Jérôme Melançon : part five

What are you working on?

I always have too many projects going on at once. I’ve been writing for years and not putting out much - my two books were written as one, fifteen years ago, and I added a few things here and there before the second one came out. Poems have been piling up ever since. I’m completely rewriting most of that work, and adding on based on what this self-transformation is letting me see about my past and present experiences.

As I mentioned before I’m putting together a fourth book right now, all in French, of poems about places in Western Canada. It’s become a practice of tentative decolonization, partly by working on old poems that kept that colonial gaze on a land that’s empty of people and relations, empty of history, just something to be perceived. There can be beauty in that, Camus’ writing has a lot of it, but this beauty comes at a cost and is an appropriation, is part of the larger continuing appropriation of the land through settler colonialism. It’s beauty that’s predicated on erasing a lot of what makes beauty possible.

And at the back, somewhere, is another book on travel, and that one will end up being bilingual in different ways, and might have to be unconventional in its presentation because I want to account for distance through history and geography. I have no idea where I might even submit it, but I suppose that’ll be a problem I’ll need to wait to deal with later on. I have a lot of poems I’ve written while travelling. There’s colonialism here too: in reading these poems I feel I was often appropriating all these places in that same way I’ve been doing it in the Prairies. But now… There’s confinement and the absence of deconfinement for my family even though it’s August now, and the nostalgia for travel itself and not just for specific trips. There’s carbon emissions, and then there’s the destruction that tourism brings, even as it’s supposed to bring some money - and that might just be another form of exploitation. Travel writing can’t have the same meaning it used to have, when eurocentrism was the norm. It certainly doesn’t for me.

For more immediate things, on Instagram (@lethejerome) I’ve been messing around with an old idea of bringing together poetry, politics, and philosophy. And it’s mostly poetic prose, so automatic translations should give you something. Lately there’s a lot about landscaping and sidewalks because with confinement I’m going for walks in a residential neighbourhood. Sidewalks lend themselves to a lot of metaphors, and there’s a lot they exclude. There’s a larger project in there somewhere, writing poetry about and from political philosophers, but I haven’t figured out what that might be just yet. I want to read more political poetry first. I’d love to be able to write something that’s at once poetry, politics, and philosophy, where neither of the three terms are an adjective or qualifier for the other, but where I might find each in the other through various techniques. I’m willing to give it time.

Jérôme Melançon : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I’m a political philosopher by training, so most of my writing focuses on being extremely precise with concepts and arguments, with relating descriptions and analyses to contexts. I inhabit the world Maurice Merleau-Ponty laid out and I’m still trying to find my way through it (that’s my book La politique dans l’adversité and the four projects I’m editing at the moment) and out of it (by asking questions I don’t think he can answer, by reading philosophers and thinkers who are very different from him). I have hesitations about rhetoric and persuasion. I’m not sure arguments work unless they have something else attached to them - affectivity, beauty, refusal, a desire for something different.

Maybe poetry can be more convincing than arguments. Poems can help us develop a sense for the perspectives of others, how they intersect with our own, maybe even enlarge or shift our perspective. They can appeal to common elements in perception, to common emotions and sentiments. They can carry values, embody them, instead of defending them. They help us relate to each other and to ourselves.

There’s also a reinvention of language in poetry, both in terms of making language say things that haven’t been said before, that couldn’t have been said before, and in terms of developing a relationship to language. That’s something I do when I teach creative writing: my students either have French as an additional language, or use English more than they do French. A lot of making them write poetry is about helping them move through language, find a measure of freedom and find themselves within it, instead of being constricted by its rules and seeing it as belonging to others. The politics of who is Francophone can be stifling.

And perhaps through this reinvention and this new relationship to language there can be a better awareness of rules, how to resist them to make other lives within them, how to transform rules, how to live with ever-changing rules. Can be, because there is a lot of conservative poetry. And attitudes toward poetry do not align with political attitudes. I’m interested in developing this emancipatory aspect of poetry now.

Jérôme Melançon : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Not that long ago I picked up my copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 and realized just how much I owed him. Early on I was very much taken with form, and reading him and Kerouac’s prose taught me a lot about flow. Much of my writing until recently was an attempt to develop a practice that includes form and flow; reading it now feels like watching myself as a teenager move in a body that’s not fully inhabited, or that’s too fully inhabited. Being aware of this conflict is helping me find solutions to this problem of form and flow.

