Nicole Brossard’s poetry enlivens the physical body with an intimate sensuousness as she writes of the whispered proximity of one body to another, or of one body (via the senses) to its world: “and here again I find an author too abstract / supplicating in space / body itself intensity”. Barthesian intimations aside, the quietness with which she writes the body juxtaposes the tendency for her work to be read as the body under the authority of the politick. It may take a bit of squinting to read her work for these political runs it makes with feminism and the political structures of identity writ large, but the larger implications of aesthetic—beyond literary theory, gender or sexuality—open her work to a more poignant reading. Political poetry is hard to survive. A propagandist agenda in the lyric typically does disservice to the full experience of the aesthetic. When a poem’s reading tends to adhere to such limitations of scope as the propaganda can only afford, staleness becomes an unfortunate virtue. And what, ultimately, of the political struggles that embody the time in which the writer writes? Such was a problem to W.H. Auden, one that he considered thoroughly and which led him to denounce his two beloved poems, “Spain” and “September 1, 1939”, later in his life.[1] By mostly avoiding explicit relating of the body and its political subjugations, Brossard’s writing has the potential for a more lasting presence which falls beyond the scope of her avant-garde epithet.

Brossard is considered to be an important French avant-garde writer, which may come as a surprise given her high lyricism. It is true there remains a resistance to the norm in her writing considering her disruptions of linguistic sense and her forthright textual experimentation. The poet Susan Howe, once very obscure, has been able to stay her path thanks to her fixity on the greater philosophical queries that lay at the heart of language. She has done so by creating a genre of her own; reexamining, though not necessarily revisioning historical figures and their impact on a collective ideology (Protestantism, Transcendentalism, et al.), and using language to embody the experience of communication as much as the communication itself. Obscurity does not delimit artistic merit, and like Howe’s work, Brossard’s poetry borders on linguistic shimmying with what can only be an assumed purpose of dissolving “the patriarchal knowledge and…its symbolic hierarchical/dualistic fields.”[2] In fact, Brossard herself has a great deal to say in essays included in this Selections about where her interests with language and sexuality lie. It is in her poetry, however, that the theories she extols surely arrive with the most intensity; it is in her simplicity and evident passion for sound:

            I know this by the words I am missing

            my life has gone to sleep

            in the contour so precise

            of the tip of a long bone

            though I still know how to smile

            before Roman cloisters and their ossuaries

            the value of I love you

                        (from Museum of Bone and Water)

Much like Emily Dickinson and Howe (and, for that matter, the later-revisionism of Auden), Brossard elects to title few of her poems, instead offering book-length sequences. Aviva (1985, 2008) captures most eloquently the fluidity with which she moves between generous ideas of the body, language, and mind:

            thus the aura leaning toward her

            while the figure keeps watch

            emotion and the (latest) humid, very

            between the thighs taking, the time

            and some verbs encountered mid-stay

                        …

            it is possible for a body to hesitate

            around the being and apply itself

Her articulations are open and indeterminate, but it is the presence of how the poem is progressing that happily suspends the reader regardless the withheld surety of a solid interpretation. For what is this “aura”? Writing influence? Genetics? History? Her sudden shifts from something not fully understood as the emotions to the “(latest) humid” physical state awkwardly places the reader in a place where the clamminess can be felt, a state in which the corporeal (“body”) need not circumscribe itself to what it is expected to “know,” which would be the body’s self. What reads as a separation from the most intimate of knowledge one may have with oneself is emboldened by a sexuality that subtly courses through the lines with the advent of the phrase “between the thighs taking”, a location where the “humid” may or may not be taking place. In her prose poem, “Obscure Languages,” Brossard announces, “I am interested in consciousness because there are invisible structures in our bones that remove us from childhood and family maneuvers.” A more thorough reading suggests these “invisible structures” to be political in origin, yet her impulse to deny the reader a definitive understanding of a grand idea disassociates her work from other overtly political avant-gardists. In essence, Brossard is a humanist, a poet with human concerns at heart.

Brossard is well known in French-speaking communities, especially in Canada; her writing encompasses more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and fiction. This quantity is essential when studying her oeuvre. Like Dickinson, her poems are often brief and hover over the page without the heft of a focal attention to history. Her ideas regarding the conflation of the body, mind and reality, and how language may be the intermediary between the three, will implore a wider audience for her work. Brossard’s poetic achievement or accumulation, as evidenced with Selections, is still amassing, and in posterity the appreciation will arrive more fully than we presently can give ourselves.


[1] “Political Poetry and the Shaping of Auden’s Canon”. Erica Marie Weaver.

[2] “Poetic Politics.” Nicole Brossard.

Yale University Press
trans. by Hoyt Rogers

When asked if he intended to be a poet, Yves Bonnefoy recalled his aunt giving him a small anthology of poems when he was around seven years of age.  She inscribed: “To my godson—future poet.”  “There was no mystery,” Bonnefoy stated, “even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry.  Why?  Perhaps because of a feeling that I could not practice the professions I saw around me.”[i]  Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, translated by Hoyt Rogers, brings together Bonnefoy’s recent works as he approaches his ninetieth year. 

