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R.P.: You’ve
been publishing essays on theory for over ten years. We’ve only now
discovered that you write poetry, and it’s readily apparent from the
level of the work that you’ve been writing for a long time. What made
you decide to publish and why did you wait so long to do so?
Michel Collot : In my career, the poetry preceded the critical writing
and the reflections on theory, the initial purpose of which was to
articulate what I observed while reading or writing poems. That
experience opened up a horizon to me, different from the poetic
underpinnings of the 70’s which insisted on a closed text and on the
intransitivity of poetic language.
I felt it
necessary to explain and demonstrate an alternative theoretical model,
centered on the notion of the horizon. It was an arduous and demanding
task which for ten years relegated to second priority the very creative
activities which gave rise to it.
During this
lengthy effort, I came upon old poems, some of which had appeared in
journals during the 80’s, that I wanted to organize and publish in a
little collection entitled,'Issu de l’oubli', This involved
retrieving from obscurity those texts that had fueled my theoretical and
critical essays and using them this time around to show the practical
application of the poetic concepts I had advanced, concepts which
meanwhile were more likely to find acceptance.
It was also a way
to restore poetry’s place in my work, to let it take the initiative
and to listen again to what that work had to say to me -- this being
something which remains unpredictable -- beyond positions of critical or
theoretical discourse and, just like that, to let it reassert itself.
Thus it was that I returned to a more sustained poetry-writing activity
which produced the Chaosmos poems, poems that are much
more recent and represent a very different kind of writing.
R.P. : Issu
de l'oubli takes the form of verse and Chaosmos that
of the prose poem. Do you work in these forms simultaneously? How do you
go about choosing between the two?
M.C. : The
recourse to prose came about of its own volition without my knowing just
why. Looking back on it, I do discern some motivations for this change.
Most of the poems in Issu de l'oubli were very elliptical,
connected to very vivid, but fleeting epiphanies. I wanted to allow
myself room for development without giving up the compression that
characterizes a poem, to go beyond the momentary to work out a structure
that was more complex, though fragmental.
Prose also allowed
me to address a greater diversity of subject and tone, to get closer to
concrete experience, the everyday and the extraordinary as well, to
evoke with greater precision certain places and moments of my existence.
I felt it necessary to invite in the disorder of our lives and of our
world. However, in order to make a cosmos out of that chaos, this prose
inclines toward the poem and sometimes reads like verse. Dictates of
rhythm, phonetic resonances play a very important part in it.
Some of the work
in Chaosmos comes closer in fact to traditional verse than
do the poems in Issu d’oubli in which the poetry is full of
interruptions, and sometimes reaches the page in snatches. The prose in Chaosmos
can end up amplifying and generalizing verse, while Issu d’oubli
worked toward reducing it, which all goes to say that the boundary
between the two is permeable and conducive to cross-over and exchange.
The fashion these
days is to render verse prose-like and prosaic; I lean more toward
rendering prose poetic. What’s important is to give speech rhythm, to
give voice to its stresses, to deal with its silences. How that’s done
in poetry is different from how it’s done in prose; I like to trade
off between the two. I’m currently working on a book of poems which
are quite different from those in Issu d’oubli. Each time, though, it’s
a matter of addressing a sense and vision of the world that seek
coherent shape through a specific form, whereby the form is more of its
own making than of my choosing.
R.P. : In
La Matière-émotion, you showed how emotion at its most intense can
achieve "the confusion between subject and object." Then, in Chaosmos, the poet’s role is one of description. How do you view the
relationship between description and emotion, objectivity and lyricism?
M.C. : The
term, "description", bothers me a bit because it is associated
in our literary consciousness with the naturalistic ideal of complete
and objective reproduction of the subject’s external reality. I prefer
"evocation" because it connotes the subjective component of
any poetic approach to reality and the role assigned to imagination and
to voice, the two things that lend poetry perceptible substance.
