R. I. P. Emmanuel Hocquard, 1940-2019

I am very saddened to learn that French poet Emmanuel Hocquard, a singular poet, a singular person, has died. I knew he was ailing, but I had hoped I might see him one more time. 

He is another elder from whom I took so much guidance and solace, especially about how to live one’s life in poetry. Some things I learned from Emmanuel: 

It’s okay if you do not live at the center (New York, Paris).

Small, independently-made poetic objects are more meaningful and honest. See the “Afterword” to my Fragments.

Group translation builds community and changes the language. 

It takes a good sense of humor to be serious about poetry. 

The first time I met him was in May of 1987, when he and Claude Royet-Journoud came to the University of California, San Diego to give a reading. I was a student at the time and attended the after party at the home of professor Michael Davidson. In my memoir, The Middle Room, I wrote about standing on the sidelines with Emmanuel while other party members—notably Claude and my poet friend Helena—danced with abandon:

from The Middle Room:

Given my difficulties around the issue of dancing in even the most anonymous venues there was no way that I was going to throw off my inhibitions in the dining room of him who had thought it fit to call my verses “interesting” and “good.” I found a fellow nay-sayer in Emmanuel Hocquard, and together we watched the dancing from the other side of the kitchen bar where, after I tried to engage him in some light repartee and received but a scowl and one-word responses, I remained by his side, unrebuffed, enjoying the decadent spectacle of Helena and Claude. I know Emmanuel much better now and have learned that behind that “cultivated scowl” he is brilliant, funny, and extraordinarily kind, but at that time I was absolutely petrified by the impassivity he affected in response to my charging confidently forth with my conversational French! Perhaps he declined further transports of pleasure in light of the fact that his visit had already reached its apex. Earlier that day John Granger had taken him to see Raymond Chandler’s house, the address of which a very pleased Hocquard had found in the Collected Letters. Both these French poets had a mania for “noir” and from the moment they landed they had joyfully demanded “take us to the house of Raymond Chandler”!

Emmanuel was a talented photographer. I’ve always loved this picture he took of Jacqueline Risset reading, with me beside her as translator. That was in Providence in 1996. 

Emmanuel Hocquard and Juliette Valéry in Orono 2006

The last time I saw Emmanuel was when he and his long-time collaborator Juliette Valéry came to give a reading at the University of Maine in 2006. The day after the reading, Steve and I took our French guests around to antique shops in quest of Depression-Era glass, which they collected. One piece he found was salmon pink and looked sort of like a soap dish—but not quite. The tag said only “Crystal Stropper.” What is a “crystal stropper” we wondered? Much silliness about this mysterious stropper and its apparent uses followed.

Crystal Stropper

In 1998 Steve and I were living in France and, at the invitation of Emmanuel and Juliette, we spent several days just outside of Bordeaux at the home of Alexander Delay. It was only last fall that I finished a draft of an essay about this idyllic visit as part of a book of essays I am writing on birds and poetry. I had hoped to send a polished version of “Bordeaux Colloquy” to Emmanuel. Though he plays but a small role in the piece, it is my hope that it captures something about his sense of humor and quiet presence. 

Bordeaux Colloquy 

Was that a member of Jacques Derrida’s colloquium being eaten with relish at my feet? Or had I, finally, drank too much wine? I was sitting at the left-most corner of a long farm table with my back to open glass doors that gave onto a large grassy field. Disturbed by an unholy crunching sound, my eyes dropped from my dinner plate to the foot of my chair. There beside my sandaled foot was the farm’s Tom cat, the feathers of a dead grackle-sized bird splayed out beneath his head like a halo. Being a French cat—or at the very least, a cat in France, as I was a poet in France—he was having his dinner at the appropriate time and at table. Despite having lived my life in the company of cats, I had never before seen one eat a bird. Tom did not pluck, dress, or truss. He bit and gnawed, swallowed and digested, “beak to tail,” feathers and all. I was both mortified and fascinated. My Bordeaux hosts and their French guests were amused when I alerted them, in a tone of concern, that a cat was casually eating a whole bird at my feet.  

I recall another instance of my “American supermarket naiveté.” France had a way of poking a hole in it. 1973. At nine years of age I am given a taste of warm milk fresh from a cow on a farm in the Loire Valley. My family was camped there for the night and the large frightening farmer brought my brothers and I this special treat. Having grown up on Carnation pasteurized, we couldn’t palate it. This amused my mother, a one-time farm girl herself, no end. Though I rarely questioned her omnipotence, her insistence that this warm grassy beverage was superior to the chilled white watery 2% product we were accustomed to was difficult to square. 

