Jean Senac: an introduction.

Nearly alone among the much-translated French poets of the 20th century, Jean Senac still waits to be discovered by the English-reading world. Maybe this is, in part, because he wasn't French but Algerian. Like Pablo Neruda--whom Senac resembles in his stormy and primal lyricism, his political commitments, and his penchant for a certain "native" surrealism--Senac represents what used to be called the "Third World."

He was born in 1926, into an extremely poor family whom the father promptly abandoned. Growing up with an apparently high-strung and impractical mother seems to have been difficult for Senac, and the early heartache of being left fatherless stayed with him all his life. His sympathies always lay with those who suffered the pangs of unrequited love, as well as those who had to endure poverty and hunger: for Senac, both extremities were already twin aspects of the same oppression. It wouldn't take a strict Freudian to argue that, as a result of his fatherless childhood, Senac's life became a constant, restless search for surrogate father-figures. Happily for him, he found good ones: fellow Algerian Albert Camus took the young Senac under his wing, as did the French poet Rene Char. Senac began to make pilgrimages to Paris (as his great hero Rimbaud had done from Charleville a century before), where Senac absorbed that extraordinary tradition of verse and revolution which he incorporated in his own writing.

However, Senac's French is barbed and inward, a language in struggle. In 1950, he wrote to Char about an early morning stroll through the capital that had lured him: "Maybe it was my nerves just letting go, madness, something else, or simply one of those bouts of euphoria which Paris should reserve--malicious defense--for those who happen to grow up here? Nonetheless, chances are, on the contrary, this REMAINS, THIS essential part: 'I was present in the world.' ... I stopped at Notre-Dame (attended 7 o'clock Mass. Slipped far away from the liturgies' still water toward a more apt Perception)." It was an irony of Senac's life that the identity which he sought, and which often seemed to elude him, came to him most strongly in a place where he did not exactly "belong."

On the one hand, Senac's abiding love for French culture, and on the other hand, his deep misgivings about French imperial power: as a result of this internal struggle, Senac entered the French language as a deliberate outsider, from the beginning mixing in polyglot words pell-mell from Spanish, Arabic, and English, while inventing many bold neologisms of his own. Later, Senac actively joined the resistance against French colonialism in Algeria, fighting as a soldier for that cause: yet, one feels that Senac was fighting only against the France who conquered with armies, not the same nation who conquered with images. France was still the country Senac thought of when he thought of poetry, French was the language he thought poetry in, and moreover, France was where his books were published. There were many of these, including Poemes Iliaques (Iliac Poems, 1966); Avant-Corps (Pre-Body, 1966); and La Mythe de la Sperme-Mediteranee (The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm, 1967), a cycle of poems in which Senac comes closest to the rousing spirit of Rimbaud. He also founded three literary reviews and wrote radio plays. Senac was often dogmatic in his quest for truth, a participant in that explosion of radical consciousness that took place across the world in the 1960's. Indeed, it was in that decade when Senac began to feel a certain solidarity with the American beats, especially Allen Ginsberg. "Ginsberg, come on," he writes in The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm, "let's braid our beards as one."

Throughout his life, writing was Senac's great refuge. A cancer survivor who was often in frail health, Senac found in writing that better, imperishable body that he needed. One of his constant motifs is the "Total Body," an ideal compound of body and soul that he felt was realizable only in poetry (and, by flashes, in the experience of profound love). As if to affirm this vital connection between writing and the body, writing and physical health, Senac worked furiously, seemingly under the gun of sensing that his life would not be a long one; and in fact it wasn't: he was murdered under unknown circumstances in 1972. His last collections, Les Desordres (Disorders) and Corpoeme (Poem-Body), were published only posthumously. But today, Senac still sings to us in his passionate, earnest, and vehement voice.

--Justin Vicari

So What Are You Spain
to Hermann Braun

So what are you Spain
if not this rustling of hawks through the heart
if not the night

Dressed in pointy coals
she circles the oracle she runs
through temples in the cactus aureole
drunk with sunspots

Me I am there by words alone as one lets a she-dog
conjure her own faithful
prairie
until the birds are buried again inside our blood
from her to our fingertips the span of a bite
from her to my fingertips the unbearable time of her lucidity

So what are you Spain
in a rifle's barrel
not a carnation still less a cry

With her long scatterbrained arms my mother
tried to stop the din of the submachine guns
the water spout of castanets, writing-machines
and the golden shears in my gypsies' fingers

O citizeness of the sunflowers
what useless melodrama hurled you to the shipyard
what horn-voyeur deleted your brassy mane from the order of things?

