The following review of Self-portrait of John Ashbery. An improvised ceremony, a book by Pierre Vinclair, comes to us by way of Diakritik, and online French culture magazine, here in English by way of Google Translate. He has much to say about “it.”
Stéphane Bouquet December 8, 2021 Books, Pierre Vinclair, Stéphane Bouquet
Pierre Vinclair: Self-portrait of John Ashbery
Some time ago Pierre Vinclair had crossed, step by step, the long desolate land of a famous poem by T. S. Eliot (Uncultivated Land. Thinking in the illegible, 2018). Here he is taking back his sherpa bag to climb another Everest: John Ashbery and his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a very long poem written by the American poet Ashbery (1927-2017) in echo, in memory, mirror of the eponymous canvas of the Italian painter Parmigianino (1503-1540). It would not make much sense to summarize Vinclair's luminous and exciting close reading of these verses, since it is precisely the detail, precision and magnifying glass effect that make up all the value and flavor of this bilingual reading (bilingual because attention to the subtleties of English and the inherent difficulties of translation is remarkable) - a reading that crosses verses full of pitfalls without failing. So read closely.
If it is difficult to summarize what Vinclair makes say to a precise section between two verses or to Ashbery's deliberately nebulous use of the pronoun "it" by Ashbery, we can make this book another reading, a kind of meta-reading and learn some lessons about Pierre Vinclair's poetics and what drives him to think / write. It is therefore a certain idea of poetry that is thus emerging through the reading of another, and as if mirrored. A certain idea of poetry that makes poetry, precisely, a territory of the idea. So be four lessons:
A poem is long - even short, it is long that is to say, it is part of a gesture that tends to surpass it itself (example the dozen en masse of a recent book by Pierre Vinclair, La Sauvagerie). I remember Ashbery says somewhere that you can't be a great poet if you haven't written a long poem at least once. This is absurd of course, but it is not absurd from Ashbery's point of view or probably Vinclair's. A poem is long because it has a totality before it. The totality in a way is his duty. As much space as possible and as much time as possible. I remember Ashbery saying somewhere that he strives to use as many words of the language as possible: unpublished, rare, unusual, infrequent. The more space and the more time and the most lexicon: a poem is long because it has an encyclopedia of the world for horizon or for concern or effort.
A poem is a drama. He doesn't say something, he does something — Claire Nancy showed in "La Raison dramatique" (text published in the Po&sie magazine and accessible on the web) that the word drama has its origin in the verb dran which means, more or less, to make a choice, to make a choice that engages. The question is: what does he do? or what can he do? In a way, Vinclair's response remains modest. Or modern. It depends. A poem states - this is modernity. A poem remains in language: it arranges fields of tension by organizing language, grammar, worm jumps etc. This is the whole meaning of making close readings of them. Because we only grasp the effect (action, doing it) of a poem by looking closely at the energy arrangement of its language and not by letting the atmosphere of the poem spread into us.
A poem is a form of knowledge or knowledge. Another modernist dimension: the poem is a way of accessing the world - for example through a mirror - and the way of accessing the world depends of course on the world given to us and which we can know and possibly inhabit. We can thus understand Vinclair's care in writing kinds of instructions for his own books (Acting not acting, Life of the poem): the instructions for use is already the poem in the sense that it reveals the perspectives (rhythmic, formal etc.) that the poem adopts on the world and therefore the world to which we will be possible or free to access.
A poem is still, in the end, meaning. Pierre Vinclair recognizes Ashbery's right to think that his poem is a flow - that it can be read as one surfs, without understanding, and simply following the waves of syntax, but this does not completely satisfy him and he defends the idea that it is still possible to "describe roughly objectively" what the poem does. Not what he does to me but what he does: his energy arrangements. He is surely also right. (I have always read John Ashbery in the other way, not really trying to understand but letting myself be carried almost hypnotically by the opiate scrolls of sentences, I read it as a late-night sensation rather than a meaning). What is striking in Vinclair's description of Ashbery's poem is that he always wonders what the poem means or means or designates. Even if it is to highlight impossibility, failure, complexity. He makes it the effort of a thinking subject. Not at all École de Genève, Vinclair does not let more or less unconscious patterns rise on the surface of the text. For me, who am more sensitive than him to the approach of a Jean-Pierre Richard or Georges Poulet, it seems to me that there is an atmosphere of threat in Self-portrait, a pervasive feeling of danger, the imminence of something but what? It seems to me that the snow, mist, winter that fall on this poem, carry within them an effect of suspense and imbalance. But, for Pierre Vinclair, this is not what matters first. The poem is above all, in the end, for him, perhaps less meaning strictly speaking than a form or function of thought, not the meaning but a way of making it. In this, Vinclair renews in his own way and again fresh the endless wedding anniversary of poetry and philosophy.
Pierre Vinclair, Self-portrait of John Ashbery. An improvised ceremony, Hermann editions, November 2021, 131 p., €22