Now in my early thirties I was the guest of poet Emmanuel Hocquard and artist/translator Juliette Valéry, lodgers on painter Alexander Delay’s small farm located in the Bordeaux region of France.  S. and I had been invited to stay a week. The stated purpose was the completion and polishing of a French version of my serial poem “Enlightenment Evidence,” the group translation of which had begun during a magical residency at the Fondation Royaumontearlier that summer. In Delay’s home S. and I were given a spare, clean, second-floor bedroom with crisp linen sheets and a window overlooking the grassy field. There was a large, beautiful bathroom and a small separate toilet at the end of the hall. Several of Delay’s art students from Dijon were also in residence: young beautiful French people with good manners and radical ideas. On the night that tom cat joined the feast, they had prepared the meal: a vegetarian pasta, which may have accounted for kitty’s decision to fend for himself. It was nearing the end of the week and everyone felt, as people do when brought together in a temporary, yet exceedingly pleasurable living arrangement, an especial fondness for each other. We drank so much red wine our teeth were stained pink. 

Jacques Derrida’s colloquium was held every evening at dusk, precisely when S. and I would sit down with Juliette and Emmanuel in the cool air at a round table to drink white Bordeaux and delicately peel hard-boiled quail eggs to eat with our apéritif. Separating Delay’s property on one side was a stand of gigantic trees that wove together into what appeared to be a great hedge. It must have been at least 45-feet high. As we sat and sipped and waited for dinner this hedge would fill with birds. Starlings, perhaps. A great racket would ensue. The din of hundreds, maybe thousands of birds. “C’est le colloque de Derrida,” Emmanuel would say, gesturing in the direction of the hedge with his head. Each night on cue they’d come together to argue, this Bordeaux conference of the birds. Their colloquy well-nigh drowned out our badinage, but because of the density of the foliage, we never saw the distinct outline of a single one of these voluble debaters. 

There were also three chickens. Often clustered at the edge of the property next to a small fish-filled pond constructed sometime in the past by Emmanuel, these seemingly hysterical hens would bolt toward the cocktail table looking for handouts. Clucking excitedly all the way, their puffy bodies wobbled precariously above their thin legs. Did I give a bite of quail egg to a chicken? I hope not. I was fond of these three squabbling hens, but as S. remembers it, I was much more preoccupied by the farm’s billy goat, who would climb atop the chicken coop to survey his realm. Of the goat I merely recall a lesson in “tail semiotics” solemnly given me by Alexander Delay: straight up and the goat is happy and alert, down means worried, angry, or fearful; a tail moving slowly side-to-side means the goat is in a state of contemplation, attempting to make up his mind. 

Playful poets taking potshots at post-structuralist philosophers. Perhaps not part of the rules of the game, but it fed our spirits well. Each day we feasted, drank, translated. One lunch we all gathered in the kitchen so that we could follow the tour de France on the radio. “Ça a le gout du frigo,” Emmanuel said, rejecting the butter at hand. It tasted as if it has been taken out and put back into the fridge over and over again. Fresh butter procured we spread copious amounts on baguette and topped it with delicious greasy rounds of saucisson sec. There was cantaloupe too, and the lovely dirt-rich house wine, filled in reusable bottles by area vineyards the way when I was little we’d put out the used bottles for the Carnation milk man. Through the wide-open door of the kitchen I could see the interlocked rings of the farm’s large metal bottle rack. A commonplace French object which I’d only ever seen in a Duchamp exhibit.

The Tom cat, siding with the poets, finished off the philosopher’s bird. I went back to my vegetarian pasta. I was trying to grok why the Dijon art students kept referring to their “potlatch,” a term that interrupted their French articulations like a fish bone in the mouth. Apparently, they borrowed the idea of the Native American festival as a frame for some sort of spontaneous and collaborative artmaking. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder which Native term was shaped into that strange word, “potlatch,” so like “pot luck,” or, for that matter . . .pot shot. Shooting the bird outside the spirit of the hunt merely to put in a pot and eat! Crunch, crunch. I had learned quickly the meaning of that sound. I looked down. I should, I think, feel honored. Tom has brought me yet another member of Derrida’s colloquium, whom he is presently and with great relish settling into the fixed meaning of his maw. 

Note: an updated version of this essay was included in For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds (2021)

Petit Tonnerre / 3 poules blanche