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Poetic Profile

Caroline Dubois (Cole Swensen, translator)

Email Interview with Caroline Dubois

Translated by Cole Swensen

1. How do you see poetry and its role in the contemporary world?
 

Poetry interests me above all as a kind of resistence. In the first place because its economy is absolutely aberrant to contemporary logic: an enormous investment (in terms of time and energy), quasi-nil effect and zero profitability. So it’s an act that could only be directed by internal necessity. On the other hand, and for the same reasons, it’s a space in which we can make experiments and take risks because no one is listening to us or expecting anything from us. It’s something like a space of liberty even if it’s a liberty that one immediately fills with its own constraints. I think that’s probably why poetry is the most vibrant space in literature today. And then poetry always runs counter to laziness. It doesn’t come easily, and it presumes much work on the part of the reader as well; it resists in all senses of the term. And finally, like other forms of art, poetry looks at the world, even if the world isn’t looking at it very much. I think often of Kafka’s phrase: “in your battles with the world, second the world.” I think poetry tries to do that.

 

2. What weight do you give the fragment in your work?
 

One of the things that I’d like to manage to do when I write is to have the texts generate a sort of phenomenon of persistence, (like certain short pieces of music seem to continue to be heard after silence has returned). That’s one of the horizons of my work. That presupposes short texts that appear, stay a moment, and then disappear, leaving a little echo. And also, unstable enunciation, unstable subject, fluctuating identity, moving,

 

3. How do you see your work exploring new territory?
 

I’m not at all sure I am exploring new territory. I don’t know if that’s still possible. Instead, I have the feeling that I visit territories that are sometimes very old, but always in existence, and I travel them, comment on them, try to elucidate them, and to integrate myself within them. I very much like the idea of inscribing myself in processes of creation that began long before me and that will continue long after. I try to be one point on a line of flight or on a bridge that’s been reaching toward the future for a long time.

 

4. What poets have been a strong influence on you?
 

I discovered contemporary poetry through certain French writers who were, for me, a real revelation. Olivier Cadiot, Anne Portugal, and Pierre Alferi were the first that I read. Then, through them, I discovered many others: Dominique Fourcade, MichPle Grangaud, and Emmanuel Hocquard, for example— through whom I began reading American poetry. The seminars at Royaumont were very important for me because I got into various American texts in an active way, concentrated and precise, which helped me later in my own work. In addition, I later began reading older American writers who had been very influential, such as Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson. Certain American novelists have had as much influence on my work as the poets, in particular Melville and Faulkner.

 

5. How and where do poems come to you? What starts one off?
 

In general, a text is always an exercise in admiration for me. Which is to say that it’s because I’ve seen or read or heard something that’s astonished me that I start to write. The idea for a text always comes from outside me. From inside, I have nothing to say. At the moment, most of the texts I write come from the love of a film or of a character, of a cinematic scene or situation. That allows me to elevate my spectator-dullness a little (tenacious tendency to identification). It also allows me to conceive of writing as a translation enterprise, of translation and not of creation ex nihilo. I can’t even imagine writing outside of fiction, yet at the same time, the idea of inventing stories and characters exhausts me. I think there are already enough characters for a lifetime, for a thousand lifetimes. So I use the ones already here, and I try to pay tribute to them.


 

6. Many interviews in France speak of the nature of poetry as opposed to that of prose. Do you see them as separate? Do you feel like you use elements of prose or fiction in your poetry? If so, how and why?

I’ve never opposed poetry and prose in my work. I could say that I write poetry in the sense that the elements normally associated with prose (logic, narrative, elaboration of a story, ending, etc.) always interest me less than the way in which the whole piece “sounds.” What interests me most is to begin a phrase, and see how long it can be held before it settles down. It’s not a specifically poetic question; you find it also in a lot of prose.