liberty dont je suis issue

Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings in Saboteur (1942)

"Stay with me. Wake up, Frank, Johnny, Jack, or whatever. Oh, Archibald, don't bow out on me now!" Comme dans les films, all those ladies qui frappent avec leurs jolies mains, peintes d'un rouge noir, sur film noir et blanc, forties ladies with their forties grammar, with their offres de jambon sandwiches and big glasses of milk, avec the uniform en blanc avec la ceinture noire saying things like "That's mighty kind of you, ma'am." and not holding his head up, but bent, en courbe, and not squarely as they should, comme appris, changing the tides of seas entire experience Held in what should be ces femmes et leurs mains qui frappent qui tapotent and hold you in their entire sea, ces femmes des années quarante, et les années de cet arbre généalogique de ces femmes des forties when on chantait "hey batter, batter, batter, swing" and "Joltin Joe DiMaggio we want you on our side," "how I love ya how I love ya, my dear old Sewanee," and of course: "somewhere over" americaines, dont je suis issue, these américaines, these ricaines, thowing back their heads, montrant leurs dents bien blanches, these carniverous ladies, candied, laquered red on the bout de leurs doigts, et leur performed liberty dont je suis issue, et que je perform oh I do and you encore ce rouge que l'on suppose, que l'on ne voit pas, et qui est noir sur l'écran, challenged like la peste au bout des doigts showing you your propre mort au bout de tes doigts bien visible, encroaching vanity, Paris vaut bien une analyse, the five shiny dying pieces of flesh au bout des doigts dont je suis issue, le visage de celui qui dort, le verre d'eau, les sels d'ammoniaque, des séries de doigts qui frappent comme pour donner le droit, enfin, le droit enfin de frapper ce con qui n'est plus. "Stella!" Ce con qui dort. Réveille-toi, idiot, avec tes six yeux si clairs, que je suppose si clairs, mais qui sont en noir et blanc. ...

An extract from "En Brume" by Jody Pou, a poem in the 1917 women: poetry: migration anthology edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. 

The poem begins and ends with Wittgenstein looking doubtfully at his hand, with a Dick and Jane early reader, and with Octavius Caesar accidentally breaking off Alexander the Great's nose. But this extract comes from the central span about the "femmes des forties", their sassiness, glamour, compromise and humiliation in a world where power resides elsewhere; performed liberty but also a "Hébé" à genoux. Somehow all the parts of the poem cohere, perhaps because of the reader's irresistible journey through this multilingual medium. The topic in question (we're mistaken into concluding) might be anything at all and we'd still be absorbed.

In "En brume" (in mist) the outlines are not quite as defined as this list of topics suggests. For example, though "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio" is definitely from the 1940s, the sideline taunt "Batter, batter, swing" can only be traced back to 1983. After all, a poem cannot be only historical, it's still a statement about now.

There are sideshows here too, multilingual crosscurrents (like seas/six yeux/seizures), creative misspellings, misgrammar, mispunctuation. Perhaps it's relevant to quote what Wittgenstein is made to say here: "Après tout, pourquoi le jeu de langage devrait-il reposer sur un savoir?" And yet the comparative definiteness of topic (compared, I mean, to a lot of other experimental writing) seems an important aspect of how "En brume" poses its questions. 

"Joltin' Joe Dimaggio" by Les Brown and his Orchestra (1941), Vocal Chorus by the sixteen-year-old Betty Bonney (she subsequently took the professional name Judy Johnson).

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The Augustus passages play off the Emperor's own Res Gestae, that seminal plea for the merits of centralised power, especially in shirtsleeves.

... just a dude among the many, absolute monarch, mais "primus inter pares," I gave HS 240 to the plebs, to the plebs, I paid out public gift, cadeau, j'ai fait construire la curie, j'ai fait reconstruire des canaux des aqueducts, I rebuilt this road puis celle-là, trois fois j'ai donné, I gave, j'ai gave des spectacles de gladiator où 10,000 hommes se sont battus, I gave the people hunts of African beasts in the circus, à peu près 3500 were killed, morts, got rid of some statues of me, I am modest, ...

HS or more pedantically IIS  :  currency symbol for sestertii.

It's useful to know that four sestertii = one denarius, and that this was approximately the day wage of a common soldier in the time of Augustus.

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Jody Pou (b. USA, lives in France) writes and performs multilingual texts, is also a singer and visual artist. 

This is great! Jody Pou and Emily Manzo, performing all of Anton Webern's compositions for voice and piano:

https://shskh.bandcamp.com/album/volume-4-a-webern-j-pou-e-manzo

Jody Pou's website:

https://jodypou.com/

Sign up for new writing on her newsletter:

https://jodypou.substack.com/

Gloria Grahame in Not as a Stranger (1955)