Form and Love in the Poetry of Jacques Roubaud

This book is rooted in a love of poetry, and especially the poetry of Jacques Roubaud. A full-length study on any topic should be inspired by at least a sense of curiosity, but with poetry some might argue that the commitment is greater. Poetry’s apparently waning readership has been put down to its difficulty by Roubaud himself. In his Poésie, etcetera: ménage [Poetry, etcetera: Housekeeping] the poet speaks of doing ‘le ménage dans [sa] tête’ [mental housekeeping] with regard to a number of questions he feels poets are faced with today, including ‘La poésie contemporaine, pourquoi si difficile?’ [Contemporary poetry, why so difficult?], to which he dedicates an entire section of this pocket-sized theoretical treatise.¹ He suggests several reasons for the perceived difficulty of poetry, including our lack of understanding as to why the genre should exist in the first place, the challenge of tackling a new metre and the barrier that is our lack of patience when confronted with a text we cannot penetrate.²

The obstacle perhaps most likely to intervene in a reading of Jacques Roubaud’s own poems is that of ‘l’ignorance de la poésie qui se fait’ [not knowing about the poetry that is being written], or a non-familiarity which functions on two levels.³ Roubaud explains: ‘la poésie est liée à la mémoire, elle l’est à la mémoire de chacun; si elle n’est pas, ou plus, dans votre mémoire, alors vous ne connaissez plus ce qu’est la poésie’ [poetry is linked to memory, it is linked to each person’s memory; if it isn’t in your memory, or it was but no longer is now, then you don’t know what poetry is any more].⁴ When we are not in the habit of reading poetry, we lose the very sense of how to read it: it is traditionally something which is memorized, or recited, gaining additional meaning through its gradual absorption into our mind, and also through its constant comparison there with other poems. Immersion will be more difficult for someone not already familiar with poetry and its techniques. The problem with contemporary poetry then is one of change, or rather our reluctance to accept change. When poems no longer sound like those we used to know, the patterns we have memorized, whether the difference is one of ‘vocabulaire, constructions, formes, présentation, idées, …’ [vocabulary, constructions, form, arrangement, ideas, …], their language comes across as ‘insolite’ [unusual], ‘étrange’ [strange] or ‘difficile’ [difficult].⁵

Critic Alain Bosquet singles out Roubaud’s Trente et un au cube [Thirty-One Cubed] for its lack of penetrability for the average reader: ‘le malheur est que, pour le lecteur de bonne volonté moyenne, Jacques Roubaud se barricade dans ses livres et en interdit l’accès’ [the unfortunate thing is that, for the average reader, Jacques Roubaud barricades himself in his books and forbids anyone else from entering].⁶ The volume Bosquet criticizes, true to its title, is described by Roubaud as ‘un livre composé d’un poème qui est trente et un poèmes, dont chacun est trente et une lignes (ou vers), chaque ligne comptée trente et un (suivant le décompte que voici: chaque voyelle non élidée est 1, chaque e muet (élidé ou non) est 1 ou 0 au choix)’ [a book that is a poem of thirty-one poems, each of which is thirty-one lines long, and every line made up of thirty-one syllables (according to the following count: each non-elided vowel is 1, each mute e (elided or not) can be 1 or 0)].⁷ The implications of this description for an analysis of the form of Trente et un au cube will be discussed in more detail elsewhere in this study, but a superficial glance is enough to identify the difficulties of ‘ignorance’ or ‘non-familiarity’, which a reader might experience. The emphasis on the syllable count, in particular the reference to the e caduc [mute e], implies an assumed knowledge of traditional methods of counting French verse. An ear trained in conventional metres will also pick up on Roubaud’s radical break here, since his lines of thirty-one syllables are divided into counts of 5-7-5-7-7 after the Japanese tanka, an unexpected sequence in French verse. A reader of Trente et un au cube might also be struck by the prominence of its intertextuality. This operates visually throughout the book, as the poems are interspersed with nearly blank pages dedicated to single quotations from other texts, sometimes poetic, but also mathematical and scientific ones. A final page of credits at the end of the volume attributes some of the intertextual extracts to their respective authors, but not all are identified.

