<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>April 13, 2009</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Dear friends of poetry </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> and readers of the working group list-serv,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Two weeks ago, on Friday, March 27 the Yale working group in contemporary poetics met to discuss select work by the French poet Jacques Roubaud. The following Monday afternoon, March 30, the group met in the Beinecke Library for a two hour, free ranging conversation with Mr. Roubaud himself. That special session was immediately followed by a public poetry reading and book signing at the Yale Bookstore. Here, in lieu of rational minutes, are a few variable (and distorted) recollections from those sessions, and a brief description of events that followed elsewhere. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">I.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Focusing largely on the recent La Presse publication, <i>Exchanges on Light </i>(2009; translated by Eleni Sikelianos), our Friday afternoon discussion opened with questions about the 'Frenchness' of Roubaud's book (originally published in France in 1990 (after <i>Quelque chose noir</i> (1986) and before <i>La Pluralité des mondes de Lewis</i> (1991)). Though the question of national character--and a given predilection for pranks--was in part raised because of the book's texture, the names of the characters strongly suggest a salon held in an English manor. And, the materials upon which the text draws, the manner in which those materials are put into motion from the beginning, sets the six evenings of dialogue in an explicitly imaginative, purposefully anachronistic field--potentially bracketing the question of national character or, for that matter, historicity, all together. A brief mention was made of Roubaud's love of England, his appreciation of 'drabitude' on his reading stints in London, and his insatiable appetite for 'inoffensive prose' written in British English, preferably of the high victorian age, the Brontës or A. Trollope especially--though none of this really quelled suspicions that a tenuously French mind was at work in the various recombinations constituting the book. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It was quickly noted that this particular text is entirely made up of a complex patchwork of citations variably cataloguing the moral and physical qualities of light (they are unidentified citations culled from philosophers and poets ranging from ancient to modern times), and that the modality of presentation is not far removed from the philosophical dialogues common during the European enlightenment (though perhaps a bit more idiosyncratic in its free movement between registers of discourse, its lack of historical reference, and lack of sustained methodical argumentation). Some consternation (and glee) was announced at the confusion of prose and verse, and the abrupt shifts, from one voice to the next, between different types of printed presentation and different registers of discourse (from the scientific to amorous to the sacred); on the other hand, there was some degree of skepticism voiced about how well defined the individual voices are, and the extent to which there is a convincing contrast in their respective points of view. One group member pondered if the book is an elaboration or a condemnation of all that the Western tradition has brought to us regarding the nature of light, illumination, and our understanding of them. While we did not discuss it at length, it was also remarked that the order in which the six characters intervene over the six chapters respects the same permutation that orders rhyme words in the sestina. It was also briefly mentioned that these <i>Exchanges on Light </i>are shared among the same six characters present in another Roubaud book, also a montage of citations, entitled <i>Sphère de la mémoire</i>--and there was some head scratching about the shadow relationship between the books. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Three other 'shadowy moments' illuminated, in a connective way, the meandering threads of our conversations that day. First, while attempting to rehearse the basic argument of Roubaud's , La Veillesse d'Alexandre, his famous critical study of the advent of French free verse during the golden age of French Surrealism, I said 'free verse' was a 'shadow form' of the alexandrine, condemned (at least in its early years) to follow the magnificent form around (like a shadow), imitating its basic tenets, but always missing its arrival into full-bodied effects (rhythmically dependent on its master). The slavishness with which early free verse 'subverts' the alexandrine ironically makes that era of free verse a body of constrained lines... that is, when compared to the form now often criticized by Mr. Roubaud, a verse form he calls International Free Verse or—punning in French on its vileness— the VIL, <i>Vers International Libre</i>. That easy form, that formless form--as Roubaud describes it in his 2002 "A Defense of Poetry" (see link at bottom of page)--tends to lead away from the poetic and toward the performative, toward 'performance poetry.' Or, so is his experience of international 'poetry' festivals which are increasingly replete, says Roubaud, with events bearing a distant relation (at best) to his idea of a poem (namely interpretive dance, musical performance (e.g. Schwitter's "Ursonate"), or various new modalities of media presentations (which are not offensive in the slightest, says he, so long as they leave the name of poetry alone)). 