of the mind'. To understand the functioning of a fable then, is, for Chdnieux-Gendron,
the key to potential access to Breton’s (underrated) thought-system.
No Poetry for ladies?'. Georgiana Colvile, echoing James Joyce’s - ironic?
- observation, begins by reminding us, with Trinh Minh Ha, that 'the Scream inhabits
women’s writings. Silence is heard there'. Firstly, Colvile takes the reader on a rapid
journey through the poetry and collages of Valentine Penrose, recalling that 'the
Surrealists were fascinated by monsters and Valentine Penrose outdid them all'.
Alcheniically transforming the 'brute matter' of such as Erzebet Bathory, La Comtesse
sanglante of sixteenth-century Hungarian demonology, Penrose is read as revealing the
reverse image of the monster, a specular angel no less convulsive for all its beauty. The
question of specular boundaries is developed in Colvile’s treatment of Alice Rahon
Paalen. The interplay of poeme∕tableau∕objet∕paysage, not only in Rahon’s work but
also in Surrealism’s broad sweep of 'metaphore filde', in Michael Riffaterre’s
formulation, is brought by Colvile into a psychoanalytical frame. Thereby the
Surrealist fetish figure of the femme-enfant 'at play in wonderland' is, mercurially,
transformed into a mystery-revelation by Colvile’s coda. 'Indian Summer 1936'. Here
Penrose and Rahon come together ... but that’s another story; one which Colvile
cleverly reveals∕conceals in the chambre double∕huis clos where 'woman’s body
weaves a ceaseless poem'.
Fragmentation, holes, silence. Nancy Blake takes up a similar trajectory
quite explicitly in her opening claim: Trench poetry in particular has been ruthless
enough to pursue the study of experience as absence'. The minimalist aesthetic of
Andrd du Bouchet provides her with a primal differentiality which she theorizes as
symptomatic of post-modem poetry. Here words do not reflect reality but interact with
it, are fragments of it. But, she stresses, du Bouchet 'has been anxious to distinguish
himself from the Tel Quel attitude, hoping to keep his poetry open to something other
than language'. For Blake, both a Taoist path and a Heideggerian openness are evoked
by this poetry. The blank, for du Bouchet as for Mallarme, is there to be read ...
negatively. Poetry is written - and read - against the blank space. Ever close to Nancy
Blake’s delicately constructed critical interventions is the question of post-modem
subjectivity, minimally differentiable from an objective world, apprehended and
articulated (though only just) through the word.
'Taking the side of things is, in part, to accept them as they are, without
wondering why they are.' Michel Collot begins his meditation on the poetry OfFrancis
Ponge in a mode strikingly close to the focus of Nancy Blake. In Te Pre', he argues,
'the question of the origin of the world is closely bound up with that of the origins of
language, since its object is simultaneously the source of the landscape and a linguistic
r∞t': pre∕pre- ... as anti-Cartesian as expression of reality can be. Again,