Name Everything for the First Time

One night in late March of 1980, more than 20 poets gathered in a dark Montreal theater before a packed audience and a documentary film crew to recite their work. The aim was to demonstrate the state of poetry in Quebec at that moment and what it might be in the decade to come. Many of those onstage—among them Nicole Brossard, Raoul Duguay, and Michèle Lalonde—were veterans of the first Nuit de la poésie, itself already a legendary reading, held exactly 10 years earlier. This was, then, something of a sequel. Like all sequels, it sought to recapture something, to go beyond nostalgia and, in effect, reproduce the magic of the original.

The 1980 reading—one of the few scenes etched in the history of Québécois literature—also marked the public debut of Marie Uguay, a 25-year-old poet with two published collections. Her brief appearance, halfway through the night’s program, proved the apex of her meteoric streak as a writer. It took all of four minutes—and it was audible. The third of four poems she recited, which begins “And yet oranges and apples do exist” and ends “Gently Cézanne claims his kinship with the earth’s suffering / with its structures / and all of summer’s vitality comes to wake me / comes gently passionately to bequeath its every fruit to me,” gave way to thunderous applause. It was as if a switch had been flipped, the suddenness with which a public epiphany descended palpably upon the room: This is a poet.

Yet, Uguay was not to enjoy the rites of a major artist. She did not have a long career punctuated by award ceremonies, readings, and frequent publications. The year after her reading at La nuit de la poésie, at age 26, she died of cancer, having just put together her third collection. But her modest legacy has resounded across the four decades since her death. Uguay’s work has been canonized as a point of no return for French-Canadian poetry, even as the rupture that it introduced between a maximalist poetry of politics and a minimalist one of cloistered subjectivity was relatively quiet. Her “extraordinary capacity for wonder, her availability to the everyday,” as the poet-critic Jacques Brault put it, allowed her to funnel the aging political energies of the Quebec ’60s into the quiet profundity of the poetic I. In this way, she opened herself and several generations of poets to “the mystery of things taken for banal,” per Brault—or to what Walter Benjamin calls “profane illumination.”

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If I may now speak in such exalted terms of a French-Canadian poet, it’s because that has been done too seldom in the past. The literary history of North America that most people learn in schools and lecture halls has neglected a part of its own treasure. French Canada has produced a tradition of Western literature since the moment of its conquest in the 1530s; its poets are recognized locally, known vaguely across Canada, and utterly unsung within the much more visible Anglophone canon on the continent. Yet the poetry of Quebec is resolutely North American. Its weather is that of northeastern frost and northeastern humidity; its societies are those that have grown up under—and have been stunted by—American industry; its past is that of the settler colony, that of the repression of the first nations to inhabit this land.

The neglect of French-Canadian poetry springs from the dual nature of the term. That it is French has meant that few Anglophone Canadians and hardly any Americans have read it, loved it, or interpreted it; that it is Canadian has stymied its access to the literary field in France, which left Quebec behind in body and spirit in 1763. This dual rejection has long seeped into the work of Quebec’s poets, including Uguay.

Like many French Canadians, Uguay was raised on the poetry of Octave Crémazie and Émile Nelligan, writers who grew up similarly disillusioned by Anglophone North America and with conflicting ties to France. In Quebec, many of those whose ancestors arrived in the late 1600s—the time of les filles du roi, when King Louis XIV urged French women to immigrate to colonies in North America—consider themselves almost an ethnicity apart from others, their blood being in some sense distinct from those of Anglophones or other later arrivals. (This has long engendered complex struggles with identity and communal belonging among generations of immigrants, including Jewish families like mine, many of whom arrived in the last century and were, until a few decades ago, denied access to French-language schools because of their religion.)

For most, those ties were more of a conceptual heirloom, a distinctive artifact of a distant colonial migration from the Old World in the 17th or 18th centuries, but for Uguay, the connection was not older than two generations. Born in Montreal to Denise Uguay and Jacques Lalonde on April 22, 1955, Uguay grew up favoring her maternal grandfather, César, a violinist born in France who, to her lifelong displeasure, seemed to have no emotional attachment to his homeland. César was her link to art, and for this reason, she assumed his surname when she began publishing. Through the volumes of Ronsard that he gave her, César connected Uguay to the faraway place where most of her favorite authors lived and wrote their greatest work. When she thought of France, of Paris in particular, Uguay thought of Rousseau, Proust, and Colette—writers who demonstrated that the poetic “adventure” was not out in the world nor in its abstractions but “within the texture of words themselves,” as she once said in an interview.

