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The Rest of the Voyage

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Bernard Noël

October 2011

Patrick James Dunagan

Bernard Noël is a cerebral, urban-realist mystic caught up by the extraordinary in everyday language as it passes by, carried in things themselves. He captures the instant of wonder, filled with longing, lust, and above all necessity, grounding it in earthy satisfaction. What the eyes see wanes but lives on as a concern of thought. The book is a record of a life of such sight:

Bernard Noël is a cerebral, urban-realist mystic caught up by the extraordinary in everyday language as it passes by, carried in things themselves. He captures the instant of wonder, filled with longing, lust, and above all necessity, grounding it in earthy satisfaction. What the eyes see wanes but lives on as a concern of thought. The book is a record of a life of such sight:

it all issues from our bodies from the earth
there John dips his quill into it when he writes
the Apocalypse and the very base seem then
at the tip of the nib ink is obscene light

The Rest of the Voyage is only Noël’s second book of poems to be translated from French into English, and arriving as it does in his eighth decade of a much-celebrated life of writing, it is well past due. While the failure to include the original French in this edition is a major disappointment, especially since translator Eléna Rivera follows the strict eleven syllables per line count which Noël set himself composing these poems (which no doubt enforced upon her some tricky hijinks of enjambment), this is nonetheless a stellar work. Rivera is particularly faithful to what’s happening inside of the poems, each translation possessing the feel of adhering closely to what the poem wants. As she observes, “I became an interpreter within Noël’s poems, as if the poems were growing out of an understanding, a closeness to the words.” The clarity of her translation, which allows for the innate concerns of Noël’s writing to be bared upon the page, bears this out:

climbed up on top of others a head protrudes
its gaze turns and turns and then it comes toppling
another head climbs upwards its eyes shut closed
beautiful balloon stuffed with noisy trinkets
it’s forgotten the position of the real
in the end it’s only a head full of heads

In an interview, which Rivera quotes from in her introduction, Noël echoes but significantly expands upon Rimbaud’s Je est un autre (I is another), emphasizing that “one must make an effort toward the other.” He stresses the point that such circumstance as he has achieved with writing is a product of effort: “One must make an effort to read, to look, to love.” This substantially clarifies how much work is required in order for the poems to arrive. It is from this avowal of recognition and commitment to the toil required that his poetry begins to grow, continually sustained with promise of work yet to come.

As Noël says, quoted from the same interview, “The number one lesson in writing, is that it takes place in the present.” In other words, be where you’re at. And hopefully dig it. Poet Joel Oppenheimer’s mantra went something like: be there when it happens and write it down. In his new poem “When I was a Poet,” David Meltzer reminds readers of poet Robert Creeley’s penchant for saying “dig it.” Both Oppenheimer and Creeley share ties to Black Mountain College and poet Charles Olson as friend and mentor. The Rest of the Voyage evidences Noël’s comfortable leanings in line with Olson’s ideas concerning the poet’s job. As Rivera attests, Noël is “a poet whose concerns are life itself, how the body lives life, and how the corporeality of polis presents itself, in all its permutations—the responsibility to the world around us and the people around us.” Such attention to the poet’s individual role as a participating body (in all senses) to a community (polis—a key term of Olson’s) is central to Olson’s approaches towards writing.

The demand for English translation of more of Noël’s work is already a foregone conclusion. His subtle lines, with their strict syllabic count and lack of punctuation, are both obvious and disarming: “the poem doesn’t give a damn for fairness.” There’s little question that poetry doesn’t come easily for Noël and that being aware of the sacrifice required, as well as the luck he’s had acquiring his skilled handling of the language, he never takes the poems for granted. Noël returns the poem again and again to the world: “again vapor volcanoes blowing great clouds / that send chills down the spine of this little life.”

Reading these poems is as stimulating to the imagination as any white water adventure or super-endurance mountain hike. Noël has written extensively on the visual arts in France, and his poems demonstrate some spill-over effect of this work as well as indicate evidence of a writing life committed to the integrity of placing priority upon the work itself. While certainly not everything (how it could it be!), this book is quite enough.

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