Jérôme Melançon : La passion de Cobain, Jonathan Charette

La passion de Cobain, Jonathan Charette
L’écrou, 2021

 

 

 

Now, I would never had thought of starting a book of poems centred on Kurt Cobain with a quotation by Leonard Cohen as an epigraph. And using it directly in English, after dedicating the book to his parents, certainly sets the tone for Jonathan Charette’s La passion de Cobain (Cobain’s Passion). There is an immediate access to experience from where we are (in this case, Montreal), regardless of languages spoken.

In part, I am sure, because of the repetition of the same images, but not wholly for that reason, I remember clearly learning about Cobain’s death, watching people on TV looking busy around his house, as I stared intently at the inside of the room where he lay, the mess of it all. I was a Nirvana fan, even though I didn’t get much of their music, let alone what was happening – I was too young for that. I did love the chaos, even though it embarrassed me. I had a hard time accepting that Cobain used drugs, I didn’t understand this whole suicide thing. I knew people did it, I just hadn’t been confronted with it yet. Nothing shifted in me on April 5, 1994, but the event certainly stuck with me.

Charette was young too. He wasn’t a fan, didn’t really know Nirvana when Cobain died. But he was aware of his death at the time, and seems to have become a fan in the following months. Really, he discovers how certain kinds of music can beautifully wreck you – something that Bon Jovi just could never do. I suppose I only had a few months on him, the advantage of age. We learn this, about Charette or a version of him who speaks (minus my own experiences) in the first few poems of this focused, ambitious collection. These poems chronicle a passage, a transformation, in plain, direct language, with sparse use of poetic devices – usually one or two strong metaphors or images per page. The first section marks time, skipping a few months in between each poem, giving a sense of what it was like to be a teenager in Québec in the mid-90s. The crowd Nirvana brought you to, if you were serious enough about music and about your generalized disgust.

The poems would work well even for readers without that shared intimate experience of space and time – but to get the full charge of each poem in the first section, its intimate associations, there’s no getting around being able to hear each song that’s mentioned. Most poems seem to be crafted around a reference to a Nirvana song, which lends its tone and its specific energy. Otherwise, in not immediately knowing the difference between “Endless, Nameless” and “All Apologies,” something would be lost (but it’s never too late to get into Nirvana):

cloud of haschich
cloistered in my bedroom
after an oath of racket
I improvise Endless, Nameless
forced to concede some weight 

nuage de haschich
cloîtré dans ma chambre
après un serment de vacarme
j’improvise Endless, Nameless
obligation de jeter du lest (16)

Compare to this repetitive structure: 

affection for a girl
at night I prepare an approach
while listening to All Apologies 

freezing up the next day
unable to invite her
to that Friday’s dance
captive in the role
of the moping lover
I run my lines
while listening to All Apologies
that song of demotivation

affection pour une fille
le soir je prépare une approche
en écoutant All Apologies 

blocage le lendemain
incapable de l’inviter
à la danse du vendredi
prisonnier du rôle
de l’amoureux qui se morfond
je répète mon discours
en écoutant All Apologies
chanson de démotivation (18)

The second section’s musical focus is on songs and artists we know Cobain to have loved, those we discovered because he mentioned them, or because they were associated with him. This section marks time in the same way as the first, but there’s a nice twist, which I won’t spoil here. These poems show to what point a life’s atmosphere is the same, no matter its outcome: “beyond disappointments / a placid constellation / where pariahs are sovereign” (au-delà des déceptions / une constellation placide / où les parias sont souverains, 36).

The same temporality as the first section, minus the references to specific months and years, reappears in the third section, which follows Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter Frances Bean from birth to Cobain’s death. Rather than interrogating what it would have been like to live with Cobain, to be his daughter, Charette leaves the narration behind and explores what the symbols, the associations, the rituals, the social circles would be for a child who would simply take it for granted. I’ll pick a very obvious image for anyone who was into Nirvana when In Utero came out:

After the playful dismembering
of the artificial angel
Frances places the organs back
into the tearful hollows

[...]
a guinea pig’s resignation
in spite of the inversions
undertaker’s panic
horror disgust sacrilege
the body is not a dump

before the In Utero tour
Kurt replaces the pieces
of the mannequin in love
with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave

Après le dépeçage ludique
de l’ange artificiel
Frances remet les organes
dans les cavités larmoyantes

[...]
résignation du cobaye
malgré les inversions
panique du thanatologue
horreur dégoût sacrilège
le corps n’est pas un dépotoir

avant la tournée In Utero
Kurt replace les pièces
du mannequin en amour
avec L’Esclave mourant de Michelangelo (52)

The next section presents a similar attempt to imagine and describe a symbolic and affective disposition – that of Cobain’s last days. Our awareness of the coming tsunami shifts to its building, and Charette lets its advance slow down considerably as it gains height. The central element to which Charette returns, the trigger to Cobain’s fall, is the “treason / absolute treason / of being made into a monument / while living” (traîtrise / traîtrise absolue / d’être changé en monument / de son vivant, 69).