The racket we've got in our veins now
is made by a thousand miners
and children held prisoner in a crumbling hopscotch
by springtime

Perhaps one day at the precipice's edge
the heart will miss us, wings
wide as motherly tenderness,
shuddering with the resolve of an athlete,
will make us as big as the foam
I will handle your pebbles o continents
and all the gold of Peru will flow across my lips
but what? It won't help the one who has no roots
and where are mine?
vines and fire
I have nothing left but a bitter fame

There, there is no longer mother nor lies
nor the desert keeping watch at the edge of a fingernail
To bruise space for us the gazelle
is waking up

So what are you Spain
in my crime of stone
a name I have risked
my father's heavy breathing
and his singing like a downpour of amorous crows

In those risky times a black child washed
his tongue three times a day
Europe let loose its neon she-wolves
propped on their elbows the gangs of entrepreneurs executed the doves
nude soldiers punched horses in the head

Buried beneath a heap of blacklists a woman
noble-faced and full of patience
cried "Honor to all the camps!"
Misery, stronger than she, hurled the night into her hair
for the children of sunburn only gravel
is left to whet their appetite

And as for me what would I be Spain
if not the wound if not perpetual summer
if not you who starts fires when I push open my voice.

Guitars

Solemn and blazing like a great empty ode
I bivouac where the dogs are getting sheared
my father waits for me there

The bad guys have crowned us with raw matter
from the height of their black brow twenty-eight saints warned me
the kings of Notre-Dame are the same age as my life

But I'm lost Soul let's run away
the cold like love damns me to hell spellbinds me
immense mercy sleeps beneath the wool
don't touch the heart that rakes its wild embers

Keep waiting keep waiting like I'm waiting for my father
My mother told me: He lives under the springtime
my mother told me As I always say knock wood
I carry a green apple tree in my heart
I cut my gums with the gravel of his name

Tuesday will start with sea water
misery with my oaths
the gypsies will come to stitch up my vertebrae
In Spain death is burning the saffron.

The Absurd

This ball in the throat
it's earth it's death
it's love like a barley pearl
hit by a lump of coal

The thousand names assail
us an octopus of seasons
arms around the waist
disorder worn on the brow

I call to you I call to you
what innocent shall respond
who will tear me out by the roots
the shovel the red earth of sheets?

In the tomb I repeat
the gesture of an unknown
vigilant after the bombing
a grass blade under bare foot

Ah difficult misery
that always comes back
under the ribs this cancer
is it a void or the absolute

In the blue of chance
where hornets battle
the poem strikes its balance
saying yes and saying no.

Prison Bestiaries

I love you that's true I love you that's false
crows on my tongue
wage war with swallows
we've got blackness inside our backs

But if one day the beloved
or the beauty comes along
we find our spinning tops again
sunlight scars the water

All around the air thins
we throw a shovel
of earth on the thighs
the ivy comes into focus

Migratory pleasures
you bequeath to the heart
decaying nymphs
and we go on living
gropingly under the waves
like crayfish

I love you
for you I write poems
to stop thinking
drunk on images
I invent margins
to prolong you

If I had at least
your name to speak
o my unknown my madwoman of the streets
honored in my veins
like a king by his empire

My needle of gold missing in the hay!

Summer of the Poem

The hay-making leaves you
A hymnal of wasps, the skin
Peels off, the sea turns away
And gulps the hard silence of love.

Your face between two reflections
Where my foot wanders bare:
Traceless pebble a wave
Casts up in the confines of a heart.

But at the end of the quill I startle the channels
Where your physique blossoms.
So much blue, so much green, and a thousand hassles
For a tiny dab of ochre where the poem can laugh!

But not to speak? The hand is faster than the soul
And without even touching the flame
The rhyme is already in ashes from my blazing.

What a lonesome turning (immense, nonetheless)
In which races are swallowed whole and the earth's belch
Sullies our blood to mud.

You sculpt your health amid these furies, corsair!
And gently the word, like a worn-out goat,
Lays its trembling horns upon your knee.

Tomorrow, everything but the sand and sadness.
Everything new in my ears: Papa's good time,
Mama's "No," her scarred stomach.
I'm born in the unforeseen chute of the poem.

Tomorrow I'll write what my fetus has engraved.

