Writing Inside the Holes

Since her first books in the early 1980s, Liliane Giraudon has been one of the major French poets of her generation. She has helped found journals, edited anthologies, and ventured into theater, performance, and visual art. Lately, she has been the object of major academic attention, with an international conference devoted to her work slated for Paris this year. While some of her short stories were translated into English in the 1990s, her poetry has only recently followed suit. Two new translations, Sphinx (2013; trans. Lindsay Turner, Litmus Press, 2023), and Love is Colder Than the Lake (2016; trans. Lindsay Turner and Sarah Riggs, Nightboat Books, 2024), offer an opportunity to delve into the long and rich career of this exceptional poet.

Giraudon’s experience is written in—and from—the margins. A childhood in rural Provence, in an old agricultural family, was followed by a religious education in the nuns’ boarding school in Carpentras. Later, she became involved in leftist and anarchist activism and literature, from participating in clandestine abortion clinics to joining the editorial board of the avant-garde journal Action poétique in the late 1970s. The iconoclastic publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens brought out Giraudon’s first full-length collection, Je marche ou je m’endors (1982), and continued to publish her after launching his own press, P.O.L, a crucial site of experimental French poetics.

In the 1980s, Giraudon published La réserve (1984) and Divagation des chiens (1988), two books in which short, tense verse poems are interwoven with prose. These works are visibly influenced by French formalist poets from the Action poétique and P.O.L spheres, from Jean Tortel’s muted lyric to Anne-Marie Albiach’s attention to the page as visual “theater” (in the word of Jean-Marie Gleize). Like these poets, Giraudon’s work is defined by painstaking attention to montage, collage, and configurations of the page. However, an original hybridity in subject matter is evident even in her early books: the landscape of her poetry is less Parisian, less urban than was usual in those years, and more open in its political and feminist discourses. Giraudon fought to promote the trobairitz, medieval women poets, in a special issue of Action poétique (no. 75, 1978), and in 1994, she co-edited an anthology of contemporary women poets despite personal attacks from protective male poets and editors. Her style was recognizably her own, but after 1988 she didn't publish poetry again for more than 20 years.

Instead, she turned to fiction, and published two collections of short stories: Pallaksch, Pallaksch (1990) and Fur (1992). Most of her stories center around pariah figures she calls “outcasts.” Her typical settings include the suburbs of Marseille, particularly its gloomy streets at night, or villages at the sunset of a rural, agricultural past. For instance, “Mademoiselle Rita,” a story from Pallaksch, Pallaksch, focuses on an obese, homeless woman being spied on by a male photographer seeking to “extract” and “reconstruct” the story of her life and her body through his art—but she dies at the end, as if the perversity of his gaze upset the fragile balance keeping her alive. Such stories expand on the atmosphere of Giraudon’s poems, although they give her politics a broader, more comprehensive medium. These stories express the outcries of silenced and invisible figures, ranging from helplessness to the deepest, most unavowable vice.

Sker (2002) marked the beginning of another cycle under the sign of “homobiographie”—Giraudon’s twist on autobiography, which decenters the writing subject and engulfs it in a series of references, quotations, and rearrangements, all in an intense hybridity of form and discourse. Sker was followed by La poétesse (2009) and Madame Himself (2013), in which Giraudon’s experience of breast cancer (she was diagnosed in 2006) and its problematization of femininity, motherhood, and aging play a major role.

In 2013, Giraudon finally returned to poetry with La sphinge mange cru. Why did she wait so long? She has cited various reasons over the years, but this is the story she has told most often: At the end of the 1980s, while reading American poetry, she discovered Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States, 1885-1890 — Recitative (1965), translated into French by Jacques Roubaud. A seminal work of documentary poetics, Testimony incorporates criminal court transcripts to conjure a panoramic account of justice and discrimination in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reading the book over and over, Giraudon was astonished by its clarity, nakedness, and political efficiency—making her question not only the difficult, formalist style of her own poetry, but its real-world agency. To this day, when she talks about Reznikoff, she recalls Testimony as a “blow to the face” that made her step back from poetry. One suspects she could only return to the form if she found new ways to relate to everyday language and the voices of other people.

