Liquid Memories

François Turcot

On the Landing

Flexion—I put forth the idea and couldn’t believe it—we were two hanging like a reflection, two shovels on the landing without any clay, two forms one tomorrow in August to mess up time.




Another Story

Another story—I was waiting on myself a frank fistful as sole end, eager to feel loved by all kinds. Tomorrow the new lamps would arrive, I repeated, tomorrow’s the day.




Escape Plan

Escape plan—eyes heavy shaken like bags of rice, in a flurry i’d head off to the unripeness of things chest open and hand—man of ruses, of shivers.




Leave

What else was it not any bigger than a fingernail, what was it if not this very word incised in drypoint—leave?




Heavy Dew

Heavy dew morning magnifies in grass torn up by hunts, on standby—tossed from the balcony a droplet of absolute nudity would swell up, fall like a knife clam.




More Gently Studied

More gently studied—in the garden unfiltered I’d go lay down my fires, nimbus or not I’d exhale deep blue and abscond gust of wind.




Fabulous Why Not

In other words it’d all be going a bit better—melted comet dust I’d float, fabulous why not, belting out choruses in the austral summer.




The Image Would Turn

The ink that hits the image would turn, no hurry it’d be there poem set loose, detached—a clue let fall from my lips.

translated from the French by Erín Moure

Read the original in French

Listen to the original read by the poet:

Translating the poetry of François Turcot requires the agility of an acrobat, and the ability to fly through the air and catch a spinning trapeze! Turcot’s work enthralls me with its capacity to shift and warp syntax, hone diamond-tough sparkles of lexicon, and I love the way it draws both on popular expressions and speech (sometimes tweaking them, ahem!) and on remote or exotic vocables. The shifts in register in just the space of a word or two build poetic rhythms that result in poems that are curious, tensile, humorous, quotidian, and refined all at once. Meaning-effects emerge on multiple planes from the stylistic gnarls: dictionary denotations are just one thing that propel this poetry. In the end, Turcot’s work is human, affective, and joyous in its combinations, even when its material substrate leads us to think of difficult times. Or of emerging from difficult times… into poetry!

François Turcot is a Montreal-based poet and the author of six books including Le livre blond (finalist for the 2016 Prix Alain-Grandbois), Mon dinosaur (finalist for the 2014 Prix du Festival de poésie de Montréal, translated into English by Erín Moure as My Dinosaur, Bookhug Press 2016), Cette maison n’est pas la mienne (2009 Prix Émile-Nelligan), Derrière les forêts (finalist 2008 Prix Émile-Nelligan) and Miniatures en pays perdu (2006), all published by La Peuplade. Noted for their luminous and lucid language, Turcot’s poems have been published widely in numerous journals and magazines including New American Writing, Estuaire, Exit, dandelion, Le livre de chevet, Riveneuve Continents, Contre-jour: Cahiers littéraires, Aufgabe, Action Yes, filling Station, Cyphers, and Ellipse. His poetry has been translated into English and German. François Turcot’s latest book, Souvenirs liquides, was published recently in 2019 by La Peuplade.

Erín Moure recently released a collection of poems, The Elements (House of Anansi Press, 2019), “a book of Dad.” In it, poems about and for Moure’s late father—accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers—are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. “The Face of the Quartzes” is her sixth translation from the work of Galician poet Chus Pato. In spring 2020, she published two new translations: a sequence from Juan Gelman’s Argentinian “translations” of the English poet John Wendell, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books) and, from the rich mountain Galician of Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands, Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books). Forthcoming in fall 2020 are: a translation of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug), and Toots fait la Shiva, avenue Minto (Le Noroît, tr. Colette St-Hilaire), the French version of her memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books, 2017). A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press.