L'Invention du verre

by Emmanuel Hocquard

L'histoire ou le "récit" tend à expliquer et à cristalliser (le quatrième état de l'eau) une situation qui n'a pas encore été tirée au clair. Ce jeu de facettes, sous le couvert d'une organisation logique de la mémoire, est une fiction car le sens ne prend corps que dans l'enchaînement des termes, la grammaire, en gommant les ombres et les angles morts. En revanche, comme le verre qui est un liquide, le poème est amorphe. Il ruisselle et cascade en tous sens mais ne reflète rien. Quel est le sens de "bleu" ? Personne n'a besoin de s'interroger sur le concept de bleu, pour comprendre ce que veut dire bleu. Ce sont de telles évidences qu'Emmanuel Hocquard interroge dans ce nouveau livre qui contient autant de leçons de lecture, de grammaire et de pensée qu'il contient de poèmes : 106.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Emmanuel Hocquard (born in 1940 in Cannes) was a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui (with a corresponding English volume, 21+1 American Poets Today) and 49+1. In 1989, Hocquard founded and directed "Un bureau sur l'Atlantique", an association fostering relations between French and American poets.

Besides poetry, he has written essays, a novel, and translated American and Portuguese poets including Charles Reznikoff, Michael Palmer, Paul Auster, Benjamin Hollander, Antonio Cisneros, and Fernando Pessoa. With the artist Alexandre Delay, he made a video film, Le Voyage à Reykjavik.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel...)

Reviews

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provenance, origin, production. Tracking floaters appears in my vision at around the same time as The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard. In my left eye, a mote lags persistently behind the rightward flow and the left- and downward jerk of my focus. At SPD, books arrive in boxes, cut them open with box cutters. The cut is the violence that precedes vision, that precedes the big reveal. The Invention of Glass reveals the organicity of semiotics & grammer. As Hocquard puts it:

The letters are
P. 82 Here, the ampersand (&) is not a replacement for and. Rather, it denotes a tautological aim. Which is to say that it tends to mark, between two terms, a relationship (but can we still speak of a relationship?) or identity: “Table & hands” (p. 10), “Person & path” (p. 86), or indifferentiation, closer to or. You could also say augmentation. “The painting shows Alvina's photographed arms augmented by a shoulder as if it's a birth...” (p. 55) is less the description of an image than the development of a formula such as “Alvina's arm & shoulder” while the other formula “Alvina's arm and shoulder” denotes an addition (113)

Relationship or identity, indifferentiation, augmentation. “Despite orders,/words like bodies/communicate among themselves/by capillary action...” (64). The differentiation contained within Hocquard's indifferention is, I believe, from cellular differention, “the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell” ("Cellular differentiation." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 March 2012. Web. 6 April 2012). The prefix in has many functions, so it is possible to think of an inverted differentiation, in which a higher order complexity shifts to a lower order as well as continuous lateral slide of meaning.

The above note about the ampersand comes from the second major section of the book, entitled “Story”. The other is “Poems”, an archive made up of “columns of white steam”, “variations between dark/and light” (41). Interesting Hocquard's mention of formula, as there are many gestures towards a science of the reactive; atoms and molecules helplessly swapping electrons; biology's messy, ordered interchange of organic material. Language, for Hocquard, is a fantasy that coexists uneasily with bodies which resist it with all their force. This is a poetry that resists not calculation, but the naivete of calculation. My friend Maya asked, as so many have and will continue to ask, “What's the difference between (poetic) image & act ?”. Hocquard: “Light under water/is no wetter/than on land...” (87-88).

[Joe Richardson]

Read this thinking it was a textbook on glass-making. Now I'm thinking, either I got the wrong book, or the process is more confusing than I thought

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hocquard's work is often discussed within the context of minimalism. Such contextualization suggests that Hocquard's is an aesthetic self-consciously aestheticized: severe, dour, meticulously hermetic. While these lyric meditation on language as medium are characterized by unusual tensile strength, they are also more playful and allusive that most works described as minimalist. "Fibrous" is perhaps the best way to describe these poems and notes that are, after all, a single poem. Like transmission lines (cables), they travel, less cutting across than running through and linking disparate zones. Come for the aphorisms -- "To remember / are copies or tautologies" -- stay for the scenery -- "To chase a goat / mistaken at a distance / for the beloved / or the river / looks like fire / beneath the branches."

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read twice...not as good as his sonnets of solitude (but what is)...a narrative thrust towards, well, who knows?< I sometimes think of Hocquard and CRJ as being in the poetics that might exist between the Wittgenstein of the Tractactus and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations (there's a paper there I'm sure, I just don't want to write it)