Temps crible: Poemes, 1962-1999

World Literature Today, Wntr, 2001 by Mechthild Cranston

Alain Lance. Temps crible: Poemes, 1962-1999. Cognac, France. Obsidiane/ Le Temps qu'il Fait. 2000. 134 pages. 95 F. ISBN 2-86853-323-X.

IN HIS OWN PREFACE to Temps crible, Alain Lance explains the dual meaning of his title's modifier, crible, as "sifted" and "pierced through," "accable d'une quantite de maux." His present anthology "sifts" from some 300 texts published between 1962 and 1999, poems and prose poems pierced through by the lasting memories of World War II and all subsequent warfare, for his temps crible(s) are multiple. From Les gens perdus deviennent fragiles (2970) to Distrait du desastre (1995), the agony of wars past and present prevails.

Born in Rouen in 1939, Lance lived his childhood in occupied Paris, heard his first poetry in the nursery rhymes recited by his grandmother (recalled in poems such as "Comptine policiere"), and began writing verse while living in Tubingen, Germany. He sent his first poems to Philippe Soupault (to whom "Philippe S." in the current collection is dedicated) and records an early attraction both for his German contemporaries (Brecht in particular) and for the French modernist tradition inaugurated by Apollinaire.

From the latter he borrows (without credit) the opening of "Zone," "A la fin tu es las," though Lance's line continues, "De ces dechets sonores." It is from Apollinaire that he inherits his intoxication with words and their seemingly limitless sound/meaning permutations, as well as his love for the music of language, as shown in "Nuit / Ruelles de rats / Rates les etoiles." Like Apollinaire, Lance preferences common speech patterns transmitted in proverbs ("Tant va le cri dans l'air qu'a la fin il s'efface"), nursery rhymes, and songs.

A line from Baudelaire's "La vie anterieure" (which an endnote does acknowledge) is transformed by Lance into an Apollinairean "catalogue aria," beginning, "J'ai longtemps remonte des boites musique," followed by twenty-six repetitions of the opening verb complemented by self-deprecatory conclusions ("J'ai longtemps verifie le compte syllabique"), before ending on the Baudelaire original: "J'ai longtemps habite sous de vastes portiques."

Like Apollinaire's, Lance's break with tradition is at once playful and irreverent. There is, however, a difference of perspective in the latter's treatment of the faits divers from which much of his poetry (like Apollinaire's) proceeds. A poem like "Printemps," for example, begins, "Foire au printemps! Gloire aux oignons blancs!," but ends on "Le printemps neuf compte les absents." There is a difference also of tone between Apollinaire's "Le mai le joli mai" and Lance's bitter portrayal of "Mai," which opens, "Un jour on decouvre un grand vide / Sous des bulbes pourris," more reminiscent of Apollinaire's "Colchiques," though the latter's poison works less visibly than Lance's putrification.

In the texts at hand, absence and the void are scripted as wanderings "entre massacre et literature" not prompted by any underlying belief in the redemptive powers of the poet. Lance's writing follows from a fall into the well of childhood from which the poem retrieves nothing but "un seau de peur" (rich in its homonymic suggestions of saut and sot ["Noir"]).

Though Lance writes in free verse (interspersed with prose poems), his poetry often gains by being richly assonanced, as in "Au musee du sang-froid / Le personnel est pale / Et l'enfant se lasse / De cogner aux rectangles verdatres / Dans l'indifference des poissons qui planent," a text which measures, by different means, the distance between "massacre" and "literature."

Cut off by both vertical and horizontal planes, wandering and gazing, Lance's child may no longer knock against the rectangle of fish tanks; but from the silence of the "poissons qui planent" and the void beneath the rotted bulbs of May the poet creates the durable time and space coordinates that compel: "Tandis que je n'ecris pas," he writes, "Le temps se renverse / Sur les femmes qui / Partent sans mot dire au long d'anciens commerces," acknowledging both the curse (mot dire, suggesting the homonym maudire) and the blessing of poetry, independent of the hand that writes (or remains still).

Mechthild Cranston
Clemson University