Where a true shift in voice takes place – perhaps where Charette feels or attempts no identification with his character – is in the second last section, where Courtney Love speaks both as a widow and in her now famous and unfortunate role as the accused in what remains a suicide.

“A blonde boy screams inside my lungs. The parasite enmeshes my system. Despite the discomfort, repulsion to dislodge it. Certainty of the damned: I am carrying my husband. Folly! Delirium! Solace.”

Un garçon blond hurle dans mes poumons. Le parasite phagocyte mon système. Malgré le malaise, répulsion à le déloger. Certitude d’une damnée : je porte mon mari. Sottise ! Délire ! Réconfort. (86)

Charette gives voice to Love who was robbed twice of herself. In five prose poems with short stanzas, she protests as much as she sings incantations and casts spells. But this voice is not meant to be Love’s own voice, there is no search for her mannerisms, her speech, her idiosyncrasies – anymore than anywhere else in the collection. This section offers the poems that are most detached from reality, the most sublimated and abstracted from real-world content, the rawest and most violent, with the strongest images – the closest to the affective life of rage and loss.

I’ll keep the coda secret. Its mystery, its imagery, and its optimism, its distance as well, all contribute to highlight the effects of the passage of time on all the pain, the hurt, the loss and the being lost that the poems carry forward and splay out so well. Besides, I’m not done with the book yet.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He is also the author of a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup (2020), and of 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) and a bunch of different attempts at figuring out human coexistence in journals and books nobody reads. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.

Jérôme Melançon : Une sorte de lumière spéciale, by Maude Veilleux

Une sorte de lumière spéciale, Maude Veilleux
L’Écrou, 2019.

 

  

 

It’s one thing to state that we can’t become someone else without ceasing to be who we were, or that we can’t leave it all behind. To make the idea true and meaningful requires a certainty that words like sincerity and authenticity don’t quite convey. Maude Veilleux relies on personal and collective introspection to recreate a connection between her selves, and these selves and those of the readers. There’s a Maude from Beauce, from working-class poverty, and there’s a Maude who lives within an artistic community in Montreal where there’s a different kind of poverty. This Maude who is writing proletarian poetry and wonders about the actuality of class struggle can’t adhere to her past. She is also kept from adhering to her new milieu because she is seen as too trashy - she or her poetry? - even though for her trash isn’t a poetics or a choice, but a matter of origins, a perceptual reaction of others to what she does still carry of her origins.

Veilleux sticks to a mostly non-metaphorical language that’s already signifying while leading an exploration of linguistic registers, code-switching and code-combining, and representations of daily life which are central to L’Écrou’s aesthetic. This shared project, which outlines something of a poetic movement within Québécois poetry, perhaps gives her the sense that “I am writing the same book as twelve other people” (j’écris le même livre que douze autres personnes, 60). Her reflection on writing finds its place in the writing itself, and Veilleux manages the feat of not producing theory even as she writes about writing and its demands: “I must write the text and write the text around the text and also live the text and live the text around the text” (je dois écrire le texte et écrire le texte autour du texte et aussi vivre le texte et vivre le texte autour du texte, 45). She does not let the reader forget that she is writing - or they are reading. Her vulnerability before the reader’s judgment remains tied to the vulnerability of life, images of brushes with death and suicide, and a desire for “total recognition” (72) that animates both impulses toward writing and death.

This total recognition is the reverse side of total alterity, the impossibility of any genuine understanding of others because of a lack of overlapping experience and knowledge:

I believe in total alterity
I dream of it
I can’t wait until we can take a trip in other people’s heads
a package to be won
I choose britney
or you over there in east broughton who works in a shop
the industrial era is over
so no one talks about your life
no one defends you
no one knows that they bring back the stock from mexico
that they open the bag and that they write
made in canada on it to sell it at a higher price
no one knows that at your work a guy died in his machine
you picked him up
you mopped up behind
total alterity

je crois à l’altérité totale
j’en rêve
j’ai hâte qu’on puisse faire des voyages dans la tête des autres
un forfait à gagner
je choisis britney
ou toi là-bas à east broughton qui travailles dans une shop
l’ère industrielle est finie
so personne ne parle de ta vie
personne ne te défend
personne sait qu’on ramène le stock du mexique
qu’on ouvre le sac et qu’on écrit
made in canada dessus pour le vendre plus cher
personne sait qu’à ta job un gars est mort dans sa machine
tu l’as ramassé
tu as moppé en arrière
altérité totale (46-47)

The poetic achievement of these poems and the tightly bound whole they make up come out of the use of introspection to allow for her situation to serve as a metaphor. A metaphor that isn’t on the page, but instead that needs a reader to activate it, that needs a will to identify, to shed the proprieties that protect us from each other, the borders and walls that protect the privilege of some. Anxiety, depression, and suicide aren’t only their own topics. They are gateways into relationships with the world and with others - gateways back to material, economic life.

