Dredgings by Alexander Dickow

Dredgings
Alexander Dickow

Why not mix languages, like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or Jody Pou? French and English are to my eyes situated back to back, recto-verso. They communicate like medieval lovers, by knocking on an impassible wall. The wall becomes at once obstacle and passage, means of communication and its impediment.

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Sometimes, asking forgiveness revives anger rather than calming it: for taking on, through the free acceptance of one’s wrongdoing, a nobler attitude than that of the offended party seems to the latter one more affront.

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What happens when a reader faces a poem stuffed with agrammaticalities, but which allows her to guess at a more or less coherent meaning beneath the veil of solecism? In such cases, meaning no longer corresponds to what is written in black and white; an abyss opens between the words as such and the meaning constructed. The words do not add up, and yet a perfectly understandable meaning emerges from them. This abyss between words and meaning attracts me constantly as a sort of realized impossibility, for is it not words, and what is written, that leads us to meaning? How can this kind of poetic mitosis, this doubling by which the poem seems both haywire and sensible, possibly occur?

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Reread Jean Paulhan, very closely.

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For that matter, what a pleasure to observe just what is written, discerning the paths the poem might have taken by reading a part of it against the grain of the apparent meaning of the whole. Linguistic deviations allow the poem to resound with all the poems it might have become.

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It’s one of two things: or vice-versa.

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How I am still infinitely a platonist: I like it best when there is appearance and reality, bottom and false bottom, concealment and unveiling.

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The cliché of expression is the prefabricated mold into which we pour our own words, orally as in writing. The cliché of reading is our inner bed of Procustes with which we deform what we read. The latter are less well catalogued than the former.

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Horror is a form of fascination. Those who fear spiders would do well to take a deep interest in them.

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Pay attention not just to constants, but also to exceptions, anomalies, variations. Literary criticism often takes the wrong road in this.

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When faced with our frustration, the other replies: why lose patience for such a small thing? This is to misunderstand the nature of frustration. If the obstacle were sizable, it would be handled without distress; one allows much less easily that a negligeable thing should foil us. One becomes frustrated not in spite of the smallness of the thing, but because of it.

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To attain to ultimate truthfulness in matters of literary theory would suppose the inclusion of a great many platitudes, no less true for all that. To keep only the best, prefer a resolutely incomplete theory.

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A work of abstraction can still reach greatness. Let us admit the primacy of the concrete or sense perception, as long as the poet not allow this primacy to reduce her field of possibilities.

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Playfulness and amusement are sadly undervalued in France: the glory of Lewis Carroll exists solely in the Anglophone world, while the French still read Yves Bonnefoy. Alas, we no longer resemble Molière and Rabelais’ France: to be thought serious, one must now appear thus.

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Against all odds, levity has not yet snuffed out Olivier Cadiot’s glory. But there’s plenty of time for that.

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The best constraint becomes invisible once the work is complete, for it is nothing but a scaffolding that must be discarded once the monument is built. Follow the model of Life a User’s Manual or Some Thing Black, not that of A Vanishing or Elementary Morality. The constraint must be inside the work.

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Yet it does happen that the most openly structural element is the most essential part of a work, and the key to its beauty. How would a Gothic church appear without its flying buttresses? What would a ballad be without the ostentatious pillars of its refrain?

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Cubism, even synthetic cubism, in no way rejects the principles of perspective and illusionism; on the contrary, it exploits them ceaselessly as its fundamental mechanism: but the perspectival coordinates of the image’s different parts do not agree.

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I feel irritation every time a critic naively declares that the avant-gardes of the 20th century reached a fusion of art and life.

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No love without ambivalence: love costs.

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Certain poems achieve a synthesis of experience: they extract constants from a series of different experiences of the same type; they remove their particularities in order to purify their content. They are abstractions, in the etymological sense of the term. Other poems embrace a particular experience in all of its thickness. Brew or distill, no matter, but without experience, neither beer nor liquor will emerge.

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Depunctuating is a literary signpost: it says “I am a poem” better, nowadays, than verse does. And just like false advertising, the absence of punctuation makes it seem as though there are disjunctions and disturbances where there are few indeed, as though there is experimentation where there is none in fact; normative language and flatness of style can hide beneath the gratuitous and artificial difficulty of reading the depunctuated text. Brilliant texts can also hide there, but why use a signpost for a product no one believes in anymore? And why give to a structured discourse the appearance of monotonous logorrhea, to that which is made of rhythms and jolts the movement of a continuous flow, to that which is rough an air of smoothness? The internal nuance provided by punctuation is worth more than this lack of differentiation (as for typography, it is only another form of punctuation, as Reverdy has written). In short, one ought to depunctuate not systematically, but occasionally — and artfully.