The trajectory of Giraudon’s career since 2013 has seemed to follow that imperative. Her recent works mix poetry with other genres informing the structure of each book: cinema in L’Amour est plus froid que le lac (2016); theater in Le travail de la viande (2019); and drawing in Une femme morte n’écrit pas and La jument de Troie (both 2023). The drawings and photographs in these books are not illustrations; instead, they provide indirect responses to, or breaks within, Giraudon’s text. Sphinx and Love is Colder Than the Lake introduce English-language readers to two sides of Giraudon’s oeuvre, and two ways in which her recent poems respond to her previous books, thus outlining a broader picture of her poetics. Sphinx highlights the refiguration of the subject through personas, which have constantly emerged in Giraudon’s books, while Love embodies Giraudon’s technique of montage and transmedia, in a preoccupation with hybridity that has marked her work since the collage pieces she published in Banana Split, a journal she co-founded with Jean-Jacques Viton in 1980.

Built around the eponymous figure, Sphinx is a short collection both mythological and deeply anchored in the present. In her translator’s note, Lindsay Turner asks: “In our world, who keeps her secrets, haunts our city, and flexes her claws? Who sees what we sometimes can't? Who gives us her ragged record of the way things are?” The answer is: the poet as sphinx who “eats raw,” writing among “the smell of shit” and the human and nonhuman bodies of the city. For as much as the sphinx is the centerpiece of the book, her inscription in the streets, as both a towering and crumbling figure, undergirds the poems. But politically the sphinx is a peripheral figure: she belongs to the city but dwells in the outskirts; she has power, but only momentarily, since she will be destroyed by Oedipus’s answer to her riddle. In this book, as in the old myth, the sphinx stands for the fragility of feminine discourse and power in the city. It’s a fragility often bathed in blood, as suggested by the omnipresent color of red in the book, about which Turner notes she “can’t think of this book in a jacket of any other color. Sphinx is a book that practically drips with the blood of its enemies.”

In Love, Giraudon focuses on another aspect of her poetry, which has always been linked to montage and arrangement: “Today, what is important to me is combination,” she writes. One might detect Reznikoff’s influence here. Every page of Love is a montage, interweaving or simply juxtaposing different voices or situations, as in these lines, which partly allude to Samuel Beckett:

like Molloy calculating the average
time of his farts
 
to act she says ‘I want to act’
 
everything turning liquid means
that everything happens

Here, Giraudon gestures at the fragility of intentionality. However closely we monitor our actions and intentions, everything still “happens”; the inherent randomness of life undermines any illusions of control. This book proposes that writing is “a learning of life” among a history that both “repeats itself” and is beyond any possible “compiling.”

Giraudon has always written this way. Most of the books she published in the 2000s are “homobiographies,” a term she coined for work that re-presents the self through abstracted, fictionalized processes, often using third-person narrative as a distantiating yet self-identifying device. She uses this technique in Sphinx, in which the titular figure from antiquity allows for a “dramatization of the present” and a form of transhistorical identity. Another persona is the “Marquise,” who first appears in Sker and recurs throughout her books. This figure enacts the imagery of its namesake—the Marquis de Sade—representing an intentional degradation of the bourgeoisie, a form of trashy poetics. “The Marquise declares through her teeth: ‘You’re inventing your own archeology, you cunt, move your tongue, shake your ass, … learn to love dirty words … pretense of splattered eros.” On the other hand, in Sphinx and many other books, Giraudon resorts to mythological characters. From Madame Himself to Polyphonie Penthésilée (2021), she invents her own Amazons as complex accomplices, bold witnesses of her breast cancer, and more broadly, of the struggle of feminist representation:

I have a precise memory of imagining Amazons riding naked on their horses, splashing into water black as ink. I could hear their laughter and would gladly have burnt off one of my breasts to join them.

