiness, she is also highly sensitive to the history of Europe, its wars, and their aftermath. From A History of Yearning, presented at the Village Voice on March 15, 2011, Kathleen read her triptych of “Photographs Already Fading.”25
In the first poem, “Grandcamp. February 2003,” she hauntingly depicts the young soldiers mowed down on the Normandy beaches in World War II: “we breathed the sharp air, the night prickled with stars / and the young men froze where they fell . . .”
Her second poem “Paris. March 2003, Sur le pont, le pont de la déportation” revives the Parisian (and worldwide) demonstrations against the imminent threat of a second war in Iraq. As the protesters slowly progress through city streets and squares, they prod passersby to remember the victims of the Nazi occupation and the Vichy laws: “We filed with the Americans and French . . . / past the Jewish Memorial to the Deportees, / the bridges, the skeletons, the polished plaques / to fallen heroes . . .”
And the poet’s triptych ends with “Anthem for Doomed Youth exhibit,”26 her sublime tribute to the sacrificed generation of British poets, some of whom survived the trenches, including Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, and others who fell on the battlefields of the First World War: “The scholar-warriors made more luminous by time . . .”
In other sections of this anthology, Kathleen reminds us that alongside its horrors, the twentieth century gave rise to the prospect of transcendence through its immense artists. Among these masters, she summons up Gustav Klimt, the painter of Vienna Before History and its “lost world” of “jeweled and doe-eyed women,” Edward Hopper’s “blazing streak of bold yellow,” and Claude Monet’s “pastel cloudy scrim of swirling pink.” These visual references are shafts of light amidst darkness that, in the poet’s words, open “endless vestibules of possibility.”
C. K. Williams. June 20, 1995. © C. Deudon
C. K. Williams
For C. K. Williams, imbued with the animus of Walt Whitman, poetry cannot exist without the consciousness of the spiritual world. A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator of international stature, Williams was a central figure of the American writing community in Paris and a great favorite at the Village Voice. During one of his book launches, Charlie, as he was known to his friends, took a long look at the public and good-humoredly compared his readings at our bookstore to his bar mitzvah: “Everyone knows me and I know everyone,” he quipped.27 It was hardly a surprise, as for almost thirty years he and his French wife Catherine had lived on and off in Paris, and it stood to reason that his French and American friends rarely missed one of his readings with us.
Between 1991 and 2010 he launched eight of his poetry collections at the Village Voice. Among them are Flesh and Blood,28 Repair,29 The Singing,30 and Wait. He likewise introduced a memoir, Misgivings, My Mother, My Father, Myself,31 and his essay On Whitman.32 Outstanding poets such as Carolyn Kizer, Adam Zagajewski, Jeffrey Greene, and Michael Blumenthal, as well as famed novelist Diane Johnson, prefaced his readings. At the launch of The Singing on November 6, 2003, Blumenthal recalled a memorable moment in his youth when a friend pressed into his hands a book by C. K. Williams, urging him to read it. “Immediately, I knew I had stumbled upon someone like no one else . . . I sensed in this poet an incredible intelligence, a ravenous hunger for the world. I also sensed someone terribly attentive to his own torments, sufferings and pains and his own longings. It’s no accident,” he added, “that C. K. Williams shows up on the shelves between Whitman and the other Williams,33 as I call him, because he combines so many of their virtues, provoking through creative, anxiety-propelled intelligence the beautiful grounded in the human.”
A charismatic presence, standing tall but slightly bent over the microphone as he read his poems, Charlie liked to open the evening with a witty remark, loosening up that initially suspended, tense moment and hoping to forge complicity with his audience. After a short pause, he would start reciting his work, slowly articulating the long lines of free verse that characterize the incantatory rhythm of his poetry, bringing on a meditative mood. Then, suddenly, he would crack a joke, breaking the spell and making everyone laugh. I was always amazed by the contrast between this discreet and pensive person and the poet who staged each of his readings as a live performance.
