Jérôme Melançon : allumettes (poèmes engageants 2014-2019), by Charles Leblanc

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Petites déviations, by Lise Gaboury-Diallo

Petites déviations, Lise Gaboury-Diallo
Éditions du Blé, 2021

 

 

 

 

In her poem “hors champ” (“offscreen”) Lise Gaboury-Diallo presents poetry as a footbridge: it is either a temporary plank that can be placed where it is needed then taken away, having no natural or definite place; or a permanent, semi-solid bridge that is limited to a slower pace, that is not vehicular, that demands the body's own efforts. Earlier in the collection, in “mappemonde” (“world map”), she asks for “small poems built from poor bones / from limestone powder (“petits poèmes construits de pauvres os / de poudre calcaire,” 43) – poems that must be told like stories, poems that find their origins in the elements and in a history that does not separate out the winners, poems that have as much in common with the smallest living beings as with their movements across world maps.

The idea of connection and literal bridges is also found where she writes about her father and the weight of inheritances. In “le sacre de l’imité” (“the rites of the imitated,” a beautiful play on words around “the initiated,” as parents are to the world before their children, and carrying children’s imitation of their parents), she recalls her father’s admiration for Gaudi, for his rich, solid materials, these marbles, woods, and gold. These materials are the opposite of those she seeks in poetry. Her footbridge is also of another materiality as the literal bridge her father, the architect Étienne Gaboury, left between Saint-Boniface and Winnipeg. And the small poems she calls for are far from the new Saint-Boniface Cathedral he built within the ruins of the old. Through its echoes of the two poems already mentioned, this one-page poem allows her to quickly and implicitly constrast her aesthetic with his, even as they share the desire for an escape from the weight of materiality.

Petites déviations (“small deviation”) is Lise Gaboury-Diallo’s tenth poetry collection. In previous collections she not only made room for others, but also put on display the room that already exists between people and can be inhabited just as well as neglected, the space that relationships create. Experience is always multiple and many-faceted in these poems, which lead to books united by tone. She has often worked in collaboration with artists in books where poetry and painting or photography live together within the same spaces. At the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, her academic work has explored the words of women and French speakers, especially in the Canadian prairies. While her work is multiple, her tone remains even. In Subliminales (1999) she adopted a series of voices and would shift between first and third person inventions, offering fluid impressionist stories. While here she juxtaposed her poems with watercolours by Monique Fillion, in Parchemins croisés / Crossworlds (2008) Gaboury-Diallo and the painter Monique Larouche each took inspiration from the other’s work to create two series of paintings and poems, the latter translated within the book by Mark Stout. The firm quietness of Gaboury-Diallo’s voice shows its depth and force here, taking on a shape that alludes to the waves Larouche paints in many of the works gathered in that collaborative work. Homestead (2005) had already gone farther, bringing together Gaboury-Diallo’s poems, their translations by Stout, photographs by Laurence Véron, paintings by Anna Binta Diallo, and drawings by Étienne Gaboury, allowing her to bring her daughter and father into a depiction of the prairies that takes form through a convergence of perspectives. Here her poems are precisely situated, moving through rooms and buildings and fields, ending on a reserve. These three books contain a relatively small number of poems, seem to lead to what might be her strongest book and at any rate a central work in Franco-Canadian poetry, Transitions (2002). Weaving around the themes of speech, thought, and communication, and densely illustrated yet sparse in their words and patient in their short lines, the poems in this collection soothe just enough to sharpen emotions and preserve the will to reach others and act for their sake.

While some poems in Petites déviations take up the style she has developed over this imposing body of work, many instead display a newer style, which echoes the more political poems in Transitions but eschew subtlety in order to favour the straight line made possible by blunt force. In order to account for the technological apparatuses that are both part of and an extension of our experiences, Gaboury-Diallo explores the possibilities of a language shorn of artifice, simple and straightforward in the doubts and emotions it names. This more tentative, less assured voice – this worried voice lets itself share an anger I hadn’t noticed in earlier work. It is shored up through this new collection by the better established voice, and their alternance make this a beautifully hesitant collection.

