Playing Over the Noise

Hotel Furama, featured in an early poem in White Piano.White Piano (Coach House, 2013) is Nicole Brossard’s latest poetry collection, translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels. Brossard is a veteran Québécoise author and has published numerous books of poetry and novels since 1965. Throughout the book, Brossard juggles the musical conceit of her title with references to the process of writing. The white piano is actually a pearl-grey computer keyboard, and the book imagines the process of writing as musical composition (especially like jazz improvisations). White Piano appeals to music to understand improvisational poetry.Brossard pays close attention to the physicality of words. Lines like “every language cultivates its own craters of fire” and “you enter the nO sound / the mouth is immobile” bring to mind the shape of the mouth around the sounds that it makes. The composition of writing involves a physical relationship with the word, too. Sitting at a desk and tapping away at the keys resembles playing a piano. The movement from pen and paper to typewriter or keyboard is as big a technological shift to the process as it was when scribes gave up clay for ink and papyrus. In comparison to keyboards, pen and paper focuses much more on a single locus point and linear progress. Typing hands move back and forth across over the board the way hands playing a piano do. The actual progress of the written word is no longer linear, but scattered. If you’re tired of deciphering so many poets’ private languages and aleatory practices, consider Brossard’s nod to the complaint that too much poetry is being written today. She quotes: “Around 1900, the world was as full of pianos as it is full of cars today … people bought an instrument simply because the piano next door had become intolerable and they preferred to produce their own noise.” Writing poetry can be an exercise in drowning out the world’s other noise, or at least an activity preferable to having to read another writer’s verse.Much of White Piano is set in hotels, both in Québec and in more exotic locales. Brossard writes, “without lux(ury) language strains unbearable