Most of his poems begin with a down-to-earth event, a factual detail or personal memory which he calls an “incident”: “My notebooks are filled with them,” he said, “incidents I have witnessed, experienced, or were reported to me. [Yet] in order to become a poem, an incident has to impose itself on me; it has to go around in my head for a while and be ruminated, before coming to maturity and ready to come down onto the page.”34
Williams spent many years in France, but wrote relatively few poems about Paris or Normandy where he later moved. One poem, though, called “Marina,”35 about Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, takes place in Clamart where she lived, on the southwestern edge of Paris. After the death of her small child from hunger in the aftermath of the Soviet revolution, she went into exile, first wandering through Europe to finally settle down in this suburb where she lived for twenty years, isolated and impoverished, unpublished and snubbed, even by the community of the Russian diaspora. She returned home on the eve of World War II with two children to face the execution of her husband and the disappearance of her elder daughter and sister in Stalinist camps. Ostracized in her own country and driven “beyond a person’s endurance,”36 Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941 in the desolate town of Yelabuga, in deep Russian country.
However, Marina Tsvetaeva’s tragic end, emblematic of millions of lives crushed by Stalin’s iron fist, is not the focus of Williams’s poem, only its starting point. When he presented his collection Wait in the fall of 2010, his last reading at the Village Voice, he talked at length about his writing process: “Starting from a factual or incidental element, a poem is to evolve toward a higher point or moral argument,”37 an objective he shared with Tsvetaeva in her essay “Art in the Light of Conscience.”38 Both poets arrive at the same conclusion: the artist is responsible for his own creation, implying a higher consciousness of the world and the necessity for the artist to elevate art to the spiritual realm. Resonating also with Whitman’s embrace of the world, Williams adheres to Tsvetaeva’s higher calling for art which is or ought to be “a kind of physical world / of the spiritual . . . a spiritual world / of the physical . . . almost flesh.”39
The first question from the audience that evening concerned the central notion of ethics in his poetry: “Does this mean, in your view, that there cannot be true poetry without ‘the moral argument,’ as you call it? And can political or social poems change the world?”
Williams: “Not all of my poems are concerned with the question of morality. I don’t write all the time about my political and social convictions. At times I treat them in a poem, but not always, and if not, they go underground into the unconscious of the verses. And I will add that most of the great art works speak about the world of their time, but not necessarily in moral ways.
However, these times are darker than what I’ve known: the war in Iraq, fundamentalists in power controlling things, and the idea that a Yale student might graduate while not believing in evolution. All that makes me feel an urgency to express all the things that are articulating our world. I even wondered at one point if I should write political essays or political verses that might have more impact. But no, political poems do not change the world, but that doesn’t make it less urgent to write them, to write the experience of our time, and whether or not they have an impact is incidental.”
Q: “As you read your poems, not only do you go through them, but you also put your listeners through them. Does the act of reading your poems before an audience bring on a relief of emotion?”
Williams: “There is a moral relief when I know how the poem is going to be resolved, and, especially, when it is finished. I noticed that emotion is greater on my first public reading of a poem. There are even poems like ‘Marina’ when, at my first public reading, my voice broke down and tears came to my eyes, very embarrassing. But then, when I happen to read them again in public, that emotion is not there anymore. It has been evacuated, and now placed in a context, the poem has become an object, and the emotional impact lies in the language.”
Q: “Some of the poems you read are quite dark and leave the reader bereft of hope. ‘At my age,’ you said, ‘all I’m doing is confirming my sadness,’ but in that sea of darkness, is there a skylight?”
Williams: “Darkness is to yield to authority, its public acquiescence. Skylight is when people communicate directly with others. And writing could be seen as a skylight. Writing a poem is an affirmation of a voice—the poet’s unique voice.”
Williams closed his reading with the poem “The Foundation,”40 a tribute to the poets who had been his life’s mental companions, and who, like him, viewed poetry as an art above “philosophizing and theories”: “I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats / we’re leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack, / but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne . . .” What made poetry? “It was the singing, the choiring, the cadence / the lull of the vowels, the chromatic consonant clatter . . .”
At an earlier event at the bookshop in 1987, in her introduction to Williams’s presentation of Flesh and Blood, Carolyn Kizer had sensed the true essence of his poetry: “It can wring you out like a rag and exhilarate you at the same time, but then, that’s among the oldest descriptions of true art that we have.”41
In December 2015, just after his passing, a tribute to C. K. Williams was organized by the poet Jeffrey Greene* at the American University of Paris where he taught literature. A community of writers from the Village Voice—Ellen Hinsey, Denis Hirson, Nancy Huston, Jeffrey Greene, Jake Lamar, and I—evoked memories of “Charlie” and read his poems aloud to a large gathering of his grieving Parisian friends.
Ellen Hinsey and French poet Claire Malroux, November 21, 2002. © Mark Carlson.
