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.
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.
