Material Girl

Truitt continuedfrom previous page Talking about poetry that is, we talk about time about poetry "at the edge of time the full summer night where the road is white." ("A Poem for Claude Roy") Roubaud points to poetry as where time—and so the "plot" of an overlaid mortality—resolves or, better, dissolves. As he concludes the prose poem "The Street," swept with Roubaud's most elusive and so inclusive statements—and which concludes his more embodied poems as the make up the first section—"But the very moment I knew I ceased knowing." But Roubaud in this book is far from intoxication : The Form ofa City is a steady stark look at mortality, finality—with the eighteen sonnets of "Square des Blancs-Manteaux: Meditation on Death" constituting a profound rhythmic challenge to consciousness itself. In these sonnets, as well as touching variously through the collection, there operates the irreducibility of time to a truth in which we glimpse not only no going back but also no going ahead. How do we locate ourselves? Ofcourse, this is not without its humor, and nowhere more so than in the book's first poem, called aptly "Paris" (after Raymond Queneau), followed by the next reflexive "Commentary on the Preceding Poem," which, combined, compass—walk around—the plot of the whole collection. The Paris we find to traipse Is not the one we used to find And we're not wild to get to The Paris we will leave behind. Here we "find" the now, marked against the past, "behind"—that woeful gap—though poised as a futurity, of loss ofthe possibility of location, which is measure: None are "wild" to die—though not to say it is any final civility either. The first line and title posit Paris: The city that, in relation to Andromache, is exile. What is there to find, then, here? In the Waldrops's translation, theuse ofthe word"traipse," derived from the Old French trespasser, "to pass beyond," is terrific in this light: The real Paris, in this sense, does not yet exist. That reading is redoubled in the following poem, its commentary: J.R.: Seven eight seven eight there me too I've got a Verlaine quatrain R.Q.: Well but yours you copied. As the Waldrops' translators' notes explain, the numbers refer to the syllabic count of the preceding poem's Verlaine quatrain copied from Queneau. As the notes point out, Queneau's original, "Lespauvres gens" ("Poor People"), was done with a sign in a public toilet. What plot, then, is lost? What mapped? There is no loss, no shit—only gain in the arrival (all of them) that is. As Roubaud begins his "Invitation to Voyage": —Think how nice it would be to go down there, to go to abbeville to Aboukir, to Ajaccio. . . . And so, on we do keep alphabetically going, all the way to "Washington." No "X" to mark the spot; and no why: Certainly no sleep. Sam Truitt is author, most recently, o/Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia). Material Girl Susan M. Schultz I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu 154 pages; cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95 Selected poems are as notable for what poets leave out as for what they include. John Ashbery's mid-1980s selected, forexample, virtually eliminated The Tennis Court Oath (1962) from his personal canon . Charles Bernstein's Republics ofReality (2000) brought back into focus some of his early work, while largely ignoring the poetry that has made his name among contemporaries. Creating a book of yourbooks tells a story; and, as stories are inevitably partial, a selected (ifcomposed by the poet) offers the readeran autobiography ofthe art, ifnotquite the artist . ANew and Selected Poems, which this is, argues for the artist's development into "newness," which is the poet's last word, at least for now. Depending on your notion of "art," the selected may tell a story more involved with aesthetics than with history, or the other way around. The word heard most in connection with Berssenbrugge 's poetry is perhaps "perception." Charles Bernstein, in conversation, tells her: "You seem to have...