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The Poetry of Jean Orizet

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Jean Orizet

Jean Orizet

Gold and Frost (eBook)
Selected Poems

Translated by
Aletha Reed DeWees

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This item will be available on October
15, 2016.

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Mundus Artium Press

By Doris McGinty Davis

The collection in this poetry volume, Gold and Frost (L’or et le gel), which consists of four parts, poses the

question of survival, life after the

loss of something precious, in the various strata of that life, which is

increasingly threatened by the materialistic, technological world. The first

section of this book examines

the primal elements of earth, fire, air, and water, rnetonyrnically seen as Man, Woman, Tree, Insect/Bird,

and

Sea. As these elements of life are being eroded into fragments during the latter twentieth century, the

poet wonders about their viability and

that of his poetic imagination, which alone has the capacity to

furnish a continuum for those elements. Like these elements, his poetic

consciousness is threatened by

the ice flow of sterility, which must be broken up. The second section. "Dynamiter la source" ("Dynamite

the

spring"), addresses this problem. As "the sea erodes the glacial floe" with its salt, so the poet must

dynamite the clocked spring of his poetic

imagination, clearing it of all detritus, releasing the living water of

poetry, leaving the poet free to recreate the world and its genesis, as seen in

the third section,

"Fragments dun oratorio" ("'Fragments of an oratorio "). The fourth section deals with a privileged place,

"Venise"

("Venice"), where water, like the fertility of the poetic imagination, is once again the dominant

force in the technologically fragmented world.

How does Orizet define the position of the poet in the fragmented world with which he has chosen to

interact') The poet is caught between

"the diluvian pronouncement" and "the wilderness’ cracked seal."

Et nous, les poétes qui survivons a I’annee, comment

placer notre parole entre la phrase diluvienne et le

signe craquelé du désert,

comment habiter nos fronts opposés. nos regards éclarés

face au blanc-noir des certitudes?

How can we, poets who survive from year to year.

impose our word between diluvian pronouncement

and the wilderness’ cracked seal.

how inhabit opposing brows, confronting gazes shattered

by black-white of certitudes?

Thu the poet establishes a tension between the flowing fertility of his imagination and the cracked sterile

glaze caused by the technological

world, which, on the surface, is composed of black and white certitudes,

void of mystery and beliefs "unproven." It is a world that is breaking

up into bits and pieces- fragments.

Orizet’s awareness of a fragmented order is reflected in his style, in the terse, rapid-fire outbursts of his

language, comparable to the staccato

sounds of electronic computers. In such language a bird in ravaged

nature becomes visibly and auditorily broken in the torrent of harsh

consonantal sounds of a lapidary-like

poem: "l’oiseau brisé/piéte parmi les bees déclats/." ("the bird savaged/ steps through splintered beaks/.

In an alternating dense prose poem, the prancing of the North Sea stings through the zebra-like zig-

zagging marked by the alternation of hard

and soft sounds: "Caracolant sous arc-en-ciel, la mer du Nord a

des allures de zébre." ("Capering under rainbow, the North Sea prances like a

zebra.") In such a way does

the language of Orizet recreate the brittleness of the dichotomy he sees between a disintegrating

civilization and

the power of poetic language. However, paradoxically, it is through his poetry that Orizet

must create the illusion of continuity, or survival in

a fragmented world.

To survive and poetize in this world of disintegration, Orizet must maintain his distance from the

technological world by playing with

language. Ironically, Orizet seizes the very terms of materialistic

society, turns them against that society, and thus establishes a coherent,

dialectic pattern between

technology and fragile nature, between the macroscopic and the microscopic. Such a pattern , follows that

of the

imagination of a child who makes miniatures of the gigantic shapes of the adult world in order to

protect himself. Thus Orizet concentrates

upon the "little" things in nature in order to distance himself from

the giant of technology. He accomplishes this through the use of the

macroscopic terms of technology to

describe the minute details of nature (a flower with petals of pitch).

As Orizet weaves this pattern of the reduction of the size of technological values by concentration on the

minute, the reader is reminded of the

weave in the inverse or negative pattern of the warp and woof found

in the underside of woven material. In fact, Orizet even speaks of "la

trame" ("the weave") of his poetry,

thus emphasizing the process of inversion. The inversion is further structured by the use of aphorisms,

the

cross-wise fusion of earth and water, puns, play on words, and semantic allusions: all of which generate,

often arbitrarily, an indefinite

multiplicity of images.

As a result of this playful manipulation, Orizet is in reality detached from the materialistic world, present

only in his imaginary time/space.

From such a privileged viewpoint, he can observe all the marvelousness

brought about by his poetic imagination. In that privileged zone, or

"entre-temps" ("meanwhile"), the poet,

similar to the child and his unfettered imagination, never feels threatened, for with a blink of his poetic

eye,

he can instantly transform an image into one or many images.

What is the nature of the images that make up the weave of the material from which Orizet creates his

imagery? Woven from the accidental to

which the poet/child has recourse, the images attain a certain

instantaneous spontaneity and vivacity, even when they satirize the comfortable,

materialistic life as a "ripe

red apple existence." Often the images are elliptic as they mock the materialists by presenting them as

mere

silhouettes without dimensions except their bare stick figures with bulging stomachs and blank faces.

