Jérôme Melançon : Folklorismes, by Louis-Martin Savard

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Cette peur précise, by Joanie Serré

Cette peur précise, Joanie Serré
Perce-Neige, 2022

 

 

 

 

The line “this precise fear,” which serves as a title to Joanie Serré’s first book of poetry, follows a repetition of the imperatively stated words “drown me.” “Drown me,” in unlikely and impossible places: “drown me nailed to the sand,” for example. The list is short, which gives it impact; the poem is short, as most are; and the book is short. But the books, like each of its poems, has an undertow: it is percussive, dizzying.

The book itself is mysteriously alluring. A dark cover features a giant paper boat in a bloody sea, a bright light or sun bringing no comfort or respite. There is no information about the author, save for her name. The poems make limited reference to the Acadian setting of their author's origins in Edmunston and of their publication with Perce-Neige, and include few references to any place at all, for that matter (Serré might also be seen as an Ottawa poet, given where her studies have taken her). The writing, bunched into the top left corner of each page, without titles and clear beginnings or endings, is delivered breathlessly, using the white space as a cushion.

The imagery borrows from the restrained surrealism that characterizes the best of Les Herbes rouges and the unrestrained but focused anger of Rose Després and Denise Desautels, all with a style that's already Serré's own:

fortunately it’s time to stir the
end of the world
galvanized by law forgetting becomes a permission
where our lines intersect

heureusement c'est le temps de remuer la
fin du monde
galvanisé par la loi l'oubli devient une permission
où nos lignes s'entrecroisent (56)

This collection is almost a call to arms – but not quite. It is also not a scream, a series of punches, an act of rebellion or protest. Instead of an image to describe this feeling, the best I could do is to return to the title. The anger Serré expresses in her poems hits like the adrenaline rush of fear, a body violently reacting to the violence of a feeling, of a physiological state, of a situation, of someone’s action or their very being. This violence, the cause of this anger, is not named; it lives in the gaps between the words and the lines. It becomes something else.

It becomes a self, melding with it. A strong "je" stumbles, strikes, moves forward, stands her ground, rarely falling into the “nous.” There is a relationship between a “je” and a man in some poems, but no “we” or “us,” two people stuck between the third person imperative (“il faut”) and the third person singular-plural (“on”): “you and I / can’t cease to articulate / spasm fruit trace / the thoughts are unequal / the necessity of sinking” (toi et moi / on ne peut pas cesser d’articuler / spasme fruit trace / les pensées sont inégales / il faut sombrer, 43).

Serré favours the “on,” a familiar, third person manner of referring to a plural subject than the “we” that is more formal than everyday French will admit. This familiar register clashes with the decidedly poetic character of the language in the book as a whole, connecting it to everyday life.

In the pages where the speaker describes her mother and their relationship, the “nous” appears but in a parallel, disconnected, each performing the actions, each stuck in the “je” and the “elle”: “we are two / cockroaches with cannibal eyes with / a dry but / submissive spinal cord // we are two who are seeking / however I feel misled” (nous sommes deux / cafards aux yeux cannibales à / la colonne vertébrale sèche mais / soumise // nous sommes deux à chercher / pourtant je me sens trompée, 14). This sense of being deceived is reinforced by the beginning of the poem, where the mother is said to lie, to “speak like one writes,” a slight in her character even though the speaker likes “reversals / the erasure of my history” (les renversements, l’effacement de mon histoire). The difficulty of connecting with others permeates this collection, a difficulty compounded by the speaker’s preference for self-malleability and certainty in her relationships with at least some specific, privileged others.

Not without ties to these difficulties, there is also danger in these pages – here are just four examples within a ten-page span:

“neck attached to chance” (le cou attaché au hasard, 55)

“the racket of the mines cuts itself off from the landscapes” (le vacarme des mines se coupe des paysages, 58)

“the noose finds itself smooth with embraces” (le noeud se retrouve repassé d'étreintes, 59)

“her cigarette laid down among men’s petals” (sa cigarette déposée parmi les pétales des hommes, 65)

There is also a whole poem that plays on the urge to protect and destroy, beginning with “I cover you slaughter you” (je te couvre t’abats, 51). Another poem begins softly, with sleeping cats and a united planet, but ends with the harshest twist: the provocation of hatred.