I know their bow, their arrows; I can believe it, about the burnt breast. I know nothing of this other version, where the a in "amazon" had originally been an intensive (rather than the exclusive a-maza: breadless, unaware of cereal, i.e., pre-agricultural, nomadic …). Amazons, then, become women who are “strong of breast,” “of robust breasts,” … small horse riders from Asia, free-breasted, quite dark-skinned, armed with spears … (Madame Himself)

There is a touch of Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (the 1969 story of mythical communities written entirely from a feminine perspective) in Giraudon’s Amazons: discrete yet politically powerful communities that call for a specific approach to writing. Giraudon’s autobiographical work reclaims agency and freedom for mastectomied, whitewashed, invisibilized bodies—only through literary examples, fictional characters, and mythological references can Giraudon comprehend her own experience and suffering. In her translator’s note to Sphinx, Turner proposes a definition of Giraudon’s relationship to “experimental” poetry:

While “experimental” writing, in France as in Anglophone spheres, can sometimes mean the renunciation of personality or voice, I have the sense that for Giraudon, linguistic opacity, fragmentation, or excess serve alternately to reveal or shield the personal, as well as to locate the personal in a world that is as opaque, confusing, fragmented, excessive, disjointed, and—yes—beautiful as this world is.

The back-and-forth Turner detects between revealing and shielding is related to the creation of such personas, which both stand for us and allow us to redefine ourselves in their vicinity.

In Love, these (re)constructions of the self are mediated by montage and film, whose “cold technique” Giraudon borrows: “The poem sets up its camera and films. Neither restoration nor restitution. Perhaps a form of prolongation. To try to bring back to the light the buried images.” Poetry is not a reparative act: bodies are unearthed in visual reconstructions. The title of her book is adapted from that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1969 film Love is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod); the book’s final section contains stills from the film. Love’s structure itself is influenced by the relationship to cinema and Fassbinder. The first half of the book is a long eponymous poem that is then deconstructed in the following sections. “Precipitate Syllables” is a visual poetry segment of collages in which Giraudon cuts out and rearranges lines from the first long poem, forming a disorganized clump of clauses that recall Susan Howe’s work. This editing or postproduction of the poem reshapes its original disorganization and gives it a more palpable form, one that Riggs and Turner excellently render, overcoming the material challenge of sampling, cutting up, and rearranging these shreds and slices. The final section, “Once and For Not All,” builds around Fassbinder’s movie, shedding light on the matrix of the book and calling the reader back to the first poem.

Fassbinder’s film tells the story of a love triangle involving a young Munich prostitute. It’s a story of domination and betrayal, but it also has a certain beauty to which Giraudon was no stranger, having lived her own long love triangle with poets Henri Deluy and Jean-Jacques Viton. But the film speaks to her, less as a result of those dynamics than that it reminds her of an early love, in the 1960s, during which she had an abortion, an experience at the core of “Once and For Not All.” This final piece is both cold and heart-wrenching. It suggests a moment that is fundamental and generative of her whole body of work—“the heroine from then on inhabiting a half-dead body and surviving for a time only by relentless use of sex and books.”

This regenerates Giraudon’s long-lasting poetics of the “hole” and open wounded body, coupling vulnerability with radical openness and rawness in living and writing. She phrases this beautifully in a 2016 interview for Diacritik: writing “takes place in the body. But you’re acutely alone when you’re writing. Even if you’re not entirely alone, that’s how you feel, and it’s brutal. Violent. You’re writing inside the holes.” And these holes are everywhere: each of Giraudon’s books begins as “an unreadable draft / and riddled with holes.” These lines from the book’s first section herald the epigraph of the second, from French filmmaker Fernand Deligny: “Don’t forget the holes. If there are no holes, where do you expect the images to land, what do you expect them to come through?” Poetry is what takes places in the holes of discourse and amid the blanks on the page. Giraudon writes “in search of holes,” and the image of the hole pervades every object in the book, including the lake, in the third section: “The lake is only a hole full of water.” Like a new Danaid’s sieve, poetry is about trying to fill these holes, though we always seem to fall short.