When I turn my
attention to an object or to a place, I do so less with a view to
recreating it than to evoking my encounter with it, the circumstances
surrounding it, the impressions and emotions it triggers, the horizon
that it opens up for me. If I do describe certain aspects of it, I do so
in an attempt to lend form to an affect, using those which I consider
most conducive to its expression and conveyance.
When I write, ‘Intrepid
height, the [stained] glass suddenly bathes us in light’ (‘Hardiesse
altière, la verrière soudain nous baigne de lumière’), it’s an
attempt to capture the impression of verticality, transparency and
luminosity which struck me one day on entering the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele in Milan. Coming out of the subway and the plaza del Duomo,
then in the throes of construction, I found myself in an urban microcosm
the harmony of which transported me to a buoyancy of spirit (‘allégresse’)
all the more unexpected since I had no reason whatever to be joyful.
That strange emotion was intimately bound up with the physiognomy of the
places, their atmosphere, configuration, architecture, even their
building materials.
Consequently, it
was through describing them that I was able to recapture their interior
resonance. Description can be lyrical; it’s often so, even in Zola’s
writing.
R.P. : In a
certain way, La Matière-émotion appears to be an attempt to go beyond
the feud between literalism and neo-lyricism. Do you think this is an
artificial debate and where do you place yourself in relation to these
two currents?
M.C. : In
writing poetry, one engages a subject, a world and a language, which
interact in the alchemy that is the word. Any practice or theory that
favors one of the elements in this complex relationship to the exclusion
of the other risks impoverishing poetry, depriving it of one of its
constituent dimensions.
Literalism tends
to disassociate work on language from the expression of the self and
from the experience of the world. Neo-lyricism’s contribution has been
to restore subject to its place, if at times too much so, to the point
of invading the poem with autobiographical confession or outpourings of
sentiment. Its detractors have had an easy time criticizing it, for its
subjectivity and idealism, on behalf of objectivism or of linguistic
materialism. As I see it, this polemic trades on the played out clefts
between subject and object, word and meaning, matter and mind, the
legacies of our poetic and philosophic traditions.
But the poetic
experience invites us to go beyond these artificial clefts. What I
propose in La Matière-émotion is to redefine lyricism, not as an
expression of internal sentiment, but rather, as the creation of a new
emotion that takes shape only through worldly matter and through words.
Thus, I take my place in the extension of efforts undertaken throughout
the century to promote "an objective lyricism" (J. Romains), a
"lyricism of reality" (Reverdy) or a "lyricism of
matter" (Marinetti, but also Ponge).
The most valuable
thing, and the most difficult thing to reason through and apply in
practice, is the reconciliation of these apparently mutually exclusive
terms. Work on ‘la lettre’, for example, is not necessarily contrary
to lyricism. In trying to express what I felt in the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele, I quickly understood that the resonance of that space was
inseparable, not just from its topography, but from its toponymy as
well.
The word ‘galleria’
stuck with me, especially as the perfect anagram of ‘allegria’. I
therefore used it as the title, and at the same time developed its
associations and meanings. By letting these resonances replay in me and
in my piece, I was able to express my buoyancy of spirit and to give it
new resonance -- that of the words in my poem.
R.P. : In Chaosmos,
you invoke this in a concrete way, and in decrying the elimination of
the figure in landscape, you try to restore it. Does this represent a
distrust of abstraction in painting and in poetry both?
M.C. :
Paradoxically, the trend in modern art and in literature as well of
accentuating verbal or pictorial matter has led to a dismissal of the
world’s materiality in favor of abstraction, an approach that’s
showing its limitations today.
It is true,
however, that freedom from the constraints of rhyme forms (‘mimésis’)
allowed us, not only to discover the wealth of matter itself, but also
to express aspects of the world and of the self which elude
representation. There is lyric abstraction and there is abstract
landscape art, for example, which to my eye say more than do classic
landscape art or portraiture about those aspects of man and of the world
which are inaccessible to consciousness and cognition. Most of the
paintings I mention in the last section of Chaosmos contain
a certain abstract element. However, primarily because of the
significance which they accord to matter, their painting evokes
powerfully for me one or another aspect of the world. It lets me
experience an adventure, at once physical and spiritual, which I
attempted to formulate through these various prose pieces.
