Prose poems on Paris - John Foulcher

A street near Montmartre

Australian poet John Foulcher is publishing a new book, The Sunset Assumption, which contains work he began at the Keesing studio. He kindly sent me an electronic copy. Here's a sample prose poem, which is part of a sequence that opens the book. I've chosen it because it is one of the more ambiguous and less transparent ones, and a departure from a certain "clarity and straightforwardness" of his earlier work, which has earned Foulcher a place on the Australian high school syllabus (he is also a teacher).  

I have to say I prefer poetry that is less clear, the poems which have more resistence to interpretation, like the following which is all the more interesting for the ambivalent way it both records and undermines the touristic response to Paris. I find Paris so layered, dense and often unreadable, yet too easy to reduce to tableaux and poetic equivalents of postcards, and perhaps Foulcher is wrestling with this here:

Art

There’s safety in art. You keep it an arm’s length while you hold it in both hands. Lifetimes are lost in the Louvre, and much more than that. You think the Mona Lisa should be set up on an easel in the street. That way, there could be peace among the masters. You take the metro to the Musée D’Orsay, a station with all kinds of transport. Coubert fills the place with darkness and steam, Degas with mist. The bed in La chambre de Van Gogh à Arles shows nothing of sleepless nights. You wander to the Orangerie, where perspective deserts you. You can’t get a grip on the lilies. They’re spattered all over the curved walls, they bloom at all times of the day. In the dusk light they’re impossible, like white blood cells. Nothing is privileged among the lilies. Everything is a long way from the river. She stands at your side and says I don’t know much about lilies, but I know what I like. You know what you despise. You’re drowning among the lilies. You think of Millay’s Ophelia as she drifts on a bed of lilies, and you wish you were somewhere else.

The cliche, I don’t know much about lilies, but I know what I like takes on a sinister overtone. it is the tourist who is aggressive, who consumes without discretion. I prefer the poems like this one, in which Foulcher allows a disturbance of the status quo, argues with the apparent reality of a scene, and goes looking for the destabilising moment. At the same time this objectivist framing of a scene is almost impossible to destabilise, given the way it has become a dominant mode of writing. There is however an ambiguity in the point-of-view. Who is looking? The paintings colour the present in obvious ways - Degas denotes 'mist', Coubert equals 'darkness', but perhaps that is the tourist eye that Foulcher adopts with mild irony. Death is the form of Ophelia, and the flowers of blood reminds the reader of Baudelaire, the pre-Raphaelites, and to the symbolists' obsessions with death and (non)transcendence. There's an interesting and discomforting tension here between the materialist/agnostic and the religious/spiritual in Foulcher's poems, and a sustained reading of Foulcher's new book might reveal who's won the struggle.