'Poetry' (the word), in other words--and this is the second 'shadowy moment'--, has been exploited for the aura attached to it, for the "phantom effect" or the "ghost effect" it brings to other modalities of expression that are not, in effect, at all poetic. Exactly what the stakes are for Roubaud, however, in defending poetry against its various modalities of hybridity or disappearance (this coattail effect of performance is just one modality of its cultural erasure), promptly became a central focus in our discussion, which again turned to the intermingling of forms in <i>Exchanges on Light </i>and, in particular, sent us to a passage on beauty: "The beauty was in the negative not-light. It is there in what is not-other than light, but is not light itself, from which it proceeds" (third shadowy moment) and its recapitulation by Mr Goodman (a recursive persona in Roubaud's œuvre, partially based on Nelson Goodman (yes, the American logician of 'grue' fame); partially an invention, a theoretical fiction, sprung from Roubaud's comical-stoicism): "Pure beauty; there is no beauty purer than the repetition of light, which loses itself" (28). The gesture of defining negatively, through multiple negatives, double or triple (or even more)--beauty is seen in the negative not-light, in what is not other than light and is not light itself--substantiates existence, or its expression in various forms of paradox, the movements of which take primacy over their static being (in discourse) (thus Mr. Goodman's praise for the successive repetition of coming into being (of light) and its (necessary?) loss). Speculating on what other problems are being circumnavigated in the exploration of light (or of memory in Sphères) as metaphoric field(s) through the devices (procedures) of montage and combinatorics, two pertinent angles of inquiry emerged: what work, in the case of <i>Exchanges on Light</i> (as well as elsewhere, since we postulated that any Roubaldian piece is representative Roubaud), is being accomplished by the poetic line, <i>le vers</i> (and, more generally, by the habit, the formal garb in which the poetic as nakedly poetic is dressed throughout JR's work; numbers)? And, to what extent is that formal armor, that ardor for the formal, well equipped enough to resist the various modes of denigration, cuteseyfication, marginalization, and erasure confronting the poetic in the contemporary world?</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We subsequently drew up a list of queries to ask the poet the following Monday, some of addressed the various (a)political stances of the Oulipo and/or Roubaud (their contrasts, connections) and others that probed how constraint based writing could be conceived as "radical" in the following two sense: as returning to the root of things ('anoulipism' is analytical, takes up the task of re-conceiving constraint from a zero degree concept of a form) and as being 'radicalized,' bent on effecting some form of change--and on this point our conversation only vaguely brushed up against the late 60s and early 70s, the period at which Roubaud (and Jean-Pierre Faye) helped found the pluridisciplinary journal <i>Change</i> whose modality of research still stands in contrast to 'avant-garde' modes of theorizing exemplified in the writings of <i>TelQuel</i>). (A full list of the questions actually submitted to the poet after white clam pizza and birch beer at Pepe's concludes these minutes).</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Very little was said about the place of Stein. Or about what her innovations in syntax bring to emergent models of poetics. We also hardly touched on the opening excerpt from <i>The Loop</i> (2009) or the translator's 'Afterword' which had also been sent to the list two weeks prior, along with the series 'Circles in Meditation' from<i> The plurality of Worlds of Lewis</i>.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">II.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Our Monday afternoon session consisted of a sequence of excursions into Roubaud's various worlds, all of them described, in his own words, by Roubaud who, afterward, pondered over how well the complexity of these realms can be communicated in what he feels is his waning command of the English language. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The problem of national identity ('Provençal') and personal signature ('Composer of mathematics and poetry') led Roubaud to talk about his childhood in the south, his early relationship to writing (he started very young), his subsequent move to Paris, and his initiation into the field of professional mathematics. Surprising many, Roubaud insisted that mathematics and poetry are completely separate, utterly unrelated discourses: the former is eminently paraphrasable, the latter is utterly un-paraphrasable (the poem 'says what it says while saying' it whereas proofs in maths can and should be rewritten in as many ways as imaginable). There was some leniency given to the</font><font face="Arial" size="4" color="#0e0704" style="font: 14.0px Arial; color: #0e0704"> notion of beauty in numbers, </font><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">but that form of beauty was to be maintained