Yet, when the
formal search goes on indefinitely only for itself, it risks losing
sight of its role in the dynamic interplay and risks becoming an
isolated energy. It turns to topping itself, in minimalism, in
sophistication or in derision, as meaning narrows, diminishing ever more
often to the point of the purely self-referential: "This is a
poem." or "This is a work of art." It seems to me that by
thus emptying itself of any other content, the language itself, whether
plastic or verbal, is impoverished.
Great formal
innovations are accompanied by a new vision of the world. To be sure,
that vision cannot be translated today by simply returning to the figure
in the usual sense of the word. It must face the test of de-figuration,
which also affects the subject itself, and be less concerned about
affirming an identity than in discovering an intimate otherness. Let us
not forget, though, that any figure emerges from a depth that at once
quickens and destroys it.
It is the same
with landscape, which we too often see as an image of the world quite
rational and stable. To experience landscape, as I do and as
philosophers such as Erwin Straus and Henri Maldiney discuss it in their
writing, is a head-spinning, unhinging encounter with the sheer enormity
of the universe.
If I have spoken
repeatedly about the horizon, I’ve done so because it embodies the
ambiguity of all landscape, at once marking the outer reaches of a
visible and organized totality as well as the threshold of a space which
is invisible and ungraspable. In linking the poem to the horizon, one
seeks to establish with the world a relation which will not be imitative
because that relationship integrates the distance separating the two.
One maintains proximity to the inaccessible.
R.P. : You
ask in Chaosmos, "When will we know how to deal with
the space in us and around us, the space needed to receive the other,
the strange, to welcome emptiness into our lives without rushing to fill
it?" You also present the other as that which opens up the horizon.
Are you saying that you assign to the poet an ethical role?
M.C. : The
rejection of a dictatorial language creased back on itself, the wish to
open the poem to a horizon which exceeds it, are responses to the
concern that one not remain prisoner of some logic of identity and that
one welcome the otherness. It is a 'poéthique' gesture, to
use Michel Deguy’s expression, in the dual sense of the word,
"ethos", thus, a way to inhabit the world and to live
together. Poets have shown too much tendency to cultivate their
peculiarity, to the point of closing themselves off in an idiom and in
an idios cosmos.
The gap that has
opened between poetic experimentation and popular literature conveys an
image to the public of complaisance and convention. We need to cultivate
shared language and experience in order to transform both if we don’t
want to leave them prey to wholesale deculturalization. To be sure, it’s
not the poet’s province to offer up a message or a lesson on morality.
Just through its way of telling and showing, poetry serves as model for
an art of living. To cumulative logic, which is increasingly prevalent
in the storage and dissemination of information, poetry interposes, for
example, its white spaces, its margins, its silences, which preserve a
potential space which another is at liberty to fill while reading it.
In a society which
tends to isolate individuals and in a world which is quick to either
exaggerate differences or to equalize them through assimilation, poetry
restores a sense of connection. Metaphor teaches us that a word can
denote one thing and connote another, the two being at once different
yet related. Landscape offers a view of totality, drawing as it does a
relation between near and far, sky and Earth, man and Nature, thus, an
individual vantage point in a shared world. By giving free play to
differences based on a shared set of references, poetry proposes a mode
of communication based on exchange among these pecularities rather than
on their obliteration. Correct expression produces the conditions for
correct relations with others.
Comments assembled
by Chantal Colomb. Michel Collot responded to the interview questions in
writing.
Copyr. Michel
Collot
Translation: © 2000 p h i l
o p h o n e m a™, New York
Revue
Prétexte: ( web
/ email )
Lionel Destremau, Directeur de la Publication
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