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Poetic Profile

Emmanuel Moses (Donna Stonecipher, translator)

An Interview Between Emmanuel Moses and Donna Stonecipher.

DS: I’m interested in how far you take the concept of “poem” in some of these excerpts, especially the two pieces of theater-like dialogue. So, to begin with a poet whom I think Kevin Hart rightly described as “protean,” how do you know when a poem is a poem?

EM: Thank you for asking this question which has been haunting me for many years, maybe because I write fiction as well as poetry. At times, I thought I could distinguish neatly between the two genres, explain why I need them both, dissect their differences, energywise etc.… I’m much more skeptical and, maybe, humble, today. I don’t know why I need and desire to write both. They, probably, stem from different desires, stimulations and, actually, may have nothing in common (but the use of language). Maybe that could be the beginning of an answer: to separate totally poetry from fiction -- in my case, at least. Two roads that don’t even run parallel. But, two roads, ways leading to clearings, unattainable clearings and yet, how they shimmer! How they guide intuition, hand, imagination, subconscious . . . A poem would then be, for me, the faithful expression of a particular necessity, a necessity that I find only along that poetry-road, like a milestone, in a way. It can be in verse, prose, a dialogue, as in Last News of Mr. Nobody (or Nothingness), but it stands on a track starting in an obscure place (like a stable at night), the obscurity of the impulse seems to occupy an important place in the genesis, something that is veiled, that evades any precise form, a fugitive of a sort and ending in light: something has appeared, at the end of the process, has been shaped by daylight, has come to existence, to a dense and light existence, like the grass and flowers surrounded by kind, protective trees around them.

DS: I like the idea of fiction and poetry being completely separate, maybe because lately the thought of these two genres standing as the two possibilities for creative thought has seemed to me somewhat arbitrary. I wonder why, for example, creative writing journals feel they must have fiction AND poetry. Do the two together form some kind of whole representing human existence? Poetry and fiction seem to me to be on a continuum, despite this lovely thought of their separateness, but I’d love to know why you need to write both. What do you find on the road leading to fiction?

EM: A width emerges from an intense observation through the prism of reconstruction (memories) and construction (imagination). Fiction is for me a way of observing myself from within. What do I find in this polymorphic space? Items and voices, gestures, the substance of time, or at least glimpses of it. I collect with passion and patience all those objects, invented and found. They create situations weaving and spitting strange dynamics which I am enchanted to follow. No physics can schematize it. No paradigm is possible. And yet, it is a question of pure matter but subject to no rigid law. Fiction generates a tissue, reticular, rich to suffusion that, eventually, on the page and, maybe, in the mind of the reader, happens. A tissue (matter) that happens: this would be my definition of fiction, the golden shore I strive to reach.

DS: I find it fascinating that you say fiction is a way of observing yourself, from within, because the general sense is that poets are concerned with observing themselves and novelists are concerned with observing others. I’d love to delve into that more deeply, but I’m going to turn the conversation back to poetry. Despite the fact that you are thinking of poetry and fiction as separate, there are many fictional characters in your poetry, especially in the excerpts I translated. What is the relationship between these fictional characters and the other elements of the poems -- language, image, rhythm, etc.?

EM: Maybe the fictional characters are a kind of fetish, I mean the poem turns around them in awe and veneration. They are painted doubles made of some incorruptible, precious wood. They are very hard, very magic, in opposition to the words and rhythms which are mortal -- subject to the diseases of words and rhythms. I can miss a word, many many words, they can lose their power, in time, and the music too can fail, those elements are not protected but the fictional figures are. No harm can befall them. I dispose them meticulously, hoping for no less than a perpetual hour. They’ll bestow it for sure.

DS: Once again, I’m tempted to take that response and head back to fiction, to ask you whether your characters in your novels are also very hard and very magic, but instead I want to ask particularly about the fragmentary nature of the poems I translated, about how the barest of details, one or two strokes of the pen as it were, gesture toward, or imply, an entire complex. What’s the significance of the fragment for you in poetry?

