L’Hexagone, 2019
Daniel
Leblanc-Poirier is onto something. A thrash surrealism, a hypertrophied Boris
Vian without any graves to spit on, or any concern for anybody’s grave. He
stands out from the thrash poetry movement in Québec (others do for other
reasons), maybe because of just how charming the thrashiness of his poems is.
This book is at times disarming by its honesty. At times endearing by its
uplifting images. At times frustrating by what feels like an intent to shock
for the sake of shocking.
I
find the book difficult because I don’t know who says “fuck you” to whom. The
author to the woman described in the book? The male speaker/character to the
female character? Her to him, in her almost complete silence and lack of
coherent response? Or given the lack of a clear orientation of this “fuck you,”
the writer to the reader?
Maybe
this “fuck you” is an answer to absurdity. There’s a lot of absurdity in this
collection. The focus is so clearly on providing images that the poems seem
inwardly fragmented. They are not ambiguous; instead, they escape
interpretation, so much so that their meaning could be entirely open. There is
absurdity, and not ambiguity, in passages like “when you arrive / I’d swear I
see / a sad tornado / of clementines” (“quand tu arrives / je jurerais voir /
une tornade triste / de clémentines,” 31). Why add the clementines, if not to
say that she is and is not a tornado, that there is something sad about her but
that she is not sad, and that these perceptions are entirely his?
There
is no point in pushing the interpretation very far; the act of reading forces
us as readers to give them a meaning of our own. Or to sit back and look at the
poems strictly aesthetically, as a mix of images that are clearly there in
front of us and emotions we know we are creating in response to them. The
absurdity is owned in the poems themselves:
and I’d like to
play on your finger
that vibrates when
you (push it) into the poutine
and I say shit
what are you doing
it’s a poutine and
you say no
it’s a wedding
and I never
understand
where you’re going
with this
et je voudrais
jouer sur ton doigt
qui vibre quand tu
l’enfonces dans la poutine
et que je dis
calice qu’est-ce que tu fais là
c’est une poutine
et tu dis non
c’est un mariage
et je ne comprends
jamais
où tu veux en
venir (18)
The
book, and the poems, do have features: sex, bodies, food, music, drugs.
Genitalia, which accounts for at least three of these. These features are
combined, recombined, to offer images that in spite of their implausibility or
impossibility can very easily be imagined. The combinations do offer moments of
joy and crass beauty, like in this poem:
vagina vagina
mucky your guitar
it shaves me
I am fulfilled
vagina vagina
seed
and the beet
I’m banging on
shapes a silence
in the crescendo
of the living room
you play the
tablet
my love you’re
blinking with a dilaudid
me at point blank
I play the potato
and the music is
beautiful
you turn and you
dance
like a tap
at the corner of
rosemont street
vagin vagin
crottée ta guitare
elle me rase
je suis comblé
vagin vagin
graine
et la betterave
que je tapoche
forme un silence
dans le crescendo
du salon
tu joues de la
tablette
mon amour tu
clignotes avec un dilaudid
moi à bout portant
je joue de la
patate
et la musique est
belle
tu tournes et tu
danses
comme une
champlure
au coin de la rue
rosemont (55)
Here
the somewhat infantile incantation of genitalia is acknowledged and immediately
replaced with even more absurdity. In spite of their repetition the poems are
not about sex, bodies, food, or music, or drugs. They are quite openly about a
relationship. Even taken together, they offer no arc, and little retrospective
meaning. Perhaps there is blinking, alternating between emotional states, joy
and worry, but no emotion exists alone here.
The
relationship is not simple or uncomplicated. The speaker recognizes that he is
dominated, but also that he desires this domination. This desire doesn’t go
without hesitation: “you call me / my toundra is in orbit / the telephone sucks
my confessions / and I compose a ladder up to doubt” (“tu m’appelles / j’ai la
toundra en orbite / le téléphone suce mes aveux / et je compose une échelle
jusqu’au doute,” 35).
Violence
flows through the relationship, but rarely openly, only as a possibility, as
part of an exchange where the speaker gives, the woman he (tells he) loves
receives, and the speaker receives some kind of gratification or reassurance as
a result of this gift. Violence is at times one possible meaning, depending on
our desire as readers to see it in the poem or not:
I want to touch
the cushion
when you ask me
for the arboreal smells
of the morning I
could pick up a knife
trace your face
say
you smell good
like a train
that’s falling
from a cliff
je veux toucher le
coussin
quand tu me
demandes les odeurs arboricoles
de la matinée je
pourrais prendre un couteau
tracer ton visage
dire
tu sens bon comme
un train
qui tombe d’une
falaise (29)
Is
the train falling a bad thing? Is it her face he traces with a knife, or is he
tracing her face onto another surface? Is there an equivalence between saying
these words and tracing with a knife? The reader is already forced to decide
early on in this stanza: does the request lead to a desire to touch a cushion
(and find some kind of comfort) or to the possible desire to pick up a knife?
This poem, like most, features how images can exist in pure juxtaposition,
without clues to bind them into a greater whole. They are close to a stream of
consciousness writing, a stream of hallucinations.
So
this isn’t a collection about the search for meaning in the aesthetic, in food
and drug and sex, or about how they stand in the way of a genuine relationship.
I can’t help but feel that Leblanc-Poirier knows what he’s doing even though
there’s no indication for us to guess what that is. He points at propriety and
at the monstruous, hides heroin, morphine, and pills in metaphors that either
mean absolutely nothing and illustrate the meaninglessness of what we do, or
that force us to figure out what our own drugs are. He creates images out of
ethics and pedophiles, out of unceded territories, out of feminism and
transphobia; he leaves no room for the well-meaning and the righteous. He’s not
nihilistic, he does things to us with words, forces us to choose between
putting the book down to look down on it, or putting ourselves in the poems in
spite of the fact that his writing makes it nearly impossible to identify with
anything in the poems.
Maybe
this “fuck you” is addressed to the reader after all.
Jérôme Melançon writes and
teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the
author of two books of poetry, De perdre
tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas
quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité
(Metispresses, 2018), and has a bilingual chapbook newly out with
above/ground press, Coup.