Ellen Hinsey
Just back from a conference on contemporary American poetry, C. K. Williams expressed his dismay at the stack of poetry he had read for the occasion in these terms: “unpardonably trivial, unambitious and patently disposable.” “Those poems,” he told us, “lacked a sense of history, vision of imagination, and moral reflection,” but “in stark contrast, these are the very qualities that distinguish the poetry of Ellen Hinsey, one of the handful of poets today who are always worth studying.”
Introducing her at the launch of her second collection of poetry, The White Fire of Time,42 written after a family tragedy, Williams went on to describe her as a “a poet who has found the way to be both truthful and original, writing poems absorbing, enlightening, and historically pertinent, as well as philosophically urgent and precise.” His words captured the essence of her volume of poems that invoked spiritual forces at the time “when courage is lost in the wild dark hours, when chaos swirls, and face-to-face with the abyss, you near the white fire of time.”43
Ellen Hinsey arrived in Paris from Boston in 1987 at the height of the Third Wave of American expatriates, “a time,” she explained, “coinciding with momentous changes that would overtake Eastern Europe.” During the Village Voice years, she wrote three volumes of poetry that she launched at our bookshop: Cities of Memory,44 The White Fire of Time, and Update on the Descent.45
Likewise, Ellen introduced the Village Voice readings of such prestigious poets as Adrienne Rich and the Irish poet Harry Clifton, as we’ve seen earlier. Thanks to her, we had the immense privilege of discovering and hearing Tomas Venclova,46 a prominent Lithuanian poet and iconic literary figure of twentieth-century Mitteleuropa. Ellen was also one the few women writers with Carol Pratl47 who, defying a roster of bureaucratic rules, successfully set up the earlier mentioned First International Women Writers Conference in Paris, featuring major women poets, novelists, and essayists from France, the United States, and, miraculously, the Soviet Union.
On June 6, 1996, Ellen Hinsey launched Cities of Memory, a collection of poems reflecting her fascination with Europe—the caldron of ideas, art invention, and . . . of repeated wars. Over time, Central Europe would become one of her primary topics of reflection and writing. In his introduction that evening, Denis Hirson saw the source of “her quest for other places, other times and other people in her personal exile, an ocean away from her native country, but one chosen as a way of investigating the world around her and her own self in it.”48 Written after witnessing firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall, and eager to grasp the meaning of the transformation of post-1989 Germany into the epicenter of Europe in its multiple lights and shadows, Hinsey embarked on a personal odyssey, “moving through time and history, preferably by train, the most potent space for contemplation”:49 “Here, do we dream of the intricate nature / of seasons, or of loss . . .”50
Cities of Memory opens with the poem “March 26, 1827,” the date of Beethoven’s death that closed a period of enlightenment, setting a tonality of twilight throughout the collection. Even Paris, La Ville Lumière, is portrayed at sunset through an arc of light descending over the Seine River to disappear behind the horizon, where “only shadows lie.”51 Each city’s memory is a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the continent, the vessel of dreams of empires and disasters of wars, the mastermind of humanistic ideals and Faustian pacts, but also the birthplace of universal thinkers and once-lauded artists forced into exile or even decimated.
Her poem “Lebensraum” sounds the death knell of Europe with the failure of the Polish cavalry to curb Hitler’s military expansionism in 1939. Nothing could resist the surge of dark forces that befell Sigmund Freud, the symbol of enlightened Europe. In the poem “The Stairwell, Berggasse 19, Vienna,” the grand staircase that used to lead the way up to the master’s consulting room and his patients striving for self-knowledge, now takes him down to his inexorable end: “Compelled to exodus / . . . down [Freud] went, following / the balustrade’s ebony path . . .” foreshadowing the soon-to-come enforced disappearance of Europe’s once-celebrated intellectual and artistic avant-garde.
Ellen presented her third collection of poetry, Update on the Descent, on June 4, 2009. In his introduction, the poet Jeffrey Greene pointed out that after The White Fire of Time, this new collection “marked the author’s return to the physical world, this time to descend into the dark abysses of the abuse and violation of human lives.” This was a daunting question that continued to haunt her, and she wanted to find out how it was possible for people to carry out violence against those they had once been intimate with, now imagined to be an enemy or “other.” “Who is that other?” and “How does one construct this idea of the other?” were fundamental interrogations she sought to investigate.
