Collected Prose

these invented shapes are exploited with great deftness, serving not as ends in themselves but as a means of ordering the fragments they encompass, of putting the various pieces in a larger context and investing them with a coherence they would not possess on their own.
    Pleynet and Roche, two poets closely connected with the well-known review Tel Quel , have each carried the notion of antipoetry to a position of extreme combativeness. Pleynet’s jocular, and at the same time deadly serious “Ars Poetica” of 1964 is a good example of this attitude. “ I. ONE CANNOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE WITHOUT KNOWING WHY. II. THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARS POETICA DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE BUT HE WRITES. III. THE QUESTION ‘HOW TO WRITE’ ANSWERS THE QUESTION ‘WHY WRITE’ AND THE QUESTION ‘WHAT IS WRITING’. IV. A QUESTION IS AN ANSWER.” Roche’s approach is perhaps even more disruptive of conventional assumptions about literature. “Poetry is inadmissible. Besides, it does not exist,” he has written. And elsewhere: “… the logic of modern writing demands that one should take a vigorous hand in promoting the death agonies of [this] symbolist, outmoded ideology. Writing can only symbolize what it is in its functioning, in its ‘society’, within the frame of its utilization. It must stick to that.”
    This is not to say, however, that short, lyric poems do not continue to be written in France. Delahaye and Denis, both still in their thirties, have created substantial bodies of work in this more familiar mode — mining a landscape that had first been mapped out by du Bouchet and Dupin. On the other hand, many of the younger poets, having absorbed and transmuted the questions raised by their predecessors, are now producing a kind of work that is both original and demanding in its insistence upon the textuality of the written word. Although there are significant differences among Albiach, Royet-Journoud, Daive, Hocquard and Veinstein, in one fundamental aspect of their work they share a common point of view. Their medium as writers is neither the individual poem nor even the sequence of poems, but the book. As Royet-Journoud stated in a recent interview: “My books consist only of a single text, the genre of which cannot be defined…. It’s a book that I write, and I feel that the notion of genre obscures the book as such.” This is as true of Daive’s highly charged, psycho-erotic work, Hocquard’s graceful and ironic narratives of memory, and Veinstein’s minimal theaters of the creative process as it is of Royet-Journoud’s obsessive “detective stories” of language. Most strikingly, this approach to composition can be found in Albiach’s 1971 volume, É tat , undoubtedly the major work to be published thus far by a member of this younger generation. As Keith Waldrop has written: “The poem — it is a single piece — does not progress by images … or by plot…. The argument, if it were given, might include the following propositions: 1) everyday language is dependent on logic, but 2) in fiction, there is no necessity that any particular word should follow any other, so 3) it is possible at least to imagine a free choice, a syntax generated by desire. É tat is the ‘epic’ … of this imagination. To state such an argument … would be to renounce the whole project. But what is presented is not a series of emotions … the poem is composed mindfully; and if Anne-Marie Albiach rejects rationality, she quite obviously writes with full intelligence …”

IV

… with the conviction that, in the end, translating is madness.
Maurice Blanchot

    As I was about to embark on the project of editing this anthology, a friend gave me a piece of valuable advice. Jonathan Griffin, who served as British cultural attaché in Paris after the war, and has translated several books by De Gaulle, as well as poets ranging from Rimbaud to Pessoa, has been around long enough to know more about such things than I do. Every anthology, he said, has two types of readers: the critics, who judge the book by what is not included in it, and the general readers, who read the book for what it actually contains. He advised me to keep this second group uppermost in my thoughts. The critics, after all, are in business to criticize, and they are familiar with the material anyway. The important thing to remember is that most people will be reading the majority of these poets for the first time. They are the ones who will get the most out