Questions de Chloé Brendlé pour Alexander Dickow: Chloé Brendlé Interviews Alexander Dickow

Voir la nouvelle revue des élèves de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Magmas, pour un entretien au sujet de Caramboles avec Chloé Brendlé, rédactrice de la revue. Avec mes remerciements à Chloé!

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Chloé Brendlé interviews me about Caramboles at the new online journal of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Magmas. You can read it in the original French here, or in my English translation, below. Thanks, Chloé!

“An Interview with Alexander Dickow
An exchange with A. Dickow regarding his first collection of poetry, Caramboles: writing “a not yet fully-formed vision of the world.”
Sunday, November 30th, 2008, by Chloé Brendlé.

Alexander Dickow, an American student writing at the ENS and conducting dissertation research in French literature on Max Jacob, Cendrars and Apollinaire, has released his first collection of poetry from Argol Editions…. Here is our conversation:

CB: You begin your collection with toads (“flock of laughter / toads”), and then we follow a long, tragic love story, a fairy tale gone loopy, and the language is “dismembered” (I’m thinking of the poem “Postcard” with the lines “Here the weather / is so vacation”); lyricism, epic, everything goes awry… Is this a kind of prank, a stylistic exercise, a serious game, or something else entirely?

AD: There certainly is a prankishness to it, a bit of provocation. But while there are some poems that really are little jokes, such as the one about the “incommodious goof” [...], there are other poems that are quite serious, on the contrary. In this relation, the idea behind the “tale” was to combine gravity and laughter; I had recently discovered Rabelais and Lautréamont, which ended up leaving me with this multi-layered poem!
Initially, it’s a fairy tale with all the morbid, violent, frivolous, silly and charming trappings of fairy tales. It’s a constant of my imagination… I often daydream about the model of the lullaby: the most famous lullaby in English, at least in the US, opens with a cradle falling from a treetop, with the baby in it.

CB: At the beginning of your book, you mention the hiatus [Au début de ton recueil, tu parles de hiatus [“and hiatus blossoms peek / out themselves and flourish”]... How does emotion appear within this gap or this clumsiness, a clumsiness that turns up again, for instance, in the princess character, who readjusts her crown while still managing to be very moving (“I think she must of remembered / by some terribly thing whose / were smuggle away inside.”).

AD: The emotion comes out of transgressing the rules of language, by a sensation of liberty or elbow-room one sometimes attains through the creative process; it also goes with the childhood imaginary, that of the fairy tale, the lullaby; that is, with a not yet fully-formed vision of the world, where the emotional values of things are not necessarily those that adults ascribe to them. There’s also a notion of the mixed-up nature of experience, suspended between joy and sadness, exuberance and melancholy, like in the poem that talks about “enjoyment groves” and “knobby sadness”...

CB: I’d like to come back to the idea of the space between languages, and this kind of hop-skipping or “hop-talking” that you operate both on the French and the English, since you always place the French and the English facing each other (and it’s not always the same language on the left side of the page…), if it’s not always a relation of translation…

AD: Placing the texts face to face is a way of showing that rather than making carbon copies, it’s really a matter of rewriting the poems in a completely different universe. It’s a way of undoing the impression that this is the original and this the translation. Translations ought to be treated with the same dignity as original texts, and originals ought to be considered translations!

CB: Why do you write [on the back cover of Caramboles that you have two foreign languages, rather than two mother tongues?

AD: When one refers to a mother tongue, it gives the impression that the language belongs to us! It’s better to look at things as a cosmopolitan poet might, between two languages or two cultural identities; when you’ve lived in a foreign country, when you return, you understand that your language is not your own.

CB: Let’s switch gears. I’d like to come back to the title “Caramboles” (which works in both languages): it designates a series of ricochets in billiards, but also a kind of fruit [the star fruit]. Does your collection have something of the fruit’s tart flavor?...

AD: Actually, what most appeals to me in that particular fruit is that it has a weird shape, as though it weren’t a real fruit. It’s star-shaped when cut into slices, but the whole, uncut fruit is even more bizarre, like some sort of pale green football covered with deep grooves… like an extraterrestrial fruit…

CB: There’s a lot of liberty taken with blending literary clichés, those of courtly literature, for instance, and modernity; in the long narrative section of the book, in the “tale”, you put the princess character with the character of the “speaker”, which is both the poet’s voice and that of the interviewer, as it were, and in a place, I quote, “some call times as ‘café’, / place of meetings, affection [...]”. How would you describe this genre-mixing?