For a Homecoming
to Jean de Maisonseul

A man doesn't know the grandeur of dawn just by dragging his heart
 around in it
nor the even more sinuous one of the morning
the choice drains the blood of nuggets and fables

Terrible

But man grows big when he throws off his sheets
and hurls himself face to face with the sky
steam away, delirious mother
so the son's hands will stop bleeding
and bread will return to the feasts of the tablecloth

Here is grandeur I can't name it
humble as the voice of the Oranese woman
who presses her limpid cliffs into my flesh

The bird of day doesn't sing
the cold gets under the vest
From the cave to the weathervanes a bull keeps watch

Taurus

I carry his lyre his potency in my heart
he's a sun angel
burning in the vertebral shade
he tears me to pieces he leads me
toward the diss and the mole's enormous worries
down there where my people withdraw for their siesta

I know grandeur as I know weakness
it bellows at me Come back (surrounded by she-donkeys)
and it's true that a man must come back
must undertake all over again
the business of warmth
at the exact point in the rigors of the sand
where a child shrivels, his leg cut off.

November Ordeal
to Antoine Steimer

1
There is no clearing more open than one word
Between your hesitant lips.
The most undreamed-of colors bite at your skin,
Delirium lasts forever under a thumbnail.
Derision! derision! your impotence gloats!
--Kid-goat encircled by satellites, neutrons, what are you
If not this trunk of cedar at the turn-off,
Where sea-foam yields its useless secrets one word at a time?

Here's the evening. A vast ring of nostalgia--aureole or microgroove.
In its black wool scarf, the heart,
Leaning from the balcony, spells
A name--toothless, profuse, a useless risk
Where birds stop getting caught in the snares.

Above the tripods, beauty comes and goes in Morse code.
A space--an Elsewhere--pierces you.
You know, invaded by anguishes and horrors,
Those cells that rise and multiply inside you
Are not the same as Hiroshima!--Perhaps the words' last
Assault on the Door behind which you dream?

Earth tips over. A stammerer
Pastes his lips to
Yours--Mud, hallucinatory glory--o helm
Of the sun, negating what dead human race?

A burning planet lays itself open inside you.
All your doors bang and flap.
Leave your vertebrae! Leave!

2
I left the cafe's tribunal and palavers, I passed
Through an acid cloud
On my way toward those isles where serpents unwind, nerves,
Verbs that can only be conjugated, to die.

Maybe the hour for living has come,
As if we were no longer glittering sleigh bells
(Jingle-jangle treasures?) up to our necks in death.
Maybe the hour has come for saying
Something pleasant, some saliva on the wound,
Silent
As a pebble at work in the desert.

I've left all my brothers so I could keep on believing in brotherhood
--To build, even on mud,
A house without prey--and its windows overlooking the stars.
You will come back, armed with my body,
With every sound affirming the bled syllable.
I will be the Visible Ray
Whose red-carpet welcome your dim centuries have rolled out.

In my acid cloud
I make my way toward you.

3
to Jamel-Eddine Bencheikh

This earth is mine with its bitter liturgy,
Its shit-smeared lights, its murderous roads,
The topsy-turvy soul, the exhausted people.

Mine with its sun cracking like an ice floe,
The starved maze where our muscles grow lost,
And all this vanity sprouting like wild herbs
Wherever the little kings fall to dreaming.

With its insolent lineage, its air-conditioned corpses,
Its tanks and the rank sweat of the poem
At the mercy of every safety-lock.

At the hour of mockery I scream at the top of my lungs.
A wing alighting! A smile I could live in!
A hardened leg where a road begins!

I won't go. Mountain-climbing the myth.
I know its thistles, its broomsticks, its torpor,
But always in the rock, wriggling into space,
A secret snail--and such an angry thumbnail!

This earth is mine between two auspicious flights,
Two mass graves, two desires, two wet-cement dreams,
And in my veins a flute's song routs
Boabdil's evil below Pomegranate walls.

Mine beyond reason, beyond the changing of your seasons.
Gnaw away,
But on such a tender science, such a stubborn joy,
Chaos won't get hung up.

4
Against this incinerated age
I foment,
Fragile, with tenderness and boldness for my crutches,
A nightlight
--Your nightlight! o dying eternity!

Among the nettles, the slingshot smile
Barely guides a single shadow home
--But the shadow of a rose!

"Thanks" upon regressive lips
Blossoms all our knowledge of the day,
More avant than a levee.

Not a flintrock nor a date-pit
Nor disorder nor carnation,
But the smile he's loaded
In his slingshot, to aim at me.

A child
To vanquish time.
Eternity, o perishable one!
O blue of the sea! My ineffable trashcan!

In the space of the word from your soul to your lips,
From your laugh to my wound, a thousand colors rise up
From deluges of X-rays, I swim in the dazzle,
For the first time a citizen of my own life.