Attending witness sessions at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, she heard eyewitness accounts of torture and executions. Among these was a witness testimony that became a poem titled “Testimony on What is Important.” The poem addresses a scene where a victim knew the torturer who was carrying out the acts of violence. While he was doing this, the victim said he had asked him: “Do you know what you are doing?” The court interrupted him with the order: “Stick to the facts.” The witness reiterated the same question that was met with the same silence. Addressing the court, he stood firm: “This, I have to say, is what is important.”52
“I was overwhelmed by the fact that in the middle of it all, someone would have the courage to challenge the conscience of the man carrying out the act of torture,” Ellen recalled with emotion in her voice. “I felt this ethical question was immensely moving.”53
This poignant testimony also reveals the importance of words to name facts or acts, a concern Hinsey raised in a poem titled “Interdiction,” in which she addresses the burning question of language in our contemporary world: “It is said that we can no longer use the old words.”54 To cite an example, Hinsey recalled how in the late 1990s, when she was teaching in a Paris suburb, and after a wave of protests and riots, she asked her students to reflect on the word “democracy.” “They categorically refused,” she said.
It was the first time this had happened to her, and she was very unsettled. She then asked the students to explain their decision. They retorted that it was “banal.” Such a reaction made her think: Was it democracy that was “banal,” or this big word? Had “the old words become taboos?” Yet “. . . there are things, in the trammeled, / The ruined, the old words, which must still be said . . .”55
As a conclusion to her reading, Ellen mentioned that often authors write books in tribute to other authors: “While writing Update on the Descent, the French philosopher Simone Weil has been very much on my mind,” she said, “but there is another inspiring presence in my work: the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote against the darkness of her century, and whose language endures as a source of elevated inspiration.”
William S. Merwin and Odile, May 27, 2002. © Village Voice Bookshop archive
W. S. Merwin
“Poetry is always about hearing, and if you hear it,
you feel it.
Poetry is rooted in oral language, not the language of the written page.”
—merwin, Village Voice reading, October 10, 2004.
The first time I heard of William S. Merwin was through a friend, the French poet and novelist Michèle Laforest56 who knew him from Lacan, a small medieval village perched on a haut plateau overlooking the valley of la Garonne in the southwest of France. They were neighbors who became closer through their devotion to poetry. Although life had scattered them to the four corners of the earth—Merwin to Hawaii* and Laforest to Africa in 2000—now in Paris Michèle heard from him, as he was back in their beloved village and spending summers in his former house there. She urged me to invite “this extraordinary person and poet” to read at the Village Voice.
So, I immediately ordered The Vixen,57 his anthology of poetry, and a book of prose, The Lost Upland, Stories of Southwest France,58 with an epigraph in French that read “Là bas il n’y a que des pierres. C’est le causse perdu.”59 I was enthralled by his languag that conjured up a land of austere beauty and mystery that concealed in its bosom the memory of prehistoric times through its rock paintings, as well as traces of the troubadours who, in the twelfth century, had traveled from village to village singing their ballads. I was also won over by his attention to animals, in fact, his genuine love for them.
The author of more than forty volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, awarded numerous national and international prestigious prizes (including two Pulitzer Prizes), William S. Merwin gave his first reading at the Village Voice on May 27, 2002. He presented his recent collection of poems The Pupil60 and The Mays of Ventadorn,61 an evocation of the history and culture of twelfth-century Languedoc through the life and poetry of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. A jewel of a book.
Merwin was impressive, but also gentle and reserved. Most striking was the enigmatic smile on his face, beautifully framed by a mane of wavy white hair.
In his introduction, the American poet Jeffrey Greene pointed out some of the major themes explored in his works: “the dual motifs of light and darkness, of presence and absence and of the poet’s continued concern with nature and animals.” In reference to the great poetry movement of the 1950s in the States, he also wondered if writers such as Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, or Carolyn Kizer had influenced Merwin in any way. Merwin replied that he didn’t think that there was any influence there. “If there was one,” he continued, “it came from Spanish and South American Surrealism, and, above all, Neruda.”
In fact, perhaps more decisive for Merwin was his encounter with Ezra Pound. During his Princeton years, he had been fortunate enough to meet him as a student. He happened to be in Washington, D.C., and realized that the world-famous poet was interned in nearby Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, a center for psychiatric treatment. Merwin called on him there and, to his surprise, was told that Pound “was willing to see him.” Unaware of the exact circumstances of the poet’s confinement,62 he admitted that “I was not too keen to scratch the surface of what I knew.”