Another echo between Sphinx and Love’s presentations of identity comes from human and nonhuman relationships. As Giraudon declares in le travail de la viande (2019), writing comes from “the beastly site inside us.” In Sphinx, she adds that they “chew bread there / with their writing teeth.” A passage in Love weaves the persona of the Marquise with a panther that troubles gender assignments:

In a Sade play        A Tiger metamorphoses into a young man
     Very pretty young man        Whom the marquis names Lili […]
it’s not a girl
                                more like a panther
it’s a boy
                  who has a girl’s name

Later in the book, Giraudon quotes Osip Mandelstam’s poem “The Age”: “My animal, my age, who will ever be able / to look into your eyes?” But the above passage recalls a different Mandelstam poem, “The Century of the Wolf”: “This cutthroat wolf century has jumped on my shoulders, / but I don’t wear the hide of a wolf.” Confronting the panther or the wolf equates facing oneself with facing the intertwined histories of violence in Giraudon’s 20th century.

Being a “boy” with a “girl’s name,” too, has been a recurring question or problem in Giraudon’s poetry. In the example above, the persona’s name is assigned by the marquis, enforced upon the body of a panther-child. Where do genders meet or depart from one another? A moment echoing throughout Giraudon’s work is the scene of her and her twin brother’s birth in 1946. It is often expressed in terms of gender confusion and animality, as in Sker:

There were too many limbs, so there was suspicion of a monster. Then in the skin of the womb, two bodies appeared. A single name, divided, worked for both. A silent movie star’s: Lilian Harvey. Named after a body broken by the talkie industry, I write whatever I write, nothing else. These dismantled notebooks, for instance, cut up and reconstructed.

The first name of the brother comes from a woman’s last name; the children could have been “monsters”; almost arbitrarily, by being assigned female at birth, Lilian became Liliane. Cut-up and reconstructed, Giraudon’s identity is endlessly refracted in her poems, read through a Sade play, deducted from a Mandelstam poem, or from a Greek myth—all because in her work, reading and writing precede any understanding of the self. As the structure of Love suggests, theory and poetics (the poem’s dislocation and its genetics) are enabled by the poem. Throughout her work, Giraudon practices a circular, reciprocal relationship between memory and poetry, sometimes involving other media such as film, theater, drawing, and painting. These artistic echoes can recall forgotten or misunderstood experiences. Memory has played an increasing role in Giraudon’s poems, especially since La poétesse (the first book in which she wrote about her breast cancer). In Love, memories become “screens” on which poetry projects and rearranges.

A poem from Sphinx dramatizes the various techniques defining Giraudon’s poetry:

A whole winter spent researching vague lands.
In a notebook she draws their outlines,
making an inventory of what is found there.
A bunch of objects put into a rebus,
sometimes partially buried in the ground—
fine things, magnetic.
So much vaster than the words for them.
Against the light is the hermaphrodite Aphrodite
distributing a phallus and a little salt,
Pasolini working on such squalid images.

There are three notable moments in this poem. First comes the mediated approach to the world, in which “outlines” of scenery only become visible when noted. Giraudon’s books all derive from “notebooks,” which she then rearranges, cuts through, and sometimes even titles sections of her books after (“Blue notebook,” in La poétesse; “Shreds of notebooks,” in Divagation des chiens). Though her notebooks are expansive “inventories” of life, books only keep shreds of this experience—hence the ragged, uneven appearance of her lines and pages. Second comes the “rebus” of what the writing looks like, and the realization that this kind of writing cannot fully account, in turn, for the materiality of lived experience. Yes, the world will always be “so much vaster” than the book. What comes out are only shreds of what remains “partially buried,” like the traumatic memories at the end of Love. Finally, to remediate this absence and this partial failure of the poem as a montage of notes, two personas join the final lines. One is mythological—an encounter between memory and tradition—and one is a contemporary artist whom Giraudon admires. Here, Pasolini is a scenery to live with (aren’t Giraudon’s books full of “squalid images” too?). And why wouldn’t Aphrodite join his scenario? Mythology is altered by the “magnetic” powers of the poem, and she becomes this queer, radiant being sowing sexes and spices into the winter landscape. By performing this montage of worlds, Giraudon once again veers away from aestheticism, creating her own kind of “squalid,” a form of loving desecration typical of her work. As in Love, these final lines in Sphinx create a cinematic image, in contrejour between the visible and the invisible, memory and fiction, life and death.