Yves Bonnefoy, Sostenuto. On Sustaining the Long Poem

Yves Bonnefoy, Sostenuto On Sustaining the Long Poem Mary Ann Caws OFTEN, A GENERAL QUESTION apparently about form is not that only: it aims at something specific, and goes beyond form. The one I want to ask now, both generally and in a specific meditation on the work of Yves Bonnefoy—concerns the long poem, and so implies connectedness and interruption. In so doing, it concerns more than that: I take it as a question not only aesthetic, but moral. What is it, then, that sustains the long poem? What kinds of joinings enable its articulation? What gives it breath? Whatever response we could give, which of course, as in all such cases, is individual and comes from our own perception, background, and judgement, may, because of that, matter more to our own sustenance than we might have thought. That figures among the many reasons why one should only write on writers and thinkers one cares deeply about: your response will affect you profoundly, perhaps irrevocably. From my point of view, the question is at its high point of interest for American poetry in the case of Wallace Stevens (for example, "The Rock") and, for French poetry, in the case of Yves Bonnefoy's Douve and especially his majestic Dans Ie leurre du seuil. I will contend that for Bonnefoy a moral sustenance underpins the other more formal one. The same intensely moral concerns make themselves felt everywhere in his work, from his critical essays on literature and art to his translations of Shakespeare and Yeats, and, especially, his poems themselves. As in his great essays, such as "The Act and Place of Poetry," or in his briefer and apparently more informal ones, say, those included in his Remarques sur le dessin, the readers we are can sense an implicit ethical stance whose consistency sustains not just the work and the person but those acquainted with them, that is, ourselves. We are all familiar, from our first readings in the field of French poetry, with the concept of the poem-as-passage and its close relative, the poem-voyage: Baudelaire's "Voyage," Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre," Apollinaire's "Zone," Cendrars' "Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France.'" These major poems have prepared us for the experience of the metaphysical and mental passage of the long poem 84 Fall 1996 Caws from 1975 that I remain haunted by, Bonnefoy's "Dans le leurre du seuil." That an experience of passage should be architecturally marked as a poem of threshold by its title already suggests the necessarily interdependent complexities of the reading, for this voyage is—paradoxically and poetically—also a stance, as the threshold is already an invitation to passage. Clearly, any sort of moral stance that eschews complexity and to which paradox is foreign is unlikely to touch more than the skin of things. And here, as in one of André Breton's poems that Bonnefoy knows so well, "Je ne touche plus que le cœur des choses je tiens le fil" ("Vigilance"). In the poetics of voyage literature as I read it, there is above all a consciousness not only of motion, but more particularly of invitation and invocation, of description as of interrogation, in the realization of the lyric subject through space and time. Lyricism, narration, and cognition converge, marking the verbs of articulation upon which such poetry depends, imposing a particular tone. In a sense, all these voyages of selfrealization and metaphoric development are composed of successive momentary views of the same lyric subject or object at once superimposed in the reading memory and nevertheless ongoing simultaneously . These spatial and psychological movements find their articulation and nourishment in the silences between the verbal motions like so many sources of energy, forming the pulse of the passage, its characteristic rhythm. At the end, as the reader looks back, a retrospective patterning may be detected, or then reconstructed.2 Such a rhythm of movement and stasis, of stress and silence, of gesture and stillness, can be experienced as analogous to the breath, inhaling and exhaling, unconsciously. In the vivid terminology of the expiration of the breath, as in the execution of the musical effect...