allumettes (poèmes engageants 2014-2019), Charles Leblanc
Les Éditions
du Blé, 2021
After my first collection came out, I was invited to read at the Winnipeg's Writers Festival. Among the poets I had the chance to meet, Charles Leblanc was often around, taking time to chat, asking questions, telling me about the Francophone poetry scene in St-Boniface – the cercle post-néo-rieliste, but mostly the poets gathered around the Éditions du Blé. He gave me a t-shirt from the circle, and a copy of his book heures d'ouverture (opening hours).
allumettes (matches) continues in the spirit of heures d’ouverture (2007) and soubresaults (jolts, 2013): to their “poems of ongoing life 2002-2007” and “unplanned poems 2007-2012” it adds “engaging poems 2014-2019” – a play on political engagement. While these books are very much collections of single poems, these generally share a confessional tone, references to pop culture that are as much identification as distanciation devices, and a concern for the emotional states and moments of daily life.
In heures d’ouverture Leblanc rewrites Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” writes for Al Purdy, for Berthold Brecht, for his friends; in soubresauts he writes for Gabrielle Roy, for Sun Ra, for poets Gérald Leblanc and J.R. Léveillée, for Roberto Bolaño, amongst others. He writes at poetry festivals (as he does in “poésie in caraquet,” from allumettes), about the discoveries and meetings they allow, and about poetry itself. In many of his longer poems he adopts the format of popular music lyrics, often minus the chorus, where each stanza tells a parallel story, where something like universality is found in repetition and variation. The “songs to breathe in” (“chansons à respirer”) in heures d’ouverture and the “musiques” in soubresauts show the meditative aspect of popular music and rock, and take it up to draw poetry away from its conventions.
These three latest collections mix longer, 3-4 page poems with short single stanza poems, and the desire for others with the desire for another world. In “economic mechanics (a theory of value)” (in soubresauts), he does both and brings his attention – and ours – to “human labour at the source of the rest / that invents the machines that fabricate the objects / merchandising / in stores” (“travail humain à la source du reste / qui invente les machines qui fabriquent les objets / qui se marchandisent / dans les magasins,” 44).
While he now works as a translator, Leblanc carries the memory of factory work. Comparing Gabrielle Roy’s character and his own mother “standing on the bridge ready for encounters” (“debout sur le pont prêtes aux rencontres,” soubresauts, p. 15), he also accounts for the alienation of women and of workers that calls for becoming the main character in their own story, rather than following the plot set by others. Through his earlier collections he achieved recognition as a working class poet and acquired the reputation of an iconoclast leading class struggle through poetry – not exactly an expected profile within minority francophone communities.
The revolution often shows up, as does feminism – if this review/profile was about one of his earlier books, I would have focused on his articulation of poetry, revolution as a poet, and feminism as a man. His first collection, Préviouzes du printemps (“Pre-vee-ews of the Spring,” 1984), was an atypical take on the typical experimental first collection, trying on several styles and formats. Yet the poem that stands out the most to me (and is worthy of being anthologized among prairie poems) is one of its most standard poems, “Prairie Wind,” in which Leblanc brings together farmers and workers and First Nations and Métis people in revolt against the bosses and the owners of the infrastructure on which all economic life depends.
The form and tone of Leblanc’s poems became more fixed with his following book in 1988, but from his first effort he was at work weaving rock, love, and revolution together. And if there is a continuous thread through Leblanc’s work, it is most definitely the reversibility of sensuality and revolution, which he names in d’amours et d’eaux troubles (“on loves and troubled waters,” 1988):
she had told me
write a poem about
baths some
-thing sensual not
political
in fact it’ll be
political because it’s sensual
she was right
(taking a bath
is taking back
stolen time
for the boss’
happiness
it’s sensual just
to think about it)
elle m’avait dit
écrit un poème à
propos des bains quelque
chose de sensuel
pas politique
en fait ça va être
politique parce que c’est sensuel
elle avait raison
(prendre un bain
c’est reprendre le
temps volé
pour le bonheur du
boss
c’est sensuel rien
que d’y penser) (72)
***
Reading allumettes feels like sitting down with someone over a beer. The familiar tone, the moving from subject to subject. The speech that’s neither percussive, nor secret either, easing the way for what Leblanc is eager to share, if only to figure out for himself. And I’m specifically picturing certain bars, or taverns, not quite dives but certainly places where we’re meant to sit down in the dark and do just that, drink and talk, share something within the intimacy of the four corners of a table or page. Sharing with plenty of common cultural references, to ensure that a bond already exists and will continue, a way to buttress the vulnerability of the real conversation.