Seven Poems in Two Days

For this corner where the cipher overtakes you,
Where you arrive crouching from great distances,

Where you call upon all the saints of your birth
And all the prophets of your resistance,

Where you no longer know, your face
In the grass, bearded, beardless or shaven,

If it's the future or the past that lies in wait for you
And percolates this babble in your blood,

Where you would like to become complete under the ground
Like a hedgehog, or a sea-urchin deep in its chimera,

Where, like the sun in the middle of your oven,
While poets hurl their drivel at your ears,

At this moment which is like your first rendezvous with the day,
You would really like to nail again seven poems in two days

And approach your forty solitary years
With this parcel of forty poems like a torch,

Not to illumine your life or your pals or who knows what
But to leap over this fire as once before a la Saint John in front of
 your Oranese house.

Short Life

If men ask for proof
what else do you want me to say
my love

Your name

I invent miracles
so my friends will love you
I create a crazy sun
from the shadow of your voice

I speak and you follow me
my carnal desert
my love whom I do not know.

Prayer

I have only a distant memory of day
this eel wrapped around my vertebrae
which never stop bleeding

Of the triumphal visage I know
only the thought bubble and the lard pomade
of the sun's pantomime I know only neon

At this hour hanging between God and the rocks
water rivers the streets but in the soul the coffin
foams up
and I cry to the Lord to x-out the steely swords
rip up the bedsheets Veronique bit through
sculpt angel bodies under shirts
of passers-by

I know of love only a single word
my name Lord my larval name

Grant me the peace of growing tall among men
and possessing a beauty like no one else's
and if the night is my pathway
let it lead to truth

Between the wolf and the hound
the cold gives its blessing.

Diagram of Misery

1
Words, I've thrown them blindly,
At the mercy of the sun, the sea-urchins.

At the mercy of gluttonous breasts,
My words, cups of avid hands.

Devoured whole by gold and the void,
Baleful, intrepid words.

Frozen horsehair, manes,
Too many words perhaps.

At the morning mercy
Of a thirsty lip.

Words, my orders, my bitter aftertastes,
My feminine side, my levee, my loose bowels.

And to engrave you in the etching
Block of amnesiac sadness--
Words!

2
Milk on the step at dawn.
The chill of the stubbed butt lingers.

The eyelashes that make a jail cell.
Bonjour: meaningless babble.

The hand gropes, draws back.
In the pocket, not even a dinar.

The trolley, the smell, it's late.
Now the sun's just a cockroach
 Spinning toward red
 Toward red
 Toward red
Without once disturbing its soul.

On the desk, everything's in order.

3
You get it now, I do not love you!
I do ... Stay, knees, perfectly straight.

The cobblestones are ajar.
But we stay in mid air.

Not ... It's funny how that snatch
Of naked music keeps playing ...

Love ... Napalm my heart.
I'm leaving with his cheeks in blossom
 You
Love of his not-love
In the crazy pool of white coffee.

Every day is Hiroshima.

4
The sun has forsaken words.
The poem's a cold beignet.

Today, all your cheap tinsel,
Your slogans and your terrors ...

When a love dies,
The verb abandons our arms.

5
Cigarette-butt language, more banal
Than a bus pass, than a tear.

All of death and all of evil
(Your body split in two, your soul)

Not even for a first spring,
A tumor, a first apartment,
 Lips.

(In the most gnarled of our fevers,
Stammer the syllables:
 Sun-light.)

Not even for one crumb of God
To place beneath our tooth.

Repetition

Waiting for you is already setting sail in our boat
it's cutting Destiny's thread
throwing death into question every day

I don't know where the blood goes
if it turns white from its ordeal
between two nights the body picks the more serene
the soul the sober pond

I interrogate the ennui of passers-by Dominique
waiting for you is burying in these stones the sole
question

Walk on walk on slumber of the man underneath the city
I don't know where the body goes
the heart is paralyzed
between our two suns earth lets itself go bad.

JUSTIN VICARI was born in New York City. In 2005 he received the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize. He is the author of the chapbooks In a Garden of Eden (Plan B Press, 2005) and Woman Bathing Light to Dark (Toad Press, 2006). His work has appeared in Rhino, Interim, Eclipse, Slant, Spillway, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Poetry Motel, Stirring, Memorious, Black Rock & Sage, and other reviews. This is his first appearance in American Poetry Review.

Translated from the French by Justin Vicari

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Author:	Vicari, Justin
Publication:	The American Poetry Review
Article Type:	Poem
Date:	May 1, 2006
Words:	3547
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