Once inside, “Pound welcomed me with an open mouth smile,” but “the distance between us was beyond calculation.”63 During the encounter, the older man recalled many names of people and things unfamiliar to the eighteen-year-old Merwin, but it was also the seasoned poet who told him that “the troubadours’ Provençal language (Occitan or langue d’oc) was the real source of poetry.” “He revered them,” Merwin confided, “they were his ancestral figures.” It is true that Pound’s long narrative Cantos resonates with Dante’s Divine Comedy, imbued with the Occitan poetry of the troubadours.
Merwin admitted that Pound did all the talking, but the latter’s next two sentences turned out to be extremely valuable to him: “Translating forces you to say in English something that did not happen in English, and it forces you to go where you would not have gone otherwise. Moreover, by translating, you’re learning very important things about your own language.”64
“If he loved to give advice, it was obvious that poetry was more important than his own ego,” our author added. Whether influenced by Pound or not, the young man would eventually devote a large part of his writing life to translation. One case in point: Merwin’s Selected Translations,65 in which poems from more than twenty different languages fill up eight pages of its table of contents.
His second Village Voice reading on June 4, 2003, was entirely dedicated to this literary art and introduced by the poet and art critic Serge Fauchereau. Merwin recited from Transparence of the World, his translations of poems by another French poet, Jean Follain, a friend from his Paris days, who was tragically killed in an accident in 1971. They both shared a fascination for the intriguing power of memory.
“What is translation?” Merwin asked his audience. “We are concerned here with the art of the impossible. What we want is the translation to be like the original, but translation is not and cannot be the original. This is a wonderful situation to be faced with because it implies great freedom.” Sensing that his notion of freedom in this process was causing some uneasiness among his listeners, he added with a bit of humor, “I have to be careful here, for I see quite a few eminent French and Anglophone translators in this audience, including Carolyn Kizer and the Irish poet John Montague.”
He brought up as an example his desire to translate the poems of the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam. To do so, he approached Clarence Brown, the distinguished professor of Russian language and literature at Princeton. The latter had managed to get the poems of Mandelstam out of the country, which Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda had learned by heart and secretly transcribed. At the time of the Cold War, smuggling out those transcriptions meant risking not only the second disappearance of these poems, but his own disappearance. “This being said, Brown agreed to collaborate with me on the one condition that I would not try to learn Russian. This was not a problem as for me—the whole matter of translation is to conjure up that sound and vitality of the voice of the original poem and not just relay its meaning.”66
Renowned for his translations in the States, Merwin was seen as an accomplished and award-winning poet, but unheard of in France at the turn of the twenty-first century. His first book translated and published in France was The Vixen, under the title La renarde, a long narrative poem grounded in the Causse, his home in Southwest France.
He launched this anthology at the Village Voice on October 7, 2004, accompanied by his French translator and friend Luc de Goustine,67 his French publisher Fanlac, and the American poet Michael Taylor68 who also lived in that region and was to introduce him. Taylor began by describing Merwin “as a great poet writing at a particularly rich time for American poetry. He is a man of that generation that emerged from Ezra Pound’s cloth, the way Russian literature had emerged from Gogol’s The Overcoat. As for his translator, Luc de Goustine, he has risen to this challenge by not only managing to convey Merwin’s style, but also carrying over the actual texture of his poetry. A mark of achievement,” he concluded.
The poet opened his talk by recalling that moment when, in the 1960s, he had discovered the Upland or Causse, which no one knew existed. He felt, he told us, as if he had discovered the other side of the moon: “Then I could walk for a whole day over the stony / ridges . . . and out onto open / hillsides overlooking valleys adrift in the distance” (“Walker”). Lured by the beauty of the place, the restless traveler settled on an old farm that had stood “empty for half a lifetime and been abandoned” (“Old Sound”), but he felt an immediate and “irrational attachment” to it.
I had the privilege of visiting with William and Paula Merwin in Lacan in the early spring of 2003 and again in June 2009 with mutual friends Steven Barclay and his partner Garth. The house that welcomed us bore little resemblance to the half-ruin “shrouded in brambles,” with its wall half-fallen and “the gaping holes in the floorboards, piles of rubble and bird droppings.” The near-wreck had been restored in keeping the spirit of the place and was now a welcoming old farmhouse of limestone, its walls covered with climbing honeysuckle vines.
