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Poetic Profile
Cécile Meinardi (Michelle Noteboom, translator)
Email Interview with Cécile Mainardi:
Translated by Michelle Noteboom
1) What is poetry (and its role) to you in the context of the world today?
The final bastion against disaster, both forthcoming and what’s already begun… which is to say super-outdated, super-useless and therefore super-remarkable.
2)
What’s the
significance of the fragment for you in poetry?
All of my notebooks,
journals, papers, scraps etc. are filled with unusable fragments – which I once
thought of as a ‘plague’. Upon seeing my perplexion at the accumulation of so
many unused fragments, a young artist once suggested I copy them over in
whatever order, clean them up and make a book out of it all. Obviously that’s
impossible. A book begins when you feel a fragment contains enough force to draw
forth the dream of its completion; even though that book might consist of
fragments, we know by its interstices that it’s a book, or else a poem, because
a ‘real’ poem should always be able to carry an entire book along with it. Book
or poem, same battle.
3) Do you think that poetry today is continuing to move forward,
to be new and dynamic, and if so how do you feel your own work is exploring new
territory?
Yes, poetry continues to find new representations, taking into account the
upheavals of the times and of linguistics. I try as much as possible to find new
writing stimuli to provoke new reflexes: inciting the reader to read something
just once, exploring an unnameable color, imprinting the impalpable singularity
of my/a voice into the text it reads/writes… in short, stir up the codes/scopes
of the utterance, like when I was a kid and would play 33 rpm records at 45 rpm
speed to try and hear the essence of certain songs that had grown stale from
habit…
4) What are some of your influences as a writer? Have international poets and writers been important to you, or primarily ones writing in and from the French tradition? (In short, is international exchange between poets important, in your opinion, and how or why (not)?)
Briefly, my lineage is Baudelaire/Breton/Deguy/Fourcade. I’ve also read a lot of German romantics, though to my regret I’m unable to read them in German. My experience of poetry in a foreign language came through Italian (and English to a lesser extent). For me, this experience is doubly magical, since it means experiencing meaning through a set of words that, as poems, are in fact fighting against meaning itself (its preservation, its obviousness, its order): a state of intense fragility where poetry comes in bursts through meaning which is abstracted from meaning, and provokes another state of language that is stroboscopic.
The different degrees of this state of language (up to the ideal mono-translation, which doesn’t exist) – asymptote of any translation – are obviously to be tried/tested by anyone who gets stuck with poetic writing, it seems essential, but I also think you can do it within the field of your own language… so I don’t think there are any rules when it comes to writing.
5) Where does a poem come from for you, what gets you started and moving into a poem?
A lot of poems result from an infection by other poems, and I’ve even written poems sparked by the systematic and programmed reading of another poet: read one poem, write one poem – I’ve done this for several pages, picking apart and examining the process. What does an operation such as this have in common with the urge to write suddenly, with no mediation, with no artistic ‘leaven’, just with ‘existence’? because the impetus is followed by the same effect in both cases. Perhaps a breath that was cut off/carried off/moved away, and is no longer able to find its place or itself in the midst of this mental utterance. Whether this carrying off is called ‘beauty’, ‘lack’ or ‘desire’, the need to catch my breath (other than physically inhaling) seems to be what triggers writing for me, or the draft of a poem.
6) Many interviews in France discuss the nature of poetry versus prose. Do you see these two as separate? Do you feel that you use elements of prose or fiction in your poetry? If so, how and why?
For me, prose and poetry are intimately linked. In one of my projects, I wanted to elevate Proust’s prose to the level of poetry – a kind of ready-made poetic – by simply inserting the same recurrent expression, “in French”, throughout his long syntactic meanderings. This operation creates a detachment from literary representation, and it also lets the poem that is coded within the prose, embedded in its every aspect, be refigured. On the other hand, producing prose that’s coded within a poem of indeterminate contours, whose indeterminability consists in this prose itself, in it’s ‘fluctuation’, that’s the current poetic form I write in.
7) What advice might you give to a young writer coming to you about how to keep working on their poems in a world which increasingly values only economically gainful activities?
There is no advice to give
about poetry, maybe just enthusiasm to pass on, but that turns out to be most
active in poems themselves. As for the world in which we live, it’s been ages
since poetry’s held any stakes whatsoever, which is why it’s urgent for it to be
perpetuated as the maximal experience of the non-profitable, non-liberal,
non-perishable, while it’s the language itself that seems struck by
merchandizing.
my voice
the ring of moonstone
cuz your switched-off blondness can wear down the batteries of the word blond
forever on the brink of expiring in what we find of the color blond in the Tiber
(all color seems to have been removed from it and converted
into pure milky density of waves)
right there where the names of colors cease to name
– we ask that you please excuse them for this brief interruption of color –
like the dream content of some dreams at a certain moment
wakes us with a flood of too much dream (not because we’re going to die) washing away the dream substance itself
Imagine blondness that drowns
is progressively diluted in water, like my mint
syrup, like blood spewing from a shark’s wound,
seething under the rotary
motion
of outboard blades
blondness that drowns and goes down
and blocks a shoal of sirens by electrolysis
and spins its yards of silk inside my memory
your switched-off or low voltage blondness?
