Dominique Hecq

Fire relies on the leaves of gum trees

 

No sound fits this spectacle     No sound

but the hiss of fire     bark     grass

searing your world into sheer whorls

of alliterations     Hallucinations

of words resounding with nothing

Following faultlines     a gorge aflame

furrows erased in granite and sandstone

                 lines of scribble gums forever

receding     The gorge

                             barring you

Now how could I speak again

when syllables shatter on my page

turning words inside out

when letters hover in the air

like the smell of your burning skin?

We were discussing poetics

on our mobiles    How we didn’t need

manuals for wordsmiths

preferred to work words as an end

in itself     make a poem fulfilled

in its enaction     look inwards

to the materiality of language

on the page and in the mouth

stress the event     not the effect

          You said good bye

And now I dream that you flit

out of my skin     your voice

lettering me     Poetic enjoyment

perhaps    as if to resist

the etiolation of language

Don’t put individual utterances on show

you say     Perform their moves

of repetition     re-use     reiteration

      show your reader the absurd

desire to contain (       )

For here is the gum and its inferno remains

the grave among blistered roots

the mouthless earth lulling one to leave

If it could speak      it would say

here is the silence          here is the question

Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. Hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. Her works include a novel, three collections of stories, and ten volumes of poetry. Among other honours such as the Melbourne Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Writing and Spoken Word Performance, the Woorilla Prize for Fiction, the Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry, the New England Poetry Prize, and the inaugural AALITRA Prize for Literary Translation, Hecq is a recipient of the 2018 International Best Poets Prize administered by the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters.

Questions for Dominique Hecq

How did you arrive at writing poetry?

I always thought I was a prose writer, but looking back over many years, I think that what I had been writing since childhood were really prose poems.

The first ‘real’ poem came into being when my second child died. The year was 1994. I needed the utter compression of poetry to convey what could not be uttered.

Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé have been long-time companions in the francophone tradition. So have all the Pauls, from Valéry to Verlaine to Eluard to Celan.

In the anglophone world, James Joyce was the great discovery of my late teens and I remain in awe of Finnegans Wake.

And in-between, there is Samuel Beckett and, later, two great Canadian experimental writers Nicole Brossard and Anne Carson.

These are just the big names, but I think you can hear a conversation with some other poets when you read my work. Marion May Campbell, Maria Takolander, Michael Farrell, Dan Disney and Shari Kosher come to mind.

I think it would be wrong to say that I continue to be inspired by a particular work, writer or artist in any medium. I get excited by new work across the arts and so might respond to philosophy, music, art, architecture, or dance as I would to poetry, essay, drama and fiction. Or physics, for that matter.

It is noticeable that you refer to the use of language as expressive in itself

            “…..work words as an end….”

How do you think written texts interact with sensual and personal meaning(s) ?

I think the uneasy slippage between sounds/words and spectacle in this poem is driven by both rhythm and emotion. You could say that there is an intermeshing of the bodymind with the subject matter.

Written texts interact with sensual and personal meanings through the bodymind.

They are kind of translations of a lived experience. My studies in philology made me aware of the materiality of language: where words come from and how they are put together.

But what happens in the writing process is something that involves a kind of childish jubilation: the sheer pleasure of experiencing rhythms in the body and sounds in the mouth and in the ear. It can be messy, so the act of revision is important too.

I’d say that written texts tamper with the oral drive.

They do violence to language through conventions such as the use of punctuation or gaps, as is the case in this poem.

 How does translation – from one form to another or from one language to another – as a formal limitation stimulate expression?

I think formal limitation functions like a container. It prevents feelings from overflowing and words from proliferating. In George Perec’s case, for instance, there is a reflexive dimension to the constraint. It points to that which is silenced.

What role do you see for silence in care for the environment? – is this abdication of responsibility?

Silence is a call. It says listen. It’s not an abdication of responsibility. On the contrary. Silence says don’t think you know what the question is. To put it rather pompously, it problematises knowledge.

The role for poetry is to voice what is beyond words.

What is your writing process?

Intuition and formal knowledge are intermeshed.

I don’t discuss poems prior to writing. That would be a killer. Again, I’d say that sentiment and formal playfulness are intermeshed. In this instance, the dialogue in the poem underscores this intermeshing, or at least that’s what I think.

There is an emotional charge which is offset by formal restraint. It is always the poem that dictates the form.

Some poems want to walk. Others run or dance. Or stay still.

How do you think that technology affects our understanding and communication of elements such as climate change and, more generally, our relationship to art and language?

Technology affects our relationship with other human beings and the natural world, including animals. It does therefore affect our relationship to language and art. I’d call this impoverishment. As regards climate change, technology goes hand in glove with capitalism. I’d call this salvaging, after Anwen Crawford who, in the introduction to Joan Fleming’s Song of Less writes:

In salvage is a Proto-Indo-European root, sol: ‘whole, well-kept’, and this root, this ancient note, made its way into the word holocaust, in which the whole of things burn. Holocene: our epoch of many burnings. But also solidarity, this song we will keep singing in the wreckage.

What does it mean to you to be care/less or care/full?

To be care/less is an index of irresponsibility and moral failure. To be care/full is to acknowledge and respect otherness. It is to honour life.

Do you have any advice for writers or creative producers?

To proffer any kind of advice would assume that I am wise enough to do so, which I’m not. I’m keenly aware that we need frameworks and methodologies with an inclusive logic that goes beyond political correctness, by which I mean a logic that binds humans, animals, plants, concepts, forms and languages.

What are the works that you are most proud of?  Do you have any publications currently available for interested readers?

My most recent books are Smacked & other stories of addiction (Spineless Wonders) and After Cage: a serial composition in word and movement on time and silence (Liquid Amber Press). Both address the theme of this issue of A-OK.