EM: I want to say that, for me, the fragment is something that has been torn off.  This violence is at the heart of the writing process, or so I feel. It is a displacement and also a dislocation. What is being created thus? A kind of golem, brimming with destructive powers. You still feel the phantom entity from which the scrap has been detached. The result is a text containing pain and a foolish hope for a healing. I wanted to speak about the mystery contained in the fragment and the imagination it stimulates in the reader’s mind but that aspect seems now to me superficial, anecdotal. The fragment is both the result of a mutilation (of the uninterrupted flow of language) and the hope for a miracle: the restoration of its lost unity.

Poems by Emmanuel Moses

Translated By Donna Stonecipher

Tramway for Sarah D.

at the bottom of a wooden box that evokes a miniature theater a model of an electric tramway is posed on rails bordered by tiny plastic trees and tiny streetlamps that are lit the tram car bathed in filtered light contains only a few passengers including a couple two signs frame the railway one indicates Peacock Road the other Glenneng the car is situated halfway between these two stops

extract from the Great Book

Klein of Klein Bros. dreams that he has stolen a volume from the library of his analyst the book in question is a work dedicated by Wilfred Bion the next day overcome by remorse he decides to return the book when the analyst opens the door for him he says: “I’ve come to return this book, which your husband (also an analyst) loaned me.”

Phébus: I had one of those strange dreams again.

Annabella: The dream of the waterfall or the dream of the rock?

Phébus: The dream of the monk.

Annabella: Ah, the dream of the monk. (She dusts off his sleeve.) How you can entertain me. (She rests her head on his shoulder.) The dreams of the monk are the most beautiful.

Phébus: Yes, but I think I prefer the dreams of the mountain pass.

Annabella: Not me. They make me sad and I run from sadness like a married woman runs from a suitor of whom she senses she will never have as much pleasure as she would in his arms.

Annabella: There are strange things going on in the apartment across the way. Do you think it’s some sort of satanic ritual?

Phébus: I’d bet they’re orgies. (He sneers.)

Annabella: To listen to you, one would think that the idea pleases you. Maybe you want to join them?

Phébus: Why not? (He sneers again.)

Annabella (turning away): If you knew how you disgust me, sometimes.

Phébus: Only sometimes?

Annabella: No. All the time. Even the sight of you has become unbearable to me. That’s what you want me to say, right? That would make you happy.

Phébus: What are you talking about? It seems to me that every day you distance yourself more from reality. 

extract 2 from the Great Book

 (the Treaty of Uniforms)

colonel talk-talk in khaki tunic with rows of decorations flat pockets and deep red collar placket directs operations he awaits a delivery of gold buttons but his orderly lies throat cut under a pepper tree when the war will be won he will be able to enjoy a well-earned rest in some deck chair on the terrace of a private club lulled by the plik plok of a game of tennis and the song of a toucan general talk-talk from now on hero of dusty campaigns

last night at the ballet the thinness of the dancers accentuated their physical defects prominent noses protruding chins and when they executed a pirouette en pointe suddenly, under the tutus brocaded with gold or covered in silver sequins, appeared the soles black with filth of their ballet slippers.

 Section V

I wanted to walk a little bit in the courtyard of the inn

lit up by the moon

but the postillion

in a hurry to arrive at the next stage

didn’t allow me the time to do so

*

the bank

overhung on both sides

by hills and mountains

sparkled with innumerable

hamlets

*

ostrich had no first name

he was sent ahead to wait

in some hotel rooms

for a call

that he never received

*

he dreamed

that he was lying

with thousands of doubles

on the damp mossy forest

floor

*

he fought nonstop with closing devices

locks padlocks bolts grooves fastenings

but although fierce

his battle up to that point

had won him only a few pathetic victories

drowned in an ocean

of black defeats

*

this hallway

reminded him of another

which in its turn

sent him back

toward a third

and so on

*

this liaison will have cost me one thousand three hundred francs

or to be more precise one thousand two hundred and sixty-five

he calculated

while he buttoned up his frock coat

before the mirror in the vestibule

Last News of Mr. Nothingness

Forgive me for not writing you more often

but my husband at the moment is going through

an acute identity crisis

of which I am keeping a scrupulous record

for posterity.