Amidst woods and fields, it was flanked on one side by a garden of irises and roses William tended with great care, and, on the other, by two traditional old stone barns with slightly curved roofs of faded red tiles, common in this region.
One morning, he invited us into the barn that was his writing retreat. It was a small shepherd’s hut with thick stone walls and a dirt floor. A faint light entered through a tiny window framed by trees outside. Just below it was a table made of rough wood, William’s desk, upon which lay sparsely written sheets of paper, perhaps the draft of a poem in progress. Against the opposite wall stood a workbench with some old tools, a reminder that the barn was originally used to store hay for the animals in winter. Little had changed since the sheep had slept here. Even the spiders had been left alone to their labor, spinning numerous webs that hung in corners, veiling the upper part of the graying window panes.
On our way out, crossing the doorsill, what came to my mind was the snakeskin which William had once stumbled upon as he was stepping out of his barn: “I stood up from the writings unfinished on the table / in the echoless stone room looking over the valley / I opened the door and on the stone doorsill / . . . the empty skin like smoke on the stone / . . . lighter than a single / breath” (“Snake”).69 I vividly recall that magical moment when William invited us into his secret den where he had written so many inspiring poems and continued to work them out. Bare as it was, the place seemed very much alive with the poet’s concentration and writing prowess.
Another memory of a beautiful June night in 2009 stands out in my mind. William, Paula, Steven, his mother Barbara, Garth, and I were sitting in the dark around the table on the terrace overlooking the valley. Dinner was over, and we remained there, spellbound by the songs of crickets and the sight of the starry sky. Not used to such brightness in the city, I stared at the immensity of the summer night above us, hypnotized by its radiance while, like an ancient mariner, William named and described the constellations, folding in stories and folklore heard from local farmers.
Stars are a recurring theme in Merwin’s poetry, fading away at dawn to vanish into the vast unknown. Though invisible in daylight, these same stars have kept watch over us imperturbably so since time immemorial. In an interview with Bill Moyers in 2009, the poet referred to the image of the “fading star” in his poem “The Nomad Flute”70 as a metaphor for the great unknown inside us, that dark part of ourselves we are mostly unaware of, but which nonetheless guides our lives. “It is life’s great mystery, and it is what gives it its dimension and its depth.” Asked what makes a poem, Merwin answered: “following what we don’t know.”71
Similar to the star, invisible but ever-present, this land of stone remains alive through continued human activity made evident in the shepherd huts built with those same stones. The ruins of the Ventadorn Castle welcome the visitor with a poem of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn: “Those stones saw them alive. In these lines they live again.” Not far, red scriptures list the names and dates of birth and death of the men, women, and children who, one day in 1944, “had been / ordered in German to that spot where they were shot/then the Germans set fire to the buildings / with the animals inside” (“The Red”).
The thirty-year ritual “verre de l’amitié” that always followed our readings. © C. Deudon
Animals occupy a special place in Merwin’s life and work, and he stresses “the importance of animals at a time and age when man—our species—sees himself so separate from the animal, which is also a part of himself.” In the poem “Substance,” “It was / the animals themselves that were the weight and place/ of the hour . . . / . . . bearing the sense of it . . .”
His anthology The Vixen opens with the poem “Fox Asleep,” in which the creature is waiting to be awakened to life; the collection closes with “Vixen.” The famously swift animal has now frozen into the hieratic figure of a dark fairytale, “the Princess of what is over.” The last lines of “Vixen” are a haunting and poignant plea: “let me catch sight of you again going over the wall / and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures / guttering on a screen let my words find their own / places in the silence after the animals.”
The Vixen is also an elegy. The poet told us that “language begins with elegy, [expressing] grief with its consonants, interrupting the undulations, trying to break it. Poetry is really about what can’t be said; it is about absence . . .” “Language is a paradox,” he continued, “because it is language that allows us to remember and express what has been lost.”
Asked by a young poet in the audience about his lack of punctuation, Merwin set down a difference between prose that requires punctuation for rational discourse and poetry, “which is always about hearing . . . The moment the punctuation is taken out, you have to pay attention to the rhythm of the poem.”
Cultivating language and cultivating the earth are both creative acts that are part and parcel of a long tradition. While the gardener helps the soil sprout and renew itself, the poet uses language to turn absence into presence, as Merwin writes in his poem “Place”:
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree.72