A reader of the book should then be sufficiently familiar with the rhythms of traditional French metres; her memory should know the patterns of poetry, if only to be able to notice the contrast made with the deviating scansions employed here. Through this play with the poems’ metrical features and the proliferation of intertextual references, Roubaud places his poetry within a series of interconnecting relationships with the writings of others. Perhaps Jacques Roubaud’s poems are ‘difficult’ then, but an intricate, concentrated, repeated reading yields greater rewards: an awareness of the links extending beyond his texts brings to light a network of allusions and associations that might otherwise have remained hidden.

Other readers of Roubaud have responded more sensitively than Bosquet to the dense quality of his poetry. Jean-François Puff writes of the demands made on a reader of Trente et un au cube as ‘un investissement, intense, dans une complexité que le désir seul peut soutenir, le désir ou l’amour de la poésie’ [an intense investment in a complexity that only desire can maintain, desire or a love of poetry].⁸ Here the reader’s love of poetry takes the form of perseverance through the sheer complexity of the poem itself. For Puff, the challenge lies in the layers of meaning that constitute the text:

Il faudrait notamment considérer quel usage conjointement formel et expressif Jacques Roubaud fait de la théorie du rythme qu’il a contribué à développer […]. Consubstantielle à la forme du poème, cette théorie en soutient aussi le sens. Cela exige une vraie lecture de la théorie et de la poésie.⁹

[In particular, the reader should consider Jacques Roubaud’s jointly formal and expressive use of the theory of rhythm that he had a hand in developing […]. An integral part of the poem’s form, this theory also underpins its meaning. This requires a committed reading of the theory and the poetry.]

To know the poem is also to know the theory of rhythm that it speaks of and through, the theory that is both subject matter and form of the poem. There are echoes of this approach in Jean-Jacques Poucel’s reading of Trente et un au cube. Like Puff, Poucel recognizes the overlap of content and form in the book as key to its understanding: ‘Roubaud’s poetic “cube” foregrounds how formal constraints engender textual meaning.’¹⁰ Poucel also explains that the theoretical value of the work is articulated through the poetry itself: ‘Reading the work as a poetic treatise on the art of poetry is fundamental to understanding how Roubaud turns literary self-referentiality into a study of poetic rhythm and memory.’¹¹ What is common to both arguments is not only the self-reflexivity of Trente et un au cube but also its particular way of engaging the reader, inviting her to participate in her own relationship with the text. That idea has been central to the impetus behind my study of Roubaud’s poetry.

The self-reflexivity of his writing and a beckoning to the reader come together at a particular moment in Roubaud’s poem of poems:

le chant | se perd qui circule | seulement contre soi-même | rouille gèle se dissout ||| s’altère cède se | complique. voilà ce que | je lis pour toi sous | ces quatre vers de Bernart | Marti ‘lo pintor’ (ainsi || s’est-il nommé lui- | même dans une chanson) | ensuite je lis | ce vers d’un poème de | lui, perdu avec le chan || sonnier de Sault (pillé par Jehan de Nostredame) | ‘tant es ma donna | endurmyda’ (car ma dame | est si profondément en- || dormie) j’écris silencieusement sur ma feuille | 21 × 27 | dans la jaune lumière endurmyda qui vient de droite || le déclic du radiateur stimulé par son | rhéostat envoie | une lueur rouge dans | le verre laiteux de la ||| télévision; je le | note aussi. je te regarde | dormir. tu dors nue | tranquillement appliquée | tranquillement arrondie.¹²

[the song | is lost when it meets | nothing but itself | it rusts freezes dissolves ||| falters gives in gets | tangled. this is what | I read to you in | these four lines by Bernart | Marti ‘lo pintor’ (so || he called him- | self in a song) | then I read | this line from a poem by | him, lost with the song- || book of Sault (plundered by Jehan de Nostredame) | ‘tant es ma donna | endurmyda’ (for my lady | sleeps so | deeply) I write silently on my page | 21 x 27 | in the yellow light endurmyda that comes from the right || the clicking on of the radiator triggered by its | rheostat sends | a red glow into | the milky glass of the ||| television; I note | that too. I watch you | sleeping. you sleep naked | quietly applied | quietly curved.]