AD: For the “tale”, I’m firmly rooted in the tradition of the burlesque [the other poems belong to different forms, other than that of the tale, Chloé’s note]. I wanted to take these old forms, transpose them into today’s world, and deflate them like a balloon! Hence, the fairy tale ties in to the world of princes and princesses, but because it takes place now, it collapses of its own accord, as it were. It doesn’t hold water.
And yet you can see that there are parallel roles that exist: in the scene with the princess, you get a glimpse of the diplomat, the business woman, the powerful woman dressed in a suit, etc., a modern woman that’s a part of male sexual fantasy. I wanted to break up images of the feminine, to mix them up so that they become impossible to untangle…

CB: Isn’t it a sort of cubism?

AD: Sure, a cubism of characters…. I did the same sort of thing with the prince; I wanted to juxtapose these different representations of gender, of the sexes, to show that they are fixed images through which we constantly move, while always trying to escape from them, I’m losing track of my grammar… I wanted to escape this problem of representations…There’s also a very dark side to the tale, the whole battered woman theme.

CB: Do you feel a poetic affinity to [Jean] Tardieu, with his text Un mot pour un autre (_One Word in Place of the Other_)?

AD: I only read One Word in Place of the Other recently, although I’ve known Tardieu’s work for a long time. Influences always occur after the fact…. Language is made of approximations: we do understand each other without having to spell things out, most of the time, and we do blabber on about nothing, you can tell when you read my work: you can understand everything just fine, until you try to decipher the details! That’s how the game is played… It’s a little like seeing through the wrong prescription: the outlines are blurry, but you can see the objects.
In the same way, you can read One Word in Place of the Other and understand everything, just like an ordinary narrative; that is, by replacing the words with the “right” ones, but you can read it differently, also, by taking literally the words that are present, and asking yourself what it might mean for the adulteress to say “Oh dear! my chair!” when it’s her husband walking in the door, and not a chair, of course…, by reading the errors literally, to see what they reveal.
For example, I believe I’ve discovered a deponent grammatical form in English and French; that is, an active meaning expressed by way of a passive construction, while remaining transparent, when I write “You are worn a raincoat”: you can understand right away that it’s the raincoat being worn, and not “you”, but part of what’s at stake in the poem is to ask the reader who’s wearing what, or what’s wearing who, after a manner of speaking. There’s meant to be a sort of unexpected appropriateness in some of these strange uses of the deponent….

CB: You use an optic metaphor; is there a sort of myopic dimension to your poems, and hence a certain meticulous attention to detail?

AD: Yes, absolutely…
I even considered becoming a jeweler for a while, which also demands a lot of concentration and attention to detail… The spontaneity of my poetry is a carefully arranged little illusion, whereas in reality it is indeed a matter of engraving in miniature; you can see it when you look closely. If the impression of spontaneity works on first reading, that’s a good sign: it shouldn’t seem labored, as they say… or rather, the seams should all show nice and properly! In the end, I’d say my poetry gives itself away, somehow or other…

CB: Is there a poem, an image, an expression in your book that you particularly like, or instead that you completely repudiate?

AD: I’ll give you an answer a year from now…
What I’m afraid might happen with this book, it’s that it’ll be reduced to its “dual language” dimension. I wanted to write a book that could hold its own without the reader needing to know both languages, and people insist on this facet of the book, while neglecting other sides of the book, such as the love story that goes wrong, or the whole fairy tale side of the project. At least I will have amused and entertained a few people, that’s great!

CB: Would you say that the world of the Ecole Normale Supérieure is “carambolesque”? (That is, if there is a “world of the Ecole Normale Supérieur”...)

AD: It’s at once a strangely closed-off place and one that sort of opens onto the entire universe. It’s really a very bizarre hybrid, partly because it also acts as host to outside institutions, research groups like the TIGRE, for instance [an interdisciplinary research group concerning periodicals from the 1880s to the 1920s].

CB: It’s a kind of permanently open gateway onto the world, then?

AD: Paradoxically, it’s also a sort of perpetual cloister: it’s even got the layout of a cloister! Let’s say that it is “carambolesque”, since you can meet just deliciously oddball individuals there…
But the ENS doesn’t have an identity, insofar as the students often have a very critical attitude towards their own institution; it’s very French, in my opinion: French people visiting the US are often astonished by students’ ostentatious displays of belonging to a particular university, or even a particular highschool.
The ENS is a variety of relic, in which there’s a good deal of charm, and which one feels lucky to experience, but something to replace the system of selection by attrition that constitutes national competitions in France….

CB: Will your last word today be the last word in the book, “goodbye but not for good”?

AD: That’s right, it’s a little wink to the reader; it’s a false congé, a goodbye that says hello….”

Jan 7, 08:27 by Alexander Dickow
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