An introduction and five easy poems for Anne-Marie Albiach

Early in the summer of 1997 Kevin Killian of Small Pres Traffic in San Francisco adviseed the idea of an evening to celebrate the French author of poems Anne-Marie Albiach's sixtieth birthday-a sort of drawn out distance greeting. He invited Norma cabbage Barbara Guest, Benjamin Hollander, Mary Margaret Sloan, and myself to participate. The occurrence took place in the theater of novel College of California on August eighth, notwithstanding that by then in Paris it was already the ninth, Anne-Marie's birthday. family read, variously, from AnneMarie's work and their possess told anecdotes and discussed her work. I read the five piece of poetrys I had written for the fact as well as the introductory note included with them here. Cake, of course, was serv and a tape of the evening sent to Anne-Marie.

In the summer of 1982 I went to the house of entertainment de l'Odeon in Paris in the confidence of meeting the poet Anne-Marie Albiach. She was for the twinkling in residence there, but without a phone and Claude Royet-Journoud had put in mind ofed I simply drop by and prove by experiment my luck. I had first read her volume Etat, in the nineteen-seventies, and it had have the appearanceed a perfect work, a work consummately realized and perfectly necessary. It had filled a space in the poetic imagination of the time that had until then been awaiting it, unoccupied.

At the [i]cabaret[/i] de l'Odeon, the poet Anne-Marie Albiach was not in, with equal reason I left a copy of my Notes for reverberation Lake for her with the desk registrar and departed. After my initial disappointment, I gradually began to comprehend that this had been a greatest in quantity excellent first meeting with the author of poems Anne-Marie Albiach. Neither had failed to suited the expectations of the other. The author of poems Anne-Marie Albiach had been spared the embuscade of gaucheries and malaproprian ejaculations with which it is my habit to salute the French. Our conversation, in short, had not ever deviated from the highest plane. And, as is the case with absence generally, a trace of the erotic had lingered in the atmosphere, at least from my point of view.

This non-encounter (or what the post-structuralist might bound this "in-place-of-an-encounter") served further to point a series of reflections upon the odeon, that is the odeum that public space for theater and the performance of verse from which, these days, bards not infrequently find themselves exclud similar reflections have continued to the at hand

I'll read "Five Easy Poems" dedicated with delight in to Anne-Marie Albiach on her sixtieth birthday.

Two pictures of a rose in the dark

A woman hurted on the street

has been carried in

a woman with injurys to the upper arm and neck

has been brought to the play where our clocks

seem always to stop

The latitude itself is dark

This question of the clock

she might say, of points upon the clock

and in the dark

pauses and addictions, colors

of the jiffy

voices, glances and nervous hands

The river below the window

river as it's pictured

on a field without perspectiveis r

a film of sooty vapor and mist

hanging above it

As if asleep while writing this

Two pictures of a rose in the dark

We say single is lost one is not

or single is a syllable one a stone

They ask and they ask

Picture of who picture of what

It has been reported

in the ploughed field

amid today's crop:

buttons, shards of a beaker

flange of an eye-socket

flex torso of a child

the pages of a diary

fold in her cloak

We do not say of the firmament

that it is an arena for dance

that it is a cerulean stream gently flowing

or that at the extreme point of the dream

a flower will remain

of an identical amethystine

We do not say we partly sing

back toward the whir

and the whistling of things

It is as it was in the film

He guides the beads into and without of her

while eddies of dust

rise from the hoove of a riderless horse

turning in a circle

She fingers the beads into then on the outside of him

counting from individual to a thousand and single

They attain:

a completed knowledge of the fragment

and the discourse of liquid surfaces

They attain:

anamnesis as regards the redolence of apples,

apricots and pears

They understand:

the Paradox of the Knower

and the Paradox of the Stone,

Paradox of the Hangman, Paradox of the Heap,

and the single of the Circling Horse

It is as it was in the film

The worriers worry the beads

The camera shuttle nervously

Eddies of dust rise up (mezza voce)

Does he incline his head to become calligraphy,

memory of the body's desire

for the moving alphabetic characters of an alphabet

of intractable geometry Ariadne's thread

as the trickling of warm blood?

Is the head bent in reminiscence,

thought of distance, arteries'

incandescence, first witness,

precision of a gesture?

Of which a trace remains

at a certain distance.

At a certain distance

twin bodies encircle a alphabetic character

they have arrived at independently

during the individual night

of a thousand and individual

What language is the Chorus speaking

from which words do not come?

What is the space

of the odeum? All metrical compositions

are easy poems

It's just that a certain quantity of

are even easier

than others

These we call

the easiest metrical compositions

of all

Copyright World verse Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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