Bonnefoy was born in 1923 in Tours, also the birthplace of 16th century French humanist poet Pierre de Ronsard.  Bonnefoy’s mother was a primary school teacher and his father was a railroad worker who assembled locomotives and died when Bonnefoy was 13.  His grandparents, whom he had close ties with, were innkeepers near the valley of the Lot River.  Bonnefoy told an interviewer, “theirs was a little place near the railway station, with a few rooms they let.  My grandmother cooked, and my grandfather looked after the clients.  He also cut hair and made jackets.”  In “The House where I was Born,” Bonnefoy writes:

    In the same dream
    I lie in the hollow of a hull,
    Eyes and forehead pressed to the curved planks
    Where I can hear the river knocking.

and later:

    I woke up, but we were traveling.
    The train had lumbered through the night.
    Now it rolled toward massive clouds
    That loomed in a cluster up ahead.
    From time to time, lightning’s whip tore the dawn.
    I watched the advent of the world

Throughout Bonnefoy’s oeuvre a perpetual dichotomy between presence and absence exists, yet the concept of Time is boundless, as if past experiences and characters exist concurrently with the finite now.  If Bonnefoy alludes to childhood, history or the “advent of the world,” it is with the same intimate consciousness and perception of the present.  In “The House I was Born” Bonnefoy returns to his childhood leitmotifs—rivers, trains, planks, father figures—and frames them within an adult dream.  This intertwining of imagery makes his writing seem circular; death, music, art, literature all alter the passage of human life yet remain unchanged, almost untouchable.  In “Mahler, The Song of the Earth” Bonnefoy writes of renouncing what is mortal in order to exist:

    She moves forward, and you grow old.
    Keep advancing, under interwoven trees,
    And you’ll glimpse each other, now and then.
    O music of words, utterance of sound,
    Bend your steps toward each other as a sign
    Of complicity, at last—and of regret.  

There is a moving forward, but also a stillness.  Language and music binding the reader to the world. 

In the first section “Beginning and End of the Snow” (originally published in 1991) Bonnefoy’s marks the progression of seasons; his choice of imagery corresponds to an autumn and winter the author spent in New England.  In the introduction to Second Simplicity Roger writes:

In her letters Emily Dickinson calls her poetry “my snow”—white pages that blow in from nowhere, without warning, and settle in drifts on the table.  In his snow poems, Bonnefoy takes up this metaphor and expands it:  the snowfall is the emblem of his words, swirling and ephemeral.[ii]

Bonnefoy’s “snow” poems—not unlike Dickinson’s in their compact length and deceptive effortlessness—wend their way through the poet’s interior geography, which was indubitably stimulated during  Bonnefoy’s wanderings near Williamstown and Amherst through the winter terrain:

A Bit of Water

I long to grant eternity
To this flake
That alights on my hand,
By making my life, my warmth,
My past, my present days
Into a moment: the boundless
Moment of now.
But already it’s no more
Than a bit of water, lost in the fog
Of bodies moving through the snow.

                                                                                               
The Mirror

Yesterday
Clouds still drifted
In the room’s black depths.
But now the mirror is empty.
Snowing
Unravels from the sky. 

These two poems, quoted in their entirety, illustrate the hazy delineations between past and present, which come together in “the boundless moment of now”.  Even the boundaries between the natural world and interior rooms fall away, as “clouds still drifted in the rooms.”

This reaching always towards the ungraspable, towards the edges of a room or a world, impart to his poems the feeling of being on the verge.  Of what, he doesn’t tell us, but in interviews he has hinted at it:

    "We need poetry…to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we     are  able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in         silence.” [iii]

According to Bonnefoy, this “beyond words,” a “system of signs”, is what makes up consciousness, and the world.  In this way signs and the senses can invent or redeem language and memory from a true primordial state, in much the same way as a mirror can reflect things we cannot see.  Mirrors play an important part of Bonnefoy’s poetic imagery;  they are a part of the idea that a thing or idea can obscure as well as illuminate, that obscurity can be hidden beneath something clear.  He writes of mirrors almost as windows to a parallel yet hardly attainable consciousness:

    I still hunger for that place
    That was our mirror, hunger
    for the fruit curved in its waters,
    Hunger for its saving light. 
                                                (from “A Stone” p. 53)

“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known,”[iv]St. Paul writes in Corinthians 13:12.  And according to Bonnefoy: “poetry can only be a partial approach, which substitutes for the object a simple image and for (our feelings) a verbal expression—thereby losing the intimate experience… This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is.”[v]    

Works Cited
[i] Paris Review, Interview with Yves Bonnefoy, Summer 1994, no. 131
[ii] Hoyt Rogers, Introduction to Second Simplicity, p. xiii
[iii] Paris Review
[iv] The Bible, Corinthians 13:12, New International Version
[v] Paris Review