Quand je ne dis rien je pense encore, Camille Readman Prud’homme
L’Oie de Cravan, 2021
There is an appreciable gap between the considerable attention poets and the broader reading public have given to Camille Readman Prud’homme’s debut collection, Quand je ne dis rien je pense encore (When I do not speak I am still thinking), and the intimacy of its internal monologue that abolishes the difference between speech and thought. These soft-voiced, pensive, often philosophical, often surprising and always subtle poems offer opportunities for active, frantic thought as much as meditation or conversation.
The audience this book is finding is certainly a result of Readman Prud’homme’s capacity to speak to each person individually. The quiet strength of these poems allows them to withstand the pressure created by the praise it has received, as well as its growing readership. The copy I was recently given (by the author, after I related how I repeatedly and almost comically failed to procure it myself in many ways) indicates a tenth printing in April 2023. Even with small printing runs, that number indicates this book’s capacity to travel from one reader to another and to spark enthusiasm.
The underlying concept behind these poems and the collection as a whole follows its title. The sections follow the motions of leaving a home, a space of secure and comfortable solitude – and the first, “sometimes I dislocate myself,” certainly takes up an additional meaning once translated into English. Throughout there is a sense of loss and of impeding catastrophe, as well as a search for assurance and confidence in the face of the perceptions of others. The speaker’s steadfastness and faithfulness to herself does not lessen the chore of leaving her home, and herself, to reach others and to create an image of herself that will allow some interplay with the images others construct of her.
The collection provides an incredibly active series of first persons as it moves between the self-disclosing je, the generic tu, the abstract on, the inclusive nous. Several portraits of kinds of people also appear in the third person plural. Their activity takes place in the lowered volume of the lower case and the certainty of well-placed punctuation. While Readman Prud’homme observes others, and observes herself observing them, she continuously maintains a proximity to them, maps out points of comparison, establishes juxtapositions or parallels. She is fully within her observations of herself, bringing her closer to others, and further from herself – but with the kind of distance that belongs to the person who is getting nearer to another, rather than the kind that is forced by the need to take a step back to understand oneself.
This movement of becoming closer to what is most intimate about herself by adopting the initial distance of alterity is the poetic movement that drives the collection. Readman Prud’homme borrows from the language of the day to day recounting of events – not the language of storytelling, not the language of lessons or care or heroism or bequeathing. Each poem begins after the initial contact, within a moment of silence that follows a conversation that has come to an end, the sudden and urging desire not simply to say something, but to respond to the shared moment taken as a whole. The lack of capitalized letters nourishes this impression: no sentence here is an absolute beginning, no sentence follows what had been said previously. The occasional poem in verse breaks up the rhythm of the reflective prose poems that make up most of the collection, making the entry of pre-existing strands of thought into the conversation even clearer.
The poetic work is the creation of a soft language, an interpellation without a request, a non-confessional intimacy, a mixing of the speaker and the addressee – especially where the first person is projected onto the second:
“there is what you throw and what you keep, and if at times you think about yourself as a set of avowed and veiled surges, you know that beneath the attraction of evidence pieces of each disappear. to show lays you bare and you reconcile yourself to a truncated appearance.”
“il y a ce que tu lances et ce que tu gardes, et si parfois tu penses à toi comme à un ensemble d’élans avoués et voilés, tu sais que sous l’attraction de l’évidence des morceaux de chacun disparaissent. montrer te dépouille et tu te résous à apparaître tronquée.” (77)
The beauty of the work on language lies in the partial failure of communication and proximity. The ease with which the speaker gets hurt is equaled only by her determination to carry the exchange, to reach a state of dialogue:
“you are there discussing with someone and you discover suddenly that you had been speaking to the void, the person is there but it is now only a body. what you had been saying has been left for the storm in the sky, for the passerby who looks right out of another time, for the smell of pizza, for the song that’s on.”
“tu es à discuter avec quelqu’un et tu découvres tout
à coup que tu parlais au vide, la personne est là mais ce n’est plus qu’un
corps. on a quitté ce que tu disais pour le ciel de tempête, pour le passant
qui semble sorti d’une autre époque, pour l’odeur de pizza, pour la chanson qui
passe.” (91)
The failure is partial because the difficulty in reaching others is presented from the beginning as the corollary of the impossibility of melding with others, or with oneself, given the ceaseless presence of others. And indeed his difficulty of reaching others is balanced out by the ease of going too far in getting near others (and not minding this excess):
“you know it would be best to hold back on your use of the word love, but you spend it, for brass doorknobs and for people who hesitate.”
“tu sais qu'il faudrait ménager l'usage du mot amour, mais tu le dépenses, pour les poignées de porte en laiton et les personnes qui hésitent.” (36)
Taken together, the poems show a rigorous attention to detail. Each poem in the section “sous les images” (“underneath the images,” or pictures) begins with some indication of time: also; sometimes; at home you find yourself; these days; it’s happened that; some nights; one day. Their juxtaposition destroys their mundanity, amplifies their capacity to make present a temporality that escapes the moment of the recounting.
Another section, “ce que nous avons, ce que je ne suis pas” (“what we have, what I am not”), in addition to taking up that major concern of existential thought, the difference between having and being, has every poem beginning with a question of knowledge of the other, “j’ai connu des gens” (“I have known people”):
“i have known people who spoke of what they loved as if it were a part of them, i believed that some street corners and some movies belonged to them. they took Ella Fitzgerald and Fullum street, i took lilacs in bloom and the colour ochre.”
“j’ai connu des gens qui parlaient de ce qu’ils aimaient comme s’il s’agissait d’une partie d’eux-mêmes, j’ai cru que certains coins de rue et certains films leur appartenaient. ils ont pris Ella Fitzgerald et la rue Fullum, j’ai pris les lilas en fleurs et la couleur ocre.” (82)
Another reading, a more philosophical one, would follow the progression of the ideas closely, beginning with the preparatory poems that addresses readers as a group (vous). There is a phenomenology of intimate life here, of our capacity and need to be with ourselves, of the inevitability of reflection, of the difference between being among others and being with others, between being an object alongside others and having objects and others pass through one’s self. The solidity of Readman Prud’homme’s reflection lies in its ability to consider these oppositions, while holding them together as unavoidabily passing into one another. It is joyful in its discovery, transformative in the relationality it questions.