These words and the visual components of the setting that they evoke have worked their way into my memory; I am drawn to this moment in time captured in poetry for a multiplicity of reasons. I am initially intrigued by its self-referential quality. Roubaud writes the details of the act of composition into the poem itself: ‘“tant es ma donna | endurmyda” (car ma dame | est si profondément en- || dormie) j’écris silencieusement sur ma feuille’ [‘tant es ma donna | endurmyda’ (for my lady | sleeps so | deeply) I write silently on my page], then ‘le verre laiteux de la ||| télévision; je le | note aussi’ [the milky glass of the ||| television; I note | that too]. It is as though the reader is given a privileged position presiding over the creation of the text as it comes into being. The time of composition, the poet’s writing and noting, merges with the moment in which the reader’s eyes scan the words on the printed page of the published volume. The poet also states that the poem needs a listener, a reader, an addressee of some sort, in order to survive. Without someone to respond to it, to activate it, ‘le chant […] | rouille gèle se dissout ||| s’altère cède se | complique’ [the song […] | rusts freezes dissolves ||| falters gives in gets | tangled]. The sense of movement which derives from the enumeration and accumulation of verbs comes up against notions of decay, immobility and confused entanglement in the semantic value of the words. While the ‘chant’ then still exists and remains dynamic in some monstrous form, it only ends in ruin when not directed towards someone in particular.

The markers of contemporaneity in the piece also captivate the reader. Roubaud’s situation watching his lover as she sleeps reminds him of a line of poetry from the past: ‘“tant es ma donna | endurmyda” (car ma dame | est si profondément en- || dormie)’ [(for my lady | sleeps so | deeply)]. The scene brings the line out in his memory, giving it new relevance in the present moment. The effect is one of a mise en abyme, like viewing a window through a window. I cannot help but wonder at the surprising juxtaposition of a verse of troubadour love poetry with ‘le déclic du radiateur’ [the clicking on of the radiator] and ‘le verre laiteux de la ||| télévision’ [the milky glass of the ||| television]. The conspicuousness of the radiator’s click, and the unnatural light of the television come to life in the poem, functioning quite literally as distractions to the reader, perhaps to make her feel self-conscious, as reader. As I become aware of myself reading the lines of the verse and of being drawn into this intimacy with the poet and his lover, I realize that in some ways I am replicating the scene in the poem, for Roubaud too is reading another poet, Bernart Marti. Somehow the windows multiply, extending out towards me and creating a web of links between my present and the different pasts represented in the writing.

This book is rooted in a love of poetry in more ways than one. For Jacques Roubaud, there is necessarily love in reading poetry and the process of reading it is inextricably linked with the act of writing. As the poet composes these lines of Trente et un au cube, he reads both to his lover and to his reader who, addressed as ‘toi’, become one and the same at various points in the text: ‘voilà ce que | je lis pour toi sous | ces quatre vers de Bernart | Marti “lo pintor”’ [this is what | I read for you in | these four lines by Bernart | Marti ‘lo pintor’]. If ‘toi’ [you] encompasses both the lover and reader as addressee, in ‘je lis’ [I read] the poet’s announcement of reading becomes confused with the act of composing the text for our eyes; he writes those words in his poetry, but the first-person present tense seems to simultaneously perform the action of the verb in ‘je lis pour toi’ [I read for you]. Writing poetry is in part formed of reading it and the words of the poem emanate from this act of reading, that is, from ‘these four lines’ that Roubaud reads-writes for his lover and reader.

The four lines by Bernart Marti to which Roubaud refers are printed on the left-hand leaf of the book, parallel to the poem which unfolds to the right on the facing page:

aisi vauc entrebescant

los motz e’l so afinant

lengu’entrebescada

es en la baizada

ainsi je vais enlaçant

les mots et affinant la mélodie

comme la langue est enlacée

à la langue dans le baiser.¹³