Folklorismes, Louis-Martin Savard
Perce-Neige,
2023
Moving between the forms of travel journal, research notes, daily observations, childhood memoir, and immediately recognizable poetry, Louis-Martin Savard’s second collection, Folklorismes, is a doubling of an attempt to find the original version of tradition. In highlighting the actions through which history and traditions – and here, specifically, songs – are transmitted, it leans toward the impossibility to find anything of the past other than what we can make of it today.
In Québec and communities that emerged out of French Canada, there is a kind of folk music that is known as trad, or even, these days, néo-trad. It has enjoyed a revival over the past decades, first through the success of La Bottine Souriante, then that of Kaïn and the more modest reach of groups likes Le Vent du Nord, De Temps Antan, Salebarbes, as well as groups across the country such as La Raquette à claquettes here in Saskatchewan. Yet it was also present in popular music, notably in Paul Piché’s earlier albums, Groovy Aardvark’s collaboration with La Bottine’s singer in the 1990s, or in Les Cowboys Fringants’ country-pop.
Trad is also a continuation of the songs Savard studies as a professor of French studies at the University of Moncton. As he explains, these songs go back to those of the coureurs des bois and canoers, back to the songs brought from France and Ireland and Scotland, sung through generations at kitchen parties and then at bedtime (so that I for instance would be sung fishermen’s songs before bed). But unlike trad music, Savard’s writing does not directly pick up on the form of the song.
Instead, by offering variations on prose texts, or arrangements of poems in parts, Savard reproduces the reality of archival research as well as that of the life of traditional songs. Much of the book is composed of prose texts that relate a memory or a part of his research into archives and into those whose version of traditional songs are recorded. Yet he does not let his prose tell the whole of a story: he follows a moment, an encounter, an experience, and reinterprets them through a poem, sometimes a few poems, that jumble the order of ideas and words and so bring forth new meanings. These poems take away the narrative of their other version and bring attention to the impression left by the event, to what is left of it. Yet they also mostly function as part of their relationship to the corresponding page of prose: they are not fully poems, if they are taken in the sense of autonomous texts. Still, these poems carry a meaning that is hidden, potential, in the prose equivalent, so that there are points of correspondence, but no equivalence between the two wholes.
In “La boite” (“The Box”), the second paragraph reads, translated:
The best way to get closer to this founding text is thus to collect a maximum of variants and fragments in order to compare their respective elements. A reconstitution can then be proposed. This method, borrowed from the specialists of the study of ancient manuscripts, generates versions that we call “aesthetic” or “critical.” (14)
While the first stanza of its poetic variant offers:
tradition provokes
the ancient text
the mind finds it
again
compares each of
its founding fantasies
that alter
themselves
down to the
amalgams
variants in the oral space
la tradition provoque le texte ancien
l’esprit le retrouve
en compare chaque fantasme fondateur
qui s’altère
jusqu’aux amalgames
variables de l’espace oral (15)
Other poems are presented through variations, without a stable fixed version. Thus the second of two stanzas in Variation A of “Le calme de l’air” (“The quiet of the air”) has a corresponding set of words and ideas in the first of two stanzas in Variation B, with which it shares a lexical field. The two poems are variations of each other, but not variations on a same poem. They are not versions, they carry different meanings, they ascribe intentionality and reverse each other’s movement (not unlike the movement of the tide that serves as an anchoring point for both poems).
Thus we read in Variation A:
“in the calm of
the marine air / I drink the faithful coffee / the tide brings me”
(“dans le calme de l’air marin / je bois le café
fidèle / que la marée m’amène,” 25)
While in Variation B we find:
“under the
faithful mud / in the porpoise calm / a speech of aboiteaux / drinks the serene
tide”
(“sous la vase fidèle / dans le calme marsouin / une
parole d’aboiteaux / boit la marée sereine,” 26)
In other sections of the book, we find more straightforward collections of poems in verse (as in “Informateurs” or “Informants,” named after the people the speaker has interviewed for his research) or of short narratives. Savard is fully aware of how close he can get to the essay form in some of the more narrative passages in prose, and embraces this proximity by creating a photocopy of a page from an equally created scholarly book about the oral tradition in song – which then gets its own poem as a “Fragment.” These fragments appear throughout the book, and seem to give us part of an experience or creative process that never found its full expression and awaits a reader to get there.
The book seems to be put together to get a point across, but it avoids the essay’s linear movement from intention to goal. It demonstrates that traditions are primary to the texts that we might tend to see as originary, that the past only exists in its transformation and in the that we can find in its discovery. This function however is secondary to what songs and poetry alike are meant to do: give courage, bring people together, exercise memory, keep the past alive while letting it breathe and transforming it.
Folklorismes indeed achieves that which it seems to be meant to demonstrate. The method Savard exposes and reverses in “La boite” permeates his own writing, allowing him to explore the founding fantasies at the heart of his work – a few memories where song and music that led to Savard’s love of folk music, neatly separate from the accounts of his research but nonetheless explicitly related to his quest through the poetic exploration of the fantasies that carry it and give it meaning.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. Perhaps he ought to explore the fantasies that feed his own research and that have led to edited books, journal issues, and academic articles that clearly have nothing to do with any of this, but very likely very much do have everything to do with it. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, 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’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.