The last section of allumettes includes two “songs without music” which, again, reference rock, but the entirety of the book has the lightness of rock songs, their directness. In line with rock aesthetics, Leblanc notices and seeks out occasions that are improper, inappropriate, that run slightly counter to public morality and expectations, or that allow him to be all of those things at once, showing that he knows full well what he is doing as he is doing it. He effectively proves and disproves Plato’s condemnation of the body and of poetry by playing on the proximity of “Platon” and “pantalon”:
deep in ideas and
their words
it’s hard
to think about
plato
when the woman you
love
is rummaging in
your pants
plongé dans les
idées et leurs mots
c’est difficile
de penser à platon
quand la femme que
t’aimes
farfouille dans
ton pantalon (63)
Sex, but also non-sexual physical intimacy, often appear as liberatory and energizing activities, a moment of communion and joy, a moment of respite and pleasure, a deepening of love through withdrawal from and return to the world. More generally in allumettes love is a relationship to others and to places, an anchoring that’s also a detachment from capitalism, from ideology, from alienation. It’s concrete, physical, emotional, and ideal; it’s a remedy against abstractions.
The poems about love come after the poems that are more directly political. Here, the political rests in refusal and resistance to hatred and destruction, where poems are reactions to violence, like “attentats” (“attacks”). Leblanc reacts to the Quebec City Grand Mosque shooting, the Bataclan shooting and the series of attacks that took place in the same period around the Mediterranean and beyond, fascism, the destruction of artifacts, various forms of integrism, unemployment, commerce, climate change, racism, and all forms of discrimination. Perhaps he reaches for too much at once; perhaps he is simply communicating a feeling that there is too much all at once. I found both frustration and solace in the dissatisfaction expressed and cause by many of these poems. “Faits divers” (“miscellania”) addresses the need to name and make sense of the images of suffering and destructions we are bombarded with: in a series of couplets the genocide of Indigenous women and girls finds its place beside desertification, war affects families and soldiers alike, and “too much fear and too little well-targeted rage / panic neighbours indifference” (“trop de peur et trop peu de rage bien ciblée / la panique voisine l’indifférence,” 31). Leblanc does not assert knowing how to aim his rage, only that there must be a way to do so, beginning with “healing our deleriums” (“soigner nos délires,” 31). There is too much to perceive and receive, and Leblanc has no choice but to receive it. In “l’oreille où l’autre vit (où l’autre vie)” (“the ear where the other lives (where other lives)”), stories, music, and the noises and cries of life that surround him all coexist, tying him to fiction, to the past, and to the present of his city.
These “political” poems also carry an anti-religious anger. Leblanc tends to reduce religion to his memories of catholicism and to the worst of what is done in the name of a god that “was a void waiting / for something;” “as for me I filled it / with the wrongs of the world / to get rid of them” (“était un vide en attente / de quelque chose // [...] // moi je l’ai rempli / des maux du monde / pour m’en débarrasser,” 38). Iconoclasmic rage extends to theology, turns what is said to be substance into a mere icon for human desires.
There’s something of a dialectic in these inversions, in these invocations of people and internal discussions with them. We’re left to finish the movement ourselves, but we are not left alone. As much as Leblanc turns within, others are always there, and he stands ready to encounter them, his ears open to the past and to the present.
[Read three poems from allumettes]
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.