The Drawings of the Broken Poem: On Henrix Michaux

Gillian Conoley's translation of Henri Michaux's Thousand Times Broken (City Lights Books 2014) has been reviewed by Ron Slate at On the Seawall. Noting that "[i]n 1955, determined to evade his own habits as a poet, Michaux had all but abandoned the genre in favor of painting" and that he would vow over and again that he would no longer write poetry, Slate looks at the drawings included here, and the ensuing prose, which "describes the sensations of the moment of creation, but also has the equanimity to comment on itself":

These drawings – must I say it? – are reconstructions. A hand two hundred times more agile than the human hand would not suffice for the task of following the accelerated course of the inexhaustible spectacle.

And it is out of the question to do more than follow. Here one cannot seize a thought, a term, or a figure, to work with it, to draws inspiration from it, or to improvise on it. All power over them is lost. Their speed, their independence, comes at that price.

Rather than a replacement art for the poverty of language, Michaux’s drawings present him with proof of a complimentary, inspiring deficiency. Poetry’s power is reconfirmed at the conclusion: “The poem, a thousand times broken, presses and pushes to construct itself, to reconstruct, for one immense unforgettable day, in order to, through everything, reconstruct us.” Peace in the Breaking ends with the title poem -- a work of ascent fated to move down the page, a wish to break away vying with the fixity of the material of its utterance: “an almost exquisite suffering / goes through my heart in my chest // linked to the loving cement that holds the fraternal world / undivided and near till its most distant point / and all enclosed in the sanctuary …”

Michaux’s argument with language began in his disaffected youth. He recalled that his introduction to the dictionary was the most significant event of his post-adolescence. The critic Peter Broome described it as “the discovery of words in a state of disponibilité, uncommitted and not slaves to the ready-made.”

Read the full review at On the Seawall.