Introspection takes place through the repetition of certain motifs in personal life, as a device for bringing moments together. So the cutting of carrots and the fear of her cat’s death show the constancy of the mistrust she feels from others and of her desire for permanence. Much of this introspection is turned toward solitude and brokenness, their reappropriation from the forces of distraction, the search for a course, a posture, a stance:

I feel alone
I always feel alone
I have a splinter in the engine
I have a heart in the engine
I don’t have a car
in a country where one is needed
yesterday I rolled my ankle with my new shoes
I cried
I wasn’t injured
I just started to cry
walking straight
not tipping over
not falling on my side right in the middle of the sidewalk
(the gif of the little girl who collapses on the beach)
I don’t know how to be anymore
I walk lying down
forehead to the ground
I fold on all sides
what strength in not breaking
better to be a reed that freaks out
than a big fucking tree right
here there’s a fracture

 

je me sens seule
je me sens toujours seule
j’ai une écharde dans le moteur
j’ai un coeur dans le moteur
je n’ai pas de char
dans un pays où il en faut un
hier je me suis versée le pied avec mes nouveaux souliers
j’ai pleuré
je n’étais pas blessée
j’ai juste commencé à pleurer
marcher drette
pas basculer
pas tomber sur le côté en plein milieu du trottoir
(le gif de la petite fille qui s’effondre sur la plage)
je ne sais plus comment être
je marche couchée
le front au sol
je plie de tous les bords
quelle force de ne pas casser
vaut mieux être un roseau qui capote
qu’un gros câlisse d’arbre right
ici il y une fracture (40-41)

These lines are only one part of a longer poem, and the length of most poems allows for such juxtapositions and small shifts in themes as the disjuncted narration progresses, and for intensity in images and rhythm. Some poems even seem to contain smaller poems, stanzas that hold on their own, just as the book feels like a single threaded poem.

Veilleux also uses a collective form of introspection, which focuses on the writers’ community, through direct references to names in the poems and footnotes, and on the tragedy of her hometown losing its one industry while having relied all along on close ties built through it. In one of the many explorations of the event, Abba lyrics are turned upside down in an illustration of a shared helplessness. The experience is collective, a part of everyone’s history and situation - and Veilleux takes part in it as the perfect participant-observer, the small-town bartender:

when the shop closed
it started up an abba frenzy at the bar
we listened to fernando forty times a day
every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
funny what’s channelled through pop
the men danced on the tables while telling themselves
that they would never in their life nail down another truss
their last paycheck
fallen into the lost accounts
the shop’s false bankruptcy gnawed at the village
they shrugged and drank their worries
believe me honestly
we only have ten minutes to live
ain’t about to cry over a job
a week later the bar was still full
long faces
the future
and what now?
what?
I was eighteen
no advice
no insight on life
another tall budlight
can you hear the gun fernando
the men, they cry too
and it seems it’s even sadder
because it comes out of a blocked place
 

quand la shop a fermé
ça a starté une frenzy d’abba au bar
on écoutait fernando quarante fois par jour
every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
c’est drôle ce qui se canalise dans la pop
les monsieurs dansaient sur les tables en se disant
qu’ils ne cloueraient plus jamais un trust de leur vie
leur dernier chèque de paye
tombé dans les comptes perdus
la fausse faillite de la shop grugeait le village
ils haussaient les épaules et buvaient leurs inquiétudes
crois-moi sincère
on a juste dix minutes pour vivre
m’as pas pleurer pour une job
une semaine plus tard le bar était encore plein
des faces longues
l’avenir
et puis quoi maintenant?
quoi?
j’avais dix-huit ans
aucun conseil
aucun insight on life
une autre grosse budlight
can you hear the gun, fernando
les monsieurs ça pleure aussi
et on dirait que c’est encore plus triste
parce que ça sort d’une place bouchée (67-68)

The success of Veilleux’s book as proletarian poetry is its organicity: everything is related, introspection leads back to material life, from food and the body to work and violence. After finding its way back several times to the desires to flee and find refuge, the book ends where introspection can only spiral: in the impossibility of fully facing violence, of truly communicating it, of having others recognize it - of finding oneself again, of bridging who violence took away from her and what it made of her. The last few pages of the book fall into the hypnotic repetition of consciousness in the middle of the night: mixed-up letters, spacing between and within thoughts, and exponents, a staccato rhythm. And an awareness of the impossibility to simply say certain things:

when I write violence do you all hurt
and when I write fear
and when I write crying
the word = the word
nothing more

 

quand j’écris violence avez-vous mal
et quand j’écris peur
et quand j’écris pleurer
le mot = le mot
sans plus (85)

 

 

 

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 more recently a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup.