French Poetry

I posted this image of the cover of Mary Anne Caw's anthology meaning to comment on it later. It is a commendable descendant of Paul Auster's Random House of Twentieth Century French Poetry, but with a whole lot more female poets and poems of Arabic/Moroccan/Algerian descent. There are is a wide range of translators, which is part of the interest. I've been thinking how abstract much of the poems are, in that the French OULIPO and Surrealiste traditions have been so much more influential on French poetry than on our own Australian work. It is interesting to see how L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E based poetry owes so much to the French propensity to accept poems as artefacts and as language games That said I love the realism and specificity of a certain Anglo-American strain, mastered most clearly by our own Laurie Duggan for example. Being here in Paris one feels both the elation of being able to partake of it stimulation but also the oppressive weight of all its CULTURE. But I resist the urge to write ABOUT PARIS. I've also been researching Australian poets who mention "Paris" in their poems. It's fascinating to see what motifs and images are repeated - pigeons for example, Notre Dame of course, beggars, the revolution, chimneys... I have found that swallows are more prevalent in French poems, and in post-war poems Paris is hardly ever the actual subject of a poem, since, I suppose, Paris IS the universe so it isn't singled out specifically in the kind of topographical poem. But what about Baudelaire? For him, Paris is metonymic of an anti-utopia, a post-romantic Hell perhaps. I feel the same bi-polarity - its seductive beauty and its hellishness, cruelty, toughness. Paris IS Western EUROPE condensed. It claims its stewardship of classical and modern culture, so much suffer the consequences of a collapse in the system. And if Europe is to collapse, it somehow seems that Paris will suffer as much as Athens. On the Eurostar from London, I heard two young Americans talking about Paris. "I must go and find Jim Morrison's grave!' In the yellow kitchen in Monet's house in Giverny, an older American gentleman to another: "Did you see that spigot?"