Foreign-Language Titles: MC Hyland's Poems in the New Slant (Rachel Mallino): To French or not to French

I really like MC Hyland's three poems in the latest Slant.

Great pacing and lots of beautiful images and phrases like "Then winter came on, scratchy/ with stars" and "Seasons/ fell away, creaking on the doorjambs." All in all a quite dreamy effect. Choreographed and ballet-like.

That being said it's strange that I'm going to quibble with the titles (Ballet Mécanique (i),(ii) and (iii)). But I am.

Most any english-language poem using French or Italian or Latin, etc, in the title, is just being pretentious in the way that Charles Simic's titles are pretentious (bandying around terms like "History" and "Knowledge" etc,... Gosh how I like to smack Charles around for this. Smack him smack-damn on the top of his eastern european head. his not-so-original eastern european head. smart head, though. anyways.)

Most foreign language in the bodies of english-language poems fails too I think. Fails because the poet is almost always trying to be "high." That is to say, taking on airs.

Is MC Hyland doing that here? I'm not sure. The title comes off that way. And I'd much rather she'd have come up with something else. Even though there is Ballet Mécanique precedent:

Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmmaker/artist Fernand Léger. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is Antheil's best known and most enduring work. It remains famous for its radical style and instrumentation as well as its storied history. (Wikipedia)

But does this have anything to do with these Slant poems? I dunno.

And if so shouldn't the poet have put a little note with an asterisk. Or something like that. It's not exactly common knowledge. And was it my responsibility to look it up. O, the age-old questions I've failed to question-mark. I dunno.

Anyways, I'm just venting here. Talking up a pet peeve. Like my not liking raw onions. But who wants to hear me venting about raw onions. Well I suppose it depends on how I do it. Style, that is. Naked, bruised, livid, on a chandelier. Maybe. With all my savoir faire on display. Blah, Blah. Quid Pro Quo. I Dunno.

On the other MC Hyland (what a great name) also uses French in the body of these poems. And uses it really well. A compound noun: "Haut-parleurs." High talkers. And in context it works brilliantly. Brilliantly 3 times.

Again, I really like these MC Hyland poems. (if i didn't you all know I'd say so.) And I'm probably just using this as a chance to fly my raw onion flags from every chandelier I can nip this aging fattening flabbying mind-body on to.

Vive la France (not really. decadent, backward-looking, tourist-sucking country! Maybe i'm just talking about Paris here. Generalizing. WTF. I'm in the mood)

Vive la France
Vive la France
VIVE!

Bits of Brian Foley's "Black Eye" shack up over at No Tell

Poems from Brian Foley's manuscript The Black Eye are featured this week at No Tell Motel

Here are some sections that struck me:

"your inside voice
assembled in hermeneutic smoke
brewed in cauldrons of steamships."

and

"I push like an unborn
from the inside until we both are outside, born again in boiling water
And weeping for our mothers."


If, like me, you like middle-career Charles Simic (when he was hungry and glinting) then I think you'll like these No Tell Foley poems, though the quotes above aren't so Simicy.

Blake Butler "Ever" -- Interview: Question 6

RK: Ron Silliman (a man much dreamed of) refers to Charles Simic's work as "soft surrealism." "Domestic" and "tame" are words I'd add. Your surrealism seems to be a wild, running, slush, manic sort. It kind of just leaps up, grows bud, points of steels, shadows, whatever. From my viewpoint it seems as though you kind of hit a vein, get in a zone, and then just let it ride, trusting your language skills to mostly get things right and to keep you on the bull for 8, 16, 32 or however many seconds. Care to talk about your and other kinds of surrealism? (influences, literary and other?)


BB: the history of surrealism to me is 95% soft. That it was born as a political statement, in political clothes, says a lot to me about what its intent is. I'm not interested at all in Breton's idea of what surrealism was supposed to be. 'Nadja' is about as normative as 'Friends' in my mind. I don't even see Simic as a surrealist (not that I've read a ton of him), soft or hard or liquid or made of showerheads. Because I think everything is human, and everything is real, even asdhfoashdfouyase8ryasuhdf, when you get into dealing with the term 'soft surrealism' and all other sorts of ism sism isimsimsimismimsims, you've got your arm up your dick. The only reason I sleep is because the woman that eats my mind every night is a surrealist of the seventh order, and has had her vulva sewn shut by god. That woman would eat Simic's first through tenth born. She'd spit out the eleventh and make a handbag of it to carry a bomb in. I don't know. I am tired of political implications. I am tired of people talking about what they intended to do 'in case it did not come through.' I am tired of soft or hard, even for my dick. I'd drink coffee in the sauna if there were room in there after all the old antiques and luggage my parents have crammed in it. The only place I can write is in the room where I grew up, the room where I was a self-imposed virgin until 19 or something, where I didn't drink or do drugs and put my arm through the wall once after having been up 128 hours straight. You could call those influences. You could call those vulva.

That said, there's been several recent things that have been getting me really amped in the mind of what I go to sleep for, which is the only reason I read, and the only place I find the way-jargoned to shit term 'surrealism' has any application, off the map. Johannes Goransson and his Action Books, as well as his wife Joyelle McSweeney: they are heroes of a sort in that way for me. And Derek White, I don't care if I am referencing the most recent book by my publisher: he did something so new and of the dream mind with his 'Marsupial.' Sean Kilpatrick is a friend and one of the best writers I know of such mind. Brian Evenson is hugely important to me, and especially Ever (read his story 'One over Twelve' from 'The Wavering Knife' if you want to see a very clear unconscious influence on the book by him). Jesse Ball. Nina Shope. Sam Pink. Kelly Link. Norman Lock. Eugene Marten. I could go on. I won't.


(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Blake Butler, at the bottom of this post)