These images resemble cut-outs pasted in

collage fashion on flat surfaces. The literary process (similar to

the painting techniques of Kandinsky?) appears semi-automatic and seems to

establish Orizet's images

somewhere between surrealism and realism.

Often these images seem to be naive, amusing ideograms which may or may not lead to the cosmic.

Images tumble like bits of sparkling glass

on the flat surface: flowers with petals of pitch, steely needles of

sun's rays, the world globe scarred with tar and asphalt, male semen spewed

forth as a crystalline

substance. Often the images seem to be hieroglyphic in nature. rooted in some sort of human pre-

consciousness: the

"Toi" ("You") of Santa Cruz de Tenerife whose pregnant shape, like that of the woman,

hides the legend of lost youth.

On the other hand, in Mira-like fashion, Orizet's images seem over-realistic and border on the

hallucinatory. Poetic inspiration is seen in

medical terms as "the lung" whose "elan" leaves the poet and

rises in parabolic traces to steal, pirate-like, the sky; the "lung" whose breathing

forces more oxygen into

the blood stream, making the blood clearer, thinner, more apt to absorb the air (the world). The

metaphoric eye of

poetic consciousness, used in traditional terms, becomes a biological eye whose fluid

has been "gummed up" by pollution and becomes

transformed into laminated metal. Its round shape

resembles a traffic circle filled with all the detritus caused by the traffic of technology. The

traditional poet

with a blank metallic stare is reduced in size to a tole-eyed Tom Thumb. This reduced image seems to

leave the poet/child no

way out of his imaginary comer. As a result, the hallucinatory image changes into

another, which takes on the configuration of its technical

surroundings by mimicking them. During this

process of child-like mimesis, the eye of the poetic consciousness once again becomes a

biological eye,

whose fluid, however, is acetylene, a chemical term to describe colorless, gaseous hydrocarbide found in

torches that solder

metallic surfaces. Hallucinatory is the resulting image of an "eye-torch," ready to fuse

poetic equivalencies between poetic imagery and the

metallic technological world.

Such images shock and grate on the reader's sensitivity and often bewilder him in their plethora of rapid

changes. As a result the reader risks

losing himself in the multiple semantic allusions that seem to spin

crazily off of each other: allusions that are known only to the poet and to

those who have read his entire

works.

But there is reconciliation brought about by the elliptic, collage-like, hallucinatory images that cavort on the

flat surfaces of the poems. Their

reduplication, the schema of inversion in the "entre-temps" ("the

meanwhile") lead to a temporal repetition. Indeed, Orizet playfully recreates

this repetition in the various

seasons by a cyclical movement. It is as if the poet were greatly influenced by the theories of Klee, who

wrote,

"... I sense a formula for man, animal, plant, earth, fire, water, air, and all circling forms at once."

Such a formula would reconcile all the diverse

elements of the finite and the infinite in an endless act of

recreation. The literary formula for a reconciliation of the opposites of Orizet’s world

(technology and

nature) is found in the privileged middle space of the volume, as the visual symbol of the shell. "Nautilc"

("Nautilus"). It is

the child/poet's listening post for the resonance of the "secret deeps." Its spiral is known

to be important in the iconography of cultures whose

thought revolves around the myth of the equilibrium

of opposites. It is the aquatic symbol of woman. Within its structure, spiral and

whirlpool arc reconciled as

well as jet propulsion (technology) and free fall (poetry). Although its very internal structure seems to be in

a state

of static growth, it never changes its outward form. It is the symbol of permanence in change. It is

the symbol of the intimate secrets of the

poetic imagination, as seen in Niveaux de survie.

Niveaux de survie is one of the latest steps in the development of the poetry of Jean Orizet. If his first

volume, Errance, was the laboratory

where the poet experimented with all word forms and where

intertextual references abound, this volume is more finely honed, more elliptic in

thought. In fact, its poetry

doesn’t lend itself easily to analysis, because every word is so charged with meaning that the original

meaning often

seems to disappear in a surfeit of images, each of which has its own networks which in turn

interweave. The reader is reminded of the words

of Mallarme, who states in his "Dictionary," "... Language

charged with expressing all the phenomena of Life, borrows something from it; it

lives… "In such a way,

Orizet’s language has a life of its own, as each new set of poetic circumstances sets up its own linguistic

variants with

their own reflections.

The poetry of Jean Orizet, susceptible to change in circumstances, becomes existential and authentic, as

the poet lives his poetry in an

atmosphere of constant change. The seigniorial metaphor for reconciliation,

the castle, of Erranee becomes the many-chambered nautilus. The

"passerelles" ("foot-bridges") of the

"entre-temps" ("the game of the meanwhile") of Errance become the jammed traffic circle of Niveaux.

Nature and humanity have been flayed by technology and the "ripe red apple," comfortable life. Yet

survival for the world will be in the

poetry of those who seek "the uncertainties," the "unprovable beliefs": in

the simple joy of being. For even when pessimism enters the poetry

of Orizet, joy is reflected in the gentle,

refined, elegant, child-like humor that permeates his works. Such in brief is the esthetic quest of Jean

Orizet in Niveaux de survie.