When Uguay finally visited Paris and lived there during the autumn months of 1978, the city deceived her. She called it a “desacralized place” in which “no ‘sign’ revealed itself.” In Paris, she sought but did not find the inspiration she had presumed waited there, and this experience colored her daydreams about travel for the rest of her brief life.

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Poetic genius, as Brault notes in the English preface to the collected edition of Uguay’s Poèmes (2005), is unrelated to age; maturity is not itself a function of time. One thinks of Keats and Laforgue, both of whom, like Uguay, succumbed in their 20s to disease. But one also thinks of Rimbaud, whose “talent was full-blown at eighteen,” as Brault puts it. Like Rimbaud, Uguay was restless and insatiable. From her Journal (2005), edited by her closest friend and sometime-lover Stéphan Kovacs (himself a celebrated artist and photographer in Quebec), one sees clearly that she wrote her way through life and crafted her existence out of language. “I want to create my life as much as my work, and to make of my life my work,” she wrote.

The problem of Uguay’s genius—of discerning it, in fact—is that she was a poet of “absolute humility,” to quote Brault. She possessed a profound degree of sensitivity, and thus her poetic address avoided bombast. Her ode was directed neither to the nightingale nor to autumn but to the “snow; calligraphy of silence.” In quiet pockets of winter air, in the “narrow splendour of the wheat,” in the “supple flash of a birch,” readers find the meticulous voice of Uguay, her language as light as the objects it touches.

Yet sensitivity, lightness, delicate precision should not imply a composition model of sudden inspiration. Uguay was a worker who ran after her poetry, wrote continuously, and read voraciously. In her most accomplished poems, where her uncanny maturity is in full evidence, she grappled with the poetic conventions that “find expression as the naked representation of themselves,” as Adorno says of Beethoven’s late style.

What astonishes about Uguay’s poetry, then, is not the maturity that, despite itself, is youthful but the youthfulness that, despite itself, is mature. This is evident in her prose too. Her journals, for example, are the record of a twentysomething woman seeking herself; they brim with the flights, anxieties, and depressions of young love. Her ruminations on poetry are also charged with the romantic desire to write the great poem that always eludes her; it is a desire that “ties me to life, jostles me, animates me,” she wrote.

Uguay published three collections of poetry, one of them posthumous. Signe et rumeur, translated by Daniel Sloate as Signs and Sounds, appeared in 1976 with Les Éditions du Noroît, not long after Uguay’s 21st birthday. She had put in nearly a year’s work on her second collection, L’Outre-vie—Outer-Life or Beyond-Life—when she learned that a persistent pain in her leg was bone cancer. When she was 22, her right leg was amputated. “First snow this morning on my mutilated body,” she wrote in the opening entry of Journal, “silent particles of death.”

From the time of the operation until her death, Uguay underwent a turbulent succession of remissions and relapses. Throughout this period, she completed L’Outre-vie and composed the poems that were collected and published posthumously as Autoportraits (Self-Portraits) in 1982. Her poetry, obstinately reflective, (one must “reflect, be reflected right to the end,” as she wrote) emerged from the catastrophe of her amputation in a changed register, darkened around the edges like a vignette. This transformation is perceptible within L’Outre-vie itself, whose aforementioned poem of gratitude for the existence of apples and oranges in Cézanne also insists that

     hospitals are endless
factories are endless
lines in the frost are endless
beaches turned to marshes are endless
 
I have known those who suffered until breathlessness
who die endlessly
listening to the voice of a violin or that of a crow
or those of maples in April

In this second collection, published in September 1979 and likely the impetus for her invitation to La nuit de la poésie six months later, one grasps the articulation of a shape within Uguay’s oeuvre. Her work, astounding by dint of the brief span of its production, began at this moment to attain the formal grace of a succession of periods.