This tension permeates the book, works immediately while also calling for multiple readings. The first section, perhaps contradictorily titled "Sea Foam" ("Écumes"), focuses thematically but far from solely on the relationship between mother and daughter. It is the most percussive, sonically as well as in the images it relays. The title "Les impairs," for the second section, refers to uneven numbers and, more likely here, to mistakes that come from misjudging a situation (as in “un impair”). Between these two meanings, “impairs” refers to the impossibility of being two, of being together or alone together, and this section explores sex crudely, in its distance from affection and love. A third section, titled “Parasites,” features a vague other addressed in the second person, and brings a heavy dose of self-awareness, the kind that’s like to make any relationship difficult. In the same register of togetherness, the following section, “Osmose” (osmosis), employs the vocabulary of war with subtlety and parsimony, but to great effect, to show the successes and failures of togetherness. And a last, very short section, “Au revers” leaves a feeling of something that has left, someone who has left, or been lost, navigating between nostalgia and melancholia, and urgency.

The strength of Serré’s poems comes from direct, short lines – so many jabs and stabs, of which we only get the movement, without origin or flesh for them to be inflicted upon. These are poems that do one thing at a time, admirably. In the abstraction of settings and actions, we get an extreme precision of feeling, an abundance of life. A sense that there is something else as well to this self who has every reason to battle but no opponent; or a sense that, at the very least, there might be something else than what is felt so sharply in these poems, something that is left once the adrenaline wears off, once the threat is identified and left behind.

 

 

 

 

 

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 : Fif et sauvage, Shayne Michael

Fif et sauvage, Shayne Michael
Perce-neige, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are books that require courage to publish – this is one of them. Shayne Michael takes up two slurs as a starting point and stops just short of appropriating them (they are the equivalent to the f insult for gay men and “savage” for Indigenous people). Instead of giving them new meaning, he allows their violence to come through on the page, showing them as weapons used at close range, for instance in between daily tasks and entertainments (“Quotidien” / “Day-to-day”). Michael doesn’t show the wounds or the trauma, so much as the moments when the flesh is struck, slashed, pierced.

These moments where harm takes place are juxtaposed with its long-term, transgenerational accumulation. Beyond the exposition of pain and trauma, personal or intergenerational, Michael shows the destruction caused by colonialism and homophobia. Dispossession appears in the first poem: “Je suis Malécite / Sans jeu de mots / Et ça fait mal avec le temps.” Malécite (Maliseet, the name adopted by colonizers from the Mi’kmaq for the Wolastoqiyik) can be heard as “mal icitte,” “not well here”: “I am Maliseet / Without playing on words / And it hurts over time.” (11)

Several poems tackle the difficulty of establishing a relationship with the territory and of taking up traditions. And one of the strengths of the collection is the juxtaposition of themes, through which Michael points out lived contradictions, as well as the gap between the teachings and social expectations of both Indigenous and colonial peoples, and the reality of how the speaker is treated. In one poem he draws strength in identifying with animals; in another he is assimilated to an animal and is metaphorically hunted, butchered, eaten.

Writing this book must have required creating a space, and Éditions Perce-neige in New Brunswick generously extended that space to publication. Something old had to be expressed, without the benefit of a predefined space or mode, without a strong tradition of writing in French to hold onto and jump from (this book is more or less contemporary with translations of Joshua Whitehead and Billy-Ray Belcourt). The collection bears the marks of a search through daily language. This search doesn’t give even results, but does lead to many strong moments. One is in “L’arbre” (“The Tree”), where the speaker protects the tree from the wind, protects the tree’s dance, ultimately fails, and concludes:

“I’m already late
I’ve lost
But I still have leaves
Between my fingers of stone”

“Je suis déjà en retard
J’ai perdu
Mais j’ai toujours des feuilles
Entre mes doigts de pierre” (39)

In his search for a visual vocabulary, one of the strategies Michael uses is what might be either pan-Indigeneism or inter-cultural appropriation – which is not of itself questionable here given the issues around reconnection and the outside identification. The figure of the totem in one poem (“Viens”) thus coexists with a poem on being “Interchangeable” – either or both as Indigenous rather than specifically Wolastoqiyik, and gay. A mother is often mentioned, and could be the land or the person who gave birth to him. And the questioning goes deeper. In “Moisson” (“Harvest”) the feeling of being discarded by the person he desires leads the speaker to ask: “You don’t even leave a trace / What am I in your eyes?” (“Tu ne laisses aucune trace / Je suis quoi à tes yeux?,” 59).

In this even-toned collection Shayne Michael develops a voice that he means to be both his own and that of his grandmother (16), among other ancestors. Its greatest strength might be Michael’s capacity to find what is already within himself and draw from that spring.

 

 

 

 

 

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) and his chapbook Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright is forthcoming in 2022 with above/ground press. He is also the author of a bilingual chapbook, Coup (above/ground press, 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.