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After the astonishing Grabinoulor, there’s no more reason to write logorrheic poems. After Tarkos and Pennequin, there’s no more place for modular, repetition-based compositions. How monotonous! Enough with the epigones!

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Other tics: a flow of phrases interspersed with commas, in a textual block without paragraph indentation. Let’s make it harder on the reader, just because.

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When Eve misunderstood Adam’s words, poetry was born.

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Misunderstanding contributes to the perpetual mutation of language.

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In art, almost anything is worth trying once. Unfortunately, most wish to repeat it at all costs.

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There is a paradoxical pleasure in extreme fatigue; the heavy honey of sleep can be felt oozing from one’s very marrow. The unpleasantness lies not in the fatigue itself, but in the effort required to resist it. Weariness is something else again; it involves the effort required to exist.

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If one scatters enough clues, will a plot eventually emerge?

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I write what I feel most deeply at any given moment: an equation, an abstract concept, a cry, a feather, a rusty nail, a peanut.

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Poetry can contribute to moral discipline.

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The great majority value first and foremost, if not solely, what answers life’s bare necessities. Aim higher, for the health and intoxication of the multiple life. This is hardly more than Gautier’s famous preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, which deserves to be read once again – since no one does so any longer.

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In all events, art for art’s sake was never a veritable doctrine, firstly for lack of disciples. Those who wave the banner of art for art’s sake for themselves are even more lacking in credibility than the others.

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So what can poetry do? Poetry concerns anything, in the rawest sense. What saves art is that it is not a field (dixit Philippe Beck); it has the potential to collect and gather no matter what fragment of life, knowledge, morality, science, decoration, — plenitude and lack. Every choice of global intention risks reducing the effective radius of one’s art. Such choices instantly exclude certain materials, certain possibilities, even before the creative act takes place; such choices consider art through blinders. Hence do I declare my art sentimental, objective, linguistic, existential, moral and moralizing, didactic, political, gratuitous, utilitarian, philosophical, metaphysical and quotidian, one after the other and at the same time. As much as possible, from one poem to the next, the cards should be redealt.

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A journal of the present: a long celebration of May 1968’s spirit of rebellion, an homage to Tarkos, a few ghosts from TXT. Nothing more rife with sad nostalgia than a former avant-garde (Dada, however, was already nostalgic for itself at its birth).

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Every poem worth the name aspires to contain everything. That’s why so many poems contain nothing but odds and ends, which evoke totality so effectively.

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If one is not to be everything, one may wish to be nothing. Both ambitions, in fact, are equally quixotic.

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One ought to aspire to be integrated into the canon after the fashion of Lautréamont: like an ineradicable weed in a classical garden, like a foreign body clinging to survival against all odds. Like a tenacious misunderstanding. This is an ideal position for the work to continue asking its question (whether or not it is heard).

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Lautréamont is readily invoked, but most often without much discussion, or with discussion lacking much substance. Lautréamont is not recuperable; all attempts to appropriate him are destined to fail.

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The Tomb of Anatole would have less value in our eyes without the absent poem that it might have become, and that haunts it. All poems worth a damn contain a great many more words than the ones that are printed.

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Speculative fiction – science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction and horror, etc. – are poetry’s immediate neighbors on the spectrum of literary genres. If “speculative poetry” seems hardly to exist, this is because all poems have something speculative about them, which dispenses us from calling them anything but “poems.”

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Speculative fiction and poetry, when they realize their full potential, delve into the very limits of meaning and imagination, each after their own fashion.

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The surge of creativity is sui generis among human pleasures.

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Poetry’s tiny readership seems to suggest that poetry can no longer tell us much about cultural trends. By the same logic, the vast audience of Marvel’s latest film would prove its relevance for a true understanding of the era. Yet the size of the audience in no way determines the value of a cultural object. Inverting the abovementioned logic proves it: it may well be that the submerged cultural object, the nearly invisible one, can better inform us of the strongest and deepest currents of an era, whereas the blockbuster may reveal nothing but the little wavelets at the surface. Put differently, the whisper may be more decisive than the cry, for its subject reveals its importance more than its volume.