Signe et rumeur, which represents Uguay’s “early” period, aims to superpose Earth—its weathers and atmospheres, its waters and riverbeds, the cyclicality of its seasons—upon the desiring female body. The text is presented as a discontinuous stream, perhaps that of a single poem, separated into lapidary fragments that meditate insistently upon rivers, oceans, snows, and light and upon touch, limb, and the texture of skin:

                      softness of shoulder
            that the sea in me dies down again
                     and your body, the sea
my rest for the unapproachable days of the city
                           somnolence
                     inaccessible speech
                  and the oblivion you beget

As Uguay said in an interview toward the end of her life, reflecting on her preoccupation with nature and its progressions, “Each season came with a kingdom of light, of sensation, of color. And I knew that each would return.” The certainty of this return was reassuring: a controlled experiment to mark the traces time leaves, each repetition being also a difference. To attend to each shift in light, sensation, or color required a poetry of multiplicity, hence not only her repeated use of the word and its variants (multiples, multipliés) throughout her work but also her playful manipulation of verse forms, her need to move beyond the walled “room” that the stanza once represented. From this necessity arises the invention of the doubled stanza, as here:

all night                                 there is no generous
we surveilled                          march but this return
the landscape in silence          to all things named

One senses immediately that these tercets are not best read as the widely spaced yet contiguous lines of a single stanza. They are two parallel stanzas read in juxtaposition. Or else, if one chooses to read them as three longer lines, one begins to hear a dialogue, a jarring discourse between two voices whispering as if oblivious to, yet nevertheless echoing off, each other. In either case, the silent landscape resonates against “all things named” and is refused by it—the ineffability of mere presence against the roar of plenitude.

This stance of surveillance, this “window of winter,” which offers a view of the “slow work / of the soil at the threshold of memory,” metamorphoses from mere poetic vantage to a complex epistemological problem in L’Outre-vie, especially after Uguay’s amputation. In her journals, she notes that she means outre in the sense of outre-mer, “overseas” in English. Thus, an over-life, an outer-life, a life beyond this one—yet not transcendent, “non-mystical.” Per the collection’s first poem:

L’Outre-vie is when one is not yet inside life, when one looks at it, when one seeks to enter it. One is not yet dead but already almost alive, almost born, in the process of being born perhaps, in this movement beyond border and beyond time which characterizes desire.

The vantage of the window encountered in Signe et rumeur here darkens and deepens into a problem of access: the problem of being not quite inside one’s life, of desiring entry back into it—indeed of desire itself being the only vehicle that might carry one from the outer-life to the inner one. Desire proliferates in this chasm between lives, and it becomes the keyword for indexing the two coordinates that mark Uguay’s exact position within L’Outre-vie. As the critic Antoine Boisclair observes, Uguay’s “desire for reality, marked by a complex relationship to the body,” can be understood in terms of her biography, on the one hand, and in terms of her relationship to poetry, on the other.

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As a woman born into the repressive Catholic atmosphere of Quebec, Uguay experienced a kind of double alienation. But the timing of her education was such that she grew up in a culture then developing a capacious vocabulary for both a secular Quebec nationalism and an American-derived feminism. These twin movements arose out of what is called the Quiet Revolution, a period spanning the 1960s to the mid-1970s during which, step by step, the younger generations of Québécois were at the vanguard of wrenching their province away from longstanding Catholic conservatism.

Feminism was eye-opening for Uguay. In her journals, she links her sense of exclusion to her difficult relationship with her grandfather. He adored her yet could never bring himself to encourage her as an artist. She was, to him, always to be a “little girl” estranged from such ambition. Toward the end of her life, Uguay drafted a letter to César, who had died five years earlier, in which she tried to excavate her frustrations and her unending love for him. “You loved me well, but you did not believe in me,” she told him. “I create in order to prove that you are not dead, that your name vibrates in the future which I want to forge, in the work I want to leave behind.”

The political language in the air of Montreal in the 1970s gave her the power to name her marginalization and to understand its sometimes hypocritical relation to other forms of alterity. The alienation of women, she notes cynically, “is two thousand years old…. Here, the alienation of the Québécois is three hundred years old and it’s quite a tragedy.” Quebec’s peculiar position in North America granted her some perspective on her own womanhood and also allowed her to see nationalism in its aspect as masculinism, perhaps even misogyny. For her, the real “tragedy” of the so-called “two solitudes,” the estrangement between English- and French-speaking Canadians, is a kind of mutual isolation to the detriment of both parties: “Now, I see the sexes as two intolerable solitudes.”

At the time of her illness and its aggressive treatments, Uguay found herself isolated in another, though related, sense. Standing often at the window of her hospital room, watching the world literally pass before her eyes, she felt herself plucked out of life by the institutions of public health. “I lived my cancer,” she wrote, “the entire hospital system tends to render the sick person a passive being, infantile (just as society tends to render the woman passive and infantile).”