your palmtrees-mauve-in-the-storm blondness
your bargage-disposal blondness
your kosher, Kantian, cashmere, cross-your-heart blondness
your unnameable blondness that everything can name
with its pipes showing
How far into language
do the anorexic rays of your blondness reach?
how far does it sink into words
like the visible into eyes
how far does it sink into my head as if your hair grew
inside my memory
as if language were lined with a retina
that sees better than an eye?
there where words cease to name
your blondness takes over
electric blender blades
Shredded to bits by the electric blender
I thought I’d gotten rid of it once and for all
minced into breadcrumbs, powder, dust
and then suddenly, because a hint of resemblance steps into the room,
it regilds my very lungs
suddenly, because a hint of you arises in a certain gait, it regilds
everything and clogs up my memory again
I thought I’d gotten rid of it once and for all
everywhere possible I’d find it crosshatched
or in the shower, “peach blossom” color
with a rock hard pit and soft flesh
“vine peach” color
your compote of blondness
“peach Melba on a slide” color
but never in a collect call
my super-matte blondness, my low-frequency blondness on an anti-depressant IV, depressurized in the changing room for the names of colors, my remedial blondness, my eagle-eyed blondness
o my hyena of blondness!
Who during the meeting would have called your hair blond?
on the whole it looks more bronze than gold
plays Schumann an octave too low
as long as I am able to still adequately name your blondness, it remains blond
as long as I still feel able to name your blondness with extemporaneous nomination – invented at the moment of need – it remains blond
not one day without a new line
without a new collection
at times, I felt I could medically read the dictionary and without the slightest hesitation write up the prescription of words that would still continue to name it, to keep it on life support, give it mouth-to-mouth
roughly one word every three pages of the Webster’s had you vagablonding on the back of a metaphor
it yields a rather muffled blondness
an impression of slow-motion in the blondness, nearly switches it off
since for me it’s a matter of keeping blond in words that continuously grow a set of new shark teeth every 24 hours
once we’ve got your cross-eyed blondness
then why not
your duck-billed platypus blondness
when you really, I mean really want to be noticed!
What makes me turn round like a true metal detector
toward the blond or blonde passing by
(looking generally dirty bronze in the back of the mirror)
isn’t the flash in the reflector (which bounces light back in the opposite direction and makes a vehicle visible at night) or the burst of color, vibrant precision of color, for example blue polkadots on my graduation dress I wore hitch-hiking, hitching color up to the spectrum’s mid-thigh
rather it’s the incoherence of seeing, there, without any lexical nuance – yes words are also a matter of gradation – the sallow sands of Rimini where I cried when I poked my hands in at three, yuck! disgusting to consider so young the degree of pokeability of the damp things of the earth, the world wasn’t smooth, no! words of a Bulgarian hairdresser trainee, so as I was saying seeing Rimini sands there as well as the hay or the horse of whatever
the melted snow of blondness on the surface of the words where it falls as if suddenly sucked up, snatched up
your aphthous and nubile blondness
your no word’s land blondness
o my fake real fake blonde peroxided in words
you’re not a real person, I shouted
for I’d shouted volumes of love, absolute hectares of pampas of love, whole shaven steppes in cinemascope
something that makes you straight out want to puke, a roller coaster in 3-D on a huge screen
you’re not a real person
even though I believed in all your external signs of blondness, you weren’t really blond, and certainly not a tow-headed tot, more of a hyper-bleached soul, 90% peroxide per volume of bleaching agent, I gulped it down, swallowed it all in one go, got a monster mouthful
I tried shouting volumes of love but it stuck in my throat
gathered the debris of what I’d thought was a real person
a real blonde
in fact I prefer red-heads
there’s nothing more handsome than red-heads when they’re beautiful
the others can just go take a hike with their hair, put their bathing caps back on, go play water-polo in the wading pool, reenact Palombella Rossa
I told you – naivety agenda – “I’ve got a blond soul” to see what it did to hear this word out loud
“when do we get to see this blond soul of yours?” replied one of the big libidinous philosophers trying to demonstrate the superiority of phenomenology over love
you are as handsome as a blond red-head if red-heads were most beautiful when they’re beautiful
it’s a real blond joke, a real joke of a blond
now I aim through the sight of my James Blond typewriter at the l lost between the b and o of blond
nevermind dyslexic agitation
bolndness, blnodness, bonness bang bang bang
machine-gunning, you shot rounds of blondness dead at me
I collapsed in the arms of Saint Blondinette, patron saint of young hairdressers, I expired in the mousse of the merciless
your express-mail, next-day-delivery blondness
in other words that shoots quicker than its shadow of copper, auburn, mahogany, ash, cherry shades, the whole OED collection, though it’s not worth it
as handsome as a woman dressed up as a man when she turns back into a woman, as a man dressed up as a woman when he turns back into a man, the brief sex-ethereal rapture it engenders each time
poems, I prefer brunette