as separate from, or different in nature from the notion of beauty in poetry. While he did not explain the function played in his writings, current and past, by his not-so-secret pet numbers--the numbers of Queneau (related to his mania for sestina forms and his admiration of prime numbers)--Roubaud did mention a website where anyone can enter a solution set and then discover all of the questions that lead to that answer (Roubaud's initial mathematical field was group theory (théorie d'ensembles) which is distinct from set theory in that it provides for open-ended answers, or solution sets, as opposed to fixed, or closed, proofs). He took visible interest and pleasure (which regaled us, undoubtedly) in noting that the series known as Queneau's numbers remains to this day the solution to an as-of-yet unknown problem/question (if anyone knows this website, please share the url). </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>A similarly exuberant moment came to pass when, describing his poem <i>Trente et un au cube</i> (1973; <i>Thirty One Cubed</i>), Roubaud confessed a terrible discovery. In part conceived as a means of overcoming any direct dependence on rhythmic structures underlying versified language in French, that book combines the syllabic structure of the Japanese tanka (5-7-5-7-7) and other fields of research dear to Roubaud at the time; it is a sequence of thirty-one poems, with thirty one lines, each line consisting of thirty one syllables, all of these units divided (at least visually) according the the distribution borrowed from the tanka (5-7-5-7-7). Several years ago, many years after having completed the book, Roubaud discovered a 'plagiarist by anticipation' who had not only written a book obeying the same structural rules, but, worse, this medieval Japanese poet (Tamekane, who wrote it during his second exile, this time to Tosa, in the years after 1315) had added an additional constraint, composing a 32nd poem exclusively consisting of one acrostic line from the other 31 poems (if anyone knows this poem, please share); while not an exact relationship, the compilation of an ultimate, recapitulating poem consisting of elements present in the others, reminds us of a heroic crown of sonnets, though in Tamekane's case, the crowning poem itself remains hidden.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>[<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>*<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> *<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>]</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; ">III.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In the reading that followed, Roubaud mostly read from<i> The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart</i> which is translated by Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop (Dalkey Archive Press). But he also read a few translations that I have written (sonnets from a more recent book, the title of which was supposed to be New York and After but which was changed to <i>Churchill 40 </i>after September 11, 2001 (reflecting, in part, Roubaud's admiration for the tenacity of the English leader during the second world war, and returning us to his reading vacations in London)). And, one last poem at that reading was the tail end of a palindrome, the fizzle of a cosmology: Genesis in reverse, a recent poem Roubaud composed in English using a 15th c French translation of the Old Testament. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In the days that followed, Roubaud was joined by his friend and collaborator Delay to speak about rewriting Arthurian tales for the modern stage. He then joined five other Oulipians in New York city for series of readings, roundtable discussion and book launches. I last saw Rouabud at Bard college where he also gave a lively reading and spoke to an engaged group about his early poetry, his current prose projects, his evolving protocols for writing in prose, his continued process of composing poems, always pursued first and foremost in the mind, in the mind's eye, as an exercise in memory (among other things), only thereafter to enter the (nether) world via some physical means of writing (on paper, on screen, for example). </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>And such are the working minutes for the working group's last two sessions--shouldyou wish to add details, please do not hesitate to write to me and/or Richard and/or Nancy. As Richard has mentioned, we still have two more meetings before disbanding for the summer, the first next Friday, April 24, with Steve Evans, and the last on May 1st, with Adelaide Russo.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As ever, The Beinecke Library Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday at 3:00pm in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall Street (the corner of Church and Wall); our meetings are open to the public; for more information and list-serv inscription (unsubscribe) go to : <a href="http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/working-group-in-contemporary-poetry/"><font color="#0018e8" style="color: #0018e8"><u>http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/working-group-in-contemporary-poetry/</u></font></a>.