Later on, a few years apart, I read Yves Bonnefoy and P.K. Page. And here it’s their attention to the moment that struck me. They give you a sense of a whole room, of a whole event, of the depth and breadth of an emotion, without entering the realms of description or analysis.

And a couple years ago now I did a reading alongside Daniel Leblanc-Poirier. I didn’t know him, hadn’t read his work. Us talking after the reading, walking from St. Boniface to Winnipeg, and the way he read his prose at the reading, opened something up for me. Not that we talked that much about poetry or writing; maybe it’s just getting to know someone a bit, how that leads to look at what matters to them, at what they do, differently. He’s part of something of a movement in Québec that can be trashy, that can seem to look for shock for aesthetic reasons. Until then I saw this kind of writing as facile, and retrospectively that was immensely unfair and close-minded. And contradicts my admiration for Ginsberg. I don’t see myself as a part of that movement or aesthetic, but for the collection I just finished I did explore a change of tone, subjects that are tied to discomfort, that might create discomfort, and vocabulary that I might not have considered poetic before this meeting. And it’s a collection about the French language and its politics, so somehow that shift is fitting.

Beyond these few moments, since rob mclennan started Periodicities I’ve been reviewing poetry. That’s new to me. I try to do one a month, it gives me a break from all my other writing. It’s allowed me to really focus on a book, to keep it with me, because I tend to move on very quickly and not return to books after I’ve read them. To discard them unto my bookshelves. Some books give and give, they’re immense like that; and there are others that have quieter voices, that you have to take more time and adjust to. Writing about them has helped me develop an actual discourse on poetry, or poetries, perhaps, as opposed to only focusing on my own practice.

Jérôme Melançon : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I go back and forth between languages quite a bit. My confidence level with French and English fluctuates. For a while I thought I could write poetry in English. It turns out I wasn’t reading nearly enough poetry in English and a lot of my writing didn’t really get anywhere, wasn’t finding a form. It seems undeveloped to me now, awkward. I’m translating a lot of those poems into French now, basically re-writing them, and I’m much happier with the results. I’m someone who can have very rigid ideas, which is antinomical to what poetry can be right now; my first poems were sonnets! And I hadn’t understood all the rules. Styles and movements are so different in French-language and English-language poetry that moving across them is often more muddling than creative for me.

I constantly feel like I’m not inhabiting either language, like I’m just beside syntax. Writing bilingual poetry has been one way to work around that issue. My chapbook, Coup, came out of my first attempt at just doing whatever. I had rules, sure: they had to fit within a tweet, with Twitter’s old character limit; they had to be couplets, one line in French, the other in English; and they had to rhyme. Better if they could be alexandrines. But within that I didn’t worry about perfection, I just sent everything out there. With this form I suppose I’m owning that French will always be my first language, that I might never cease to approach English through it, and that this can be a strength. My speech and writing have been transformed by these hesitations and echoes.

Jérôme Melançon : part one

Jérôme Melançon writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the author of a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup (August 2020), two books of poetry, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, and one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He teaches Francophone studies and philosophy, and even sometimes creative writing, at the University of Regina. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram through @lethejerome.

How does a poem begin?

A desire to stop what’s happening around me and render a moment fully. Not unlike taking a picture. There’s something I know I’ll want to remember, there’s something happening in that moment, emotions attached to things that I want to take with me. I’m not much of a photographer so I can only really account for a moment through words. This swelling feeling often just disappears as I write and the poem falls flat. At times though there’s a line or two that will stick, and I can build the rest of a poem around them.

There’s a struggle between what I’m trying to get across then, the aesthetics of it, and the desire to be in close communication with readers. This writing might also just be me saying “you’ve got to see this!” I haven’t thought too much about what communicating beauty means; it’s just a given for me, I have this desire. I haven’t felt the need to interrogate it, or to question it. And more recently, like in the book I just finished, it’s moved to the beauty in responses to what isn’t beautiful, the aesthetics of what has an aesthetic impact, without necessarily being beautiful.