The first section, “surrogati,” is concerned with fakes, imitations, appropriation, surrogacy – here Gaboury-Diallo writes within the realm of replacement. This is a dangerous realm to approach, what with its current appropriation by fascism. The poet resists nihilism and the quest for purity by heightening tensions between what is replaced and what replaces it, and playing on the difficulty of accepting replacement. Writing on a surrogate giving birth, she asks: “where does this soul come from / this child / to whom their mixed flesh / for whom their tomorrows” (“d’où vient l’âme / de cet enfant / à qui ses chairs mêlées / et pour qui ses demains,” 15). Of those who invent identities to garner support, she recognizes an authenticity and a resemblance to herself: “you want to imitate honey / so we can live / better / you / you take the place / of the vague desire for forgiveness / brushing up against my watered / down appetite” (“tu veux imiter le miel / pour que l’on vive / mieux / toi / tu te substitues / au vague désir de pardon / frôlant mon appétit / édulcoré,” 19). The many political poems in this section often read like declamations and feel uncertain. This would be a criticism were it not for the courage of putting forward this non-bellicous, unassured position: the speaker here exposes herself and offers a stance that is the opposite of the piercing language of social media and of populist movements. She chooses weakness as a stratagem.

To this cartography of misappropriations succeeds a second section marked by a concern for place, geographies, and movement. There is an interplay between experiences of running into obstacles that are as insurmountable as they are weakened by these impacts, and those of fleeing threats that never really leave the speaker alone. In one of a few poems where cartography serves as the main reference point, Gaboury-Diallo illustrates what resists all attempts at creating stability, at naming:

on the map
the surroundings have their quadrants
the countries are sketched but
there is only neglect
for the shifting deltas
and the sky beyond
of the ripped margin
with nowhere to sprawl

sur la carte
on a quadrillé les environs
esquissé des pays mais
on a négligé
les deltas mouvants
et le ciel au-delà
de la marge déchirée
qui ne s’étale nulle part (41)

Finding the same interplay of voices as the first section, the third, “spectres” (“specters”), provides reflections on social media from a distance. The speaker situates herself outside their realm of influence, and as a result some poems feel foreign to what they describe, as they rely on observation rather than on experience. The speaker understands what makes social media attractive, but misses what they also make possible. Yet this is far from being a reactionary critique of social media and again this unassured position has its strengths. Quite to the contrary in fact, Gaboury-Diallo explores a different source of meaning by comparing social media to older photographs – of her family, or from past ages. The sepia tones of the origins of photography echo back to what it is that social media users are seeking through their constant sharing. In “silhouette” we can see the photography of a parent, how their style, their corporeity is recognizable even though their face is not visible. Far into this section, in "Sépia," the speaker shares her main reason for rejecting social media: the lack of forgetting, the accumulation of passing thoughts and acts that would not otherwise define her. As we read through the section, relearning the patience and the composition that are needed to grasp the meaning of the words of others, these poems reveal their focus on memory, and on remembrance more precisely, rather than on the medium through which it emerges.

A long poem about COVID-19 closes this section, giving historical context for the distance that defines so many of the poems, the initial shock of isolation and the slight differences of later stages of the pandemic. Distance appears as an unavoidable condition as she addresses the virus, creates words with it. Wishes and certainty clash in the very same words, which show again Gaboury-Diallo’s capacity to create tension within meaning:

and we flee your noxious
shadow by running to the future
we won’t cross out your asterisk
from the annals of history
but someday you will leave
your departure is announced

et on fuit ton ombre
délétère en courant vers l’avenir
on ne pourra rayer ton astérisque
des annales de l’histoire
mais tu partiras un jour
ton départ est annoncé (90)

That impossible optimism is equal to the pessimism of the other long poem in this collection, “taire” (“keeping it quiet”), which explores environmental harm and ends on the prediction, also voiced as certainty, that the planet will go quiet. Several poems here, such as “charge électrique” and “charge statique” (“Electric Load” and “Static Load”) are mysterious in their intention, address, and subject, leaving the reader with more room to situate themself. This section is by far the best assured, where Gaboury-Diallo finds the voice that carried her through her past collections, adding a calm doom to what was previously playful. Not that the playfulness of her previous work is absent (in “en trombe” she plays on the proximity between the explosive meaning of “en trombe” and attachments to emails, “en trombone”), but it is certainly overshadowed by the darkness of the current moment. These poems are not acts or expressions of revolt; instead, they create an oscillation between hope and desolation and offer a knowledge that is neither true nor stable, but on which we can nonetheless rely.

In this collection then we find a mixing of registers – the poetic and formal meets and everyday language, creating more occasions for plays on words, taking the quotidian seriously, bringing the serious and contemplative into the everyday. The greatest achievement of this collection is in the arrangement of poems. Gaboury-Diallo misleads us, feints, builds on juxtaposition, unveils different meanings to the social and psychological realities she describes. We discover slowly through this arrangement the orientation, the experience at its core: not so much the experience of alienation nor of being lost, but that of having taken the wrong path, slowly, one wrong step at a time.

[Read Three poems from Petites déviations]

 

 

 

 

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.