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>With gratitude,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>Jean-Jacques Poucel</i></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>working group co-coordinator</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">ps- A few wepages, shadow effects of recent OULIPO events in NYC</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> <a href="http://artforum.com/diary/id=22421"><font color="#0018e8" style="color: #0018e8"><u>http://artforum.com/diary/id=22421</u></font></a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> <a href="http://uprightdown.com/blog/?p=118"><font color="#0018e8" style="color: #0018e8"><u>http://uprightdown.com/blog/?p=118</u></font></a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> <a href="http://cartooniologist.blogspot.com/"><font color="#0018e8" style="color: #0018e8"><u>http://cartooniologist.blogspot.com</u></font></a>/</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/index.htm"><font color="#0018e8" style="color: #0018e8"><u>http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/index.htm</u></font></a> (see 04-05-09)</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">J. Roubaud - "A Defense of Poetry" - 2002</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" color="#0018e8" style="font: 14.0px Arial; color: #0018e8"><a href="http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=366"><u>http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=366</u><u></u></a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">pps- Several opening Questions for a poetics discussion with Jacques Roubaud (April 2009)</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">1. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">In your writing you frequently identify yourself as a Provençal poet. But you currently live, and have spent the better part of your adult life writing in Paris. How is it that the south of France plays such a great role in your identity as a writer? What initial childhood experiences influenced your becoming a writer? Is your identification with Provence more directly related to childhood memory or to the study of texts rooted in the landscape / poetry of langue d'Oc (or Provençal)? Or, is your self-identification as Provençal a means of reacting against the increasingly radical immigration 'reforms' instituted in France?</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">2. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">Among the other ways you characterize your identity as an author is this simple signature: Jacques Roubaud, Compositeur de Mathématique et de Poésie. Can you please explain the ways in which mathematics informs your practice of writing. And, if it's useful, can you explain how your creative process as a poet has informed your work in mathematics?</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">3.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">One of the questions we perennially pose to the contemporary authors who visit our group addresses the manner in which they see themselves within or in opposition to tradition, or a particular literary lineage. How do you see your work in relation to the history of modernist and avant-garde experimentation in France, or Europe generally?</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">4.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">How would you situate the Oulipo in or opposed to a modernist or avant-garde tradition?</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">5.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">Another very salient aspect of your various works is its frequent attraction to traditions removed from French literature. You have written translations for Troubadour and Japanese poetry, you have translated and assembled anthologies of American Indian chants, you are an avid reader of English prose and American contemporary poetry. How do these alternate traditions participate in your ambitions as a writer?</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">6.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">You have noted that there are four principle activities that characterize your primary activities: translation, anthologies, the composition of poems, and critical reflection on the writing of poetry--a poetics. How do you imagine the relation between these activities? Which of these activities is the most important to you? Why? Where, if anywhere, does mathematics figure into these areas of work.</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">7.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">In several of your statement on poetics, you seem to be defending poetry against its own demise. You speak often about the tragedy of free verse, and you repeatedly criticize the conflagration of poetry and performance. What is at stake for you in defending difficult poetry and other form enhanced modes of writing?</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial"> </font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">8.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Arial">In<i> Exchanges on Light </i>one remarks the interweaving of many voices, the inclusion of many perspectives about the physical and moral qualities of light, all intermixed according to the logic of the sestina. How is this book an example the extreme contemporary? Do you consider every incursion by your characters a statement spoken in / as poetry?</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; min-height: 16px; "><br></div>
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