As her illness progressed, Uguay grew vexed with the alienation immanent to poetry itself. How the poem does or does not attach itself to the world was the thorniest problem for her, and she became more and more preoccupied with finding a poetry that might bring her into the “Real” that lay beyond mere reality. She wanted, via the vector of desire, to “traverse the obtuse reality in order to enter into a reality at once more painful and more pleasant, into the unknown, the secret, the contradictory, open one’s senses and come to know.”

The formal experiments she sketched in Signe et rumeur, those that might have distinguished her superficially among her peers, take a back seat in L’Outre-vie and Autoportraits. She stopped playing the “visionary,” as Brault puts it: “In a short span of time she would turn her back on the facile turn of phrase, syntactic and lexical inaccuracies, metaphorical overdosing and poorly assimilated influences.” Much of her verse begins to resemble that of Apollinaire, a hero of hers, who famously removed the punctuation marks across his verse prior to the publication of Alcools (1913) to approximate the Cubist condition of ambiguous signification in poetry. This was a received form that worked well for Uguay’s purposes. But even Apollinaire’s example, which often amounts ultimately to a simple free verse, lost its pragmatism for her. As she looked toward Autoportraits and beyond, and as the progression of her illness made demands upon her time, she turned to prose poetry. The form allowed her to “write all in one go, tied to daily life like an ivy, impregnated with it, an instrument to help me live better and even more intensely,” she wrote.

One senses Uguay’s hurry. The tone of her journal entries shifts perceptibly at this point, incorporating concepts from literary theory into her ruminations. She began to read Roland Barthes’s The Empire of Signs (1970), his semiologic study of Japanese culture, and became obsessed with producing a poetic “event.” She quoted several passages from the book on the subject of the haiku, wherein might have nested the solution to the problem of poetic alienation. “The haiku,” Barthes writes, “never describes.” It is a form of “counter-description,” an event, “a faint plication by which is creased, with a rapid touch, the page of life, the silk of language.”

This materialization of language was an epiphany to Uguay. It brought poetry closer to the tangible objects populating the world. “A poem does not repeat itself,” she wrote, “it is immediate.” It acts into and upon the world; it pinches it into the sheet of language. But the economy of the haiku, its intimate relationship to the abyssal silence that surrounds it, was nevertheless inadequate to Uguay’s purposes. She had, like other poets in the Whitmanic tradition, the insatiable desire to name, to “invent a universe, name everything as if for the first time.”

Uguay’s poetics thus thematize and incarnate the paradox at the heart of the Western poetic tradition: how to name the world and to render it in utter silence. As she puts it, “How to make literature adequate, to make it coincide with the real such that it fulfills the evocation and does not lose any trace thereby. To attain by writing the first movement which jostles all things, to reveal it by transmitting the indivisible and quiet presence.”

***

What readers find repeatedly in Uguay’s work is the metabolization of a world in historical flux, refracted through the optic of her unique subject-position as a chronically ill, Québécoise woman. Yet, there remains something false about trying to fit her seamlessly into her moment, which becomes evident in the footage of La nuit de la poésie.

The first nuit, in 1970, was the direct expression of the shifting cultural winds of the 1960s in Quebec and in North America more broadly. It took place three years after Charles De Gaulle caused a minor diplomatic calamity by declaring, from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall, “Vive le Québec libre!” The fervor for Québécois sovereignty was at its crest in 1970, and the night of recitals was itself an opportunity to speak against the hegemony of English Canada and the English language. On this occasion, Michèle Lalonde recited her poem “Speak White,” which audaciously compares the plight of French Canadians to that of Jewish and Black North Americans. It is a provocative piece that asserts the radicalism of that burgeoning movement.

The 1980 event, by contrast, was a ghost before it began, lesser because it was a copy, an attempt to recapture that originary gestalt. The same documentary crew was asked to film the reading; many of the same poets were invited; the same atmosphere was sought. The poets’ desire was nostalgic but also, one senses, anxious—anxious to be, still, the kind of poets they had been 10 years earlier: those for whom the fight is not yet over.

But, in a way, it was over. In 1977, the Assemblée nationale du Québec—under the first nationalist government in the province—passed The Charter of the French language, otherwise known as Bill 101, which made French the official language of Quebec. Within a handful of years, the very futurity of the province and of its crown jewel, Montreal, was dissolved and replaced. Where one once saw a sprawling city of international import, a hub of the late-capitalist, multilingual modernity that the Expo of 1967 had envisioned, one now discovered a daily drain of migrants and businesses heading for the more level waters of Ontario or New York. The Anglophones, in a sense, had gone.

