|
I'd like there to be a
term for poems made of long blocks of lineated text apparently following no
narrative, temporal or logical sequence, and which zip haphazardly from one
thing to another. Then I could have written that while Dean Young's X___s are
peppered with vacuum cleaners and hammers, Jean-Paul Pecqueur on the other
hand populates his with references to Locke, Shelley, Aristotle, Emerson
alongside (since this is what he calls in 'Patti Suddenly' the 'parched soil
of the Po-Mo world') hamsters, blood oranges, a beach wearing 'thick /
luxurious hair' ('On Wasting Time').
Pecqueur's X___s have two distinctive characteristics. The first is an
elegant, controlled and sweeping syntax, which is what enables him to sustain
long sentences encompassing changes of focus and asides. Here's a
straightforward example, the first stanza of 'Long Distance Communication':
When my mom
calls late Friday to say
she found the
stereo's remote control hidden
in the
hallway closet under one of Murphy's
favourite
western shirts, the one whose mother-
of-pearl
buttons stand out from the turquoise
rayon like a
hermit thrush in a clearing,
He slips from a clause of 'where' the remote was found, to a descriptive
clause about the shirt, whose simile about the hermit thrush is unlikely to
have been the speaker's, and then recaps on the first line to continue
what she
wants to say is that the old blue
dog is sick,
will probably die soon, with
or without
her help, and that she's tired
of living all
alone...
this is his interpretation of the phone call remember, but it continues with
a typically Pecqueur simile - his own, not mom's - leading you just about out
of sight of where you started:
...like a minor character
from some
plot-bare English novel who learns
thirty years
too late that security is really
a bad pun on a polysyllabic
Greek word
forever lost
when some inquisitors decided
the best idea
would be to burn Alexandria.
How can he get this poem back on track? By discussing what's been going on
here. The next stanza opens
There are
sentences with no appropriate context.
What I mean
is that my mind is an informal entity,
multidirectional as light. Then there are sentences
where the
arrows equals its mark. The man
in the second
row exclaimed that he expected
the remote control to return, but he
really meant /....
Multidirectional's a good word for what's going on in many of the poems, but
they work because they're in the grip of masterly syntax, a syntax which he
can make work unpunctuated, writing again, I think, about his own writing in
'Closer to Home'
The idea was to exude
words
like pheromones
salts or attitude then
to abstract from these a
style /...
Nevertheless, among all these densely descriptive, skittering, allusive
poems, I have that turquoise rayon shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons stuck
in my mind. And this is the second striking characteristic of the poems: how
non-visual they are. There's very little stuff like that shirt; this is
head-stuff. 'A blonde voice'? ['The Only Justice is Love'] - no, that sort of
thing isn't visual. Sometimes there's stuff for the ear as well. 'On Wasting
Time' sets up an expectation for a visual description, opening, 'The figure
could be described as in repose' but meets that expectation not with visual exploration
of the figure but with a heady examination of that preposition 'in':
The figure
could be described to be in repose
in the same
way that men are said to be in love
or actions in
vain, each swelling to fill its abstract,
ill-conceived
element, air or other, with novel strains,
forms
harmonious, as waves would fill an ear.
Pecqueur revels in words, and will pack them together like they've never been
before. This, from 'How to Make the Case Against Happiness':
The enthusiast's
dream is a rapt idol,
an escape
module fashioned like a second head
from
government surplus neoprene.
What is that neoprene doing in there? Sometimes his own enthusiasm for words
seems to get a bit out of hand. But not the syntax, never the syntax.
© Jane Routh 2007
|