Cartwright Gardens
We agreed to meet at a pub in Leigh street, between Judd street and Monmouth street; just off Cartwright gardens, of which Jacques Roubaud wrote his London prose poem. The Lord John Russell. Brown tables and brown beer. I went to a reading by Roubaud one May evening in London with S, who has arranged this meeting place, but she can’t remember this poem. Then I remember that I first heard it at a seminar with A in Mile end on a hot June afternoon, a year before the mild May evening by the river. I thought that it had been with S because she was altogether more sympathetic to M. Roubaud, than A, as I was myself, and also because of the lecturer’s reference to certain Buddhist prayers or rhythmic incantations, which I thought would have interested her. Anyhow, no one remembered any of this although I myself cannot now pass the corner of Cartwright gardens where it meets the John Russell pub without thinking of that prose poem, without nodding in the direction of M. Roubaud.
Maintenant je passe dans la rue. Maintenant la rue, vide, passe ..
I meet P, partner of S, on the street outside the pub and tell him some of this and he replies with something I hear as “I vividly remember Etienne’s belly bouncing from the balcony”. Actually, he was talking about Etienne Balibar, Marxist theoretician and critic, waving from the hotel balcony, perhaps the same hotel balcony from which Roubaud’s partner, soon to die suddenly and violently, waved to him in the street, from which she took his photograph, as he put in his prose poem. The same balcony from which he perhaps, waved to her, with the books and magazines on the bed, listed in his poem.
We go in to the pub to meet S it is all brown wood, wooden panels, brown beer, and I order a glass of la bière Guinness; something black, as the poet put it, to drink to the Frenchman and his London limbo.
(this took place 10th March 2011. Written 14 mars 2011)
We agreed to meet at a pub in Leigh street, between Judd street and Monmouth street; just off Cartwright gardens, of which Jacques Roubaud wrote his London prose poem. The Lord John Russell. Brown tables and brown beer. I went to a reading by Roubaud one May evening in London with S, who has arranged this meeting place, but she can’t remember this poem. Then I remember that I first heard it at a seminar with A in Mile end on a hot June afternoon, a year before the mild May evening by the river. I thought that it had been with S because she was altogether more sympathetic to M. Roubaud, than A, as I was myself, and also because of the lecturer’s reference to certain Buddhist prayers or rhythmic incantations, which I thought would have interested her. Anyhow, no one remembered any of this although I myself cannot now pass the corner of Cartwright gardens where it meets the John Russell pub without thinking of that prose poem, without nodding in the direction of M. Roubaud.
Maintenant je passe dans la rue. Maintenant la rue, vide, passe ..
I meet P, partner of S, on the street outside the pub and tell him some of this and he replies with something I hear as “I vividly remember Etienne’s belly bouncing from the balcony”. Actually, he was talking about Etienne Balibar, Marxist theoretician and critic, waving from the hotel balcony, perhaps the same hotel balcony from which Roubaud’s partner, soon to die suddenly and violently, waved to him in the street, from which she took his photograph, as he put in his prose poem. The same balcony from which he perhaps, waved to her, with the books and magazines on the bed, listed in his poem.
We go in to the pub to meet S it is all brown wood, wooden panels, brown beer, and I order a glass of la bière Guinness; something black, as the poet put it, to drink to the Frenchman and his London limbo.
(this took place 10th March 2011. Written 14 mars 2011)