This made for an awkward night of French poetry under a newly Francophone state. There was still a viable nationalist position that sought absolute sovereignty: the separation of Quebec from Canada and the establishment of a nation-state. But this was already the doomed mandate of the provincial government in power. How, then, to proclaim it without losing one’s credibility as a counterculture? A few of the poets present re-envisioned the struggle as against capitalism and jingoism; not a nationalist struggle so much as an internationalist one that, like others of its kind in the 1980s, could gesture toward its comrades without seeing them—this, in a Quebec where the least prosperous were already nonwhite workers and where industry had been or was in the process of being exported abroad, as it was elsewhere in the West. If, in 1970, the language of international struggle was the pathway into Québécois nationalism, now, for those who could see the need to reposition, the inverse was true: the sentiments of nationalism must give way, rhetorically, to the language of international struggle so as not to be dead on arrival, so as not to protest too much.

This was a moment when Québécois and Québécoise poets either held fast to old positions or pivoted to new ones. But for Uguay, who was young within this scene, the pressures seemed irrelevant. All such forces were renegotiated into her desire to use her multifaceted alienation to gain a new purchase on the world, so she distinguished herself from her peers by rerouting these political energies into the life of her mind. What resulted was a poetry that channels the dialectic between the public and the private, the political and the domestic, the men in the mines and “the women endlessly sewing” them up.

For those paying attention that night in 1980, Uguay represented an aperture into the future of French-Canadian poetry. The director of both Nuits de la poésie, Jean-Claude Labrecque, approached her about making a documentary on her life and work. She assented, though when it came time to film, she was so wrecked by the recommencement of her cancer treatment that she could sit for only two interviews.

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The film, like her life, is framed by her illness and her impending death. Death, for Uguay, is not the hypothetical mortality with which most of us live. It spreads physically within her, often in proportion as her love—for Stéphan or for her paramour Paul—grows. Late in her journals, she fixates on Cesare Pavese’s immortal line, “Death will come and she will have your eyes,” and these are, in Uguay’s writing, always the eyes of her lover. Death is a stalker, and there is no true counterforce to it. Even as she quotes Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) at the start of her second notebook—“The air is so sweet that it keeps one from dying”—she harbors no illusions about the strength of this prevention. Death always hovers and threatens the closure of thought.

But because she lives with death, she learns to see it as a black oasis that nourishes her poetry. When she begins writing her journals, it is always out of death that she must write: out of death and into life, into desire, into love. The one leads naturally to the other: “How much time left to hold on? To want to hold on? And what poem? What book to come? What event?”

In her final months, her own mortality allows her to slip out of the social game of literature—recitals, submissions, contests—and whittle her attention down to the delight of her poetry, the pith of its minor event. Seeking always that plication of language’s silk, Uguay moves deeper into a poetry of presence, that is, one of insistent deixis. Voici (“Here is,” roughly) several of her late poems begin. “Voici l’arbre (“Here is the tree”),” she jots down in her journal, attempting to begin a verse. “Ici,” one of the last poems of Autoportraits begins, “Here / like a white leaf.” She tries with all her meticulous might to collapse the distance between herself and the world, between poet, poem, and reader. Always demonstrating, always gesturing, as if waving the hand of language before the reader's eyes.

Against this quest for and through the paradox of the ineffable stands the imminent threat of the absolute. “Death for me is not something about which we can speak,” she tells Labrecque. “That moment is one at which there is nothing left to say. It is the irrevocable.” But Uguay’s insight is that one need not resist this threat, even as one will always fear it. She finds the interval of her life compressed by desire on one side and by death on the other, but that shrinking ratio, that winter window onto existence, is shot through with love, beauty, and all that might bring a person peace. “It is as if all that is real, even the most atrocious, could not become sayable except by way of love,” she writes. Uguay learned this lesson from Robert Desnos, who is said to have tried to make his fellow inmates at Theresienstadt smile even as they were led to the gas chambers.

“I see death in the light of a rock we toss in the water,” Uguay says toward the end of the film. “It creates ripples, and afterwards nothing. I am the rock. I sink into existence, I make a few ripples. Then all is calm.” Perhaps she is thinking of all the features of the world that do not flow, or flee, but rather cycle, fix, and take hold—at least for a time: the frost of a Montreal winter, the vigor of fruit made still by the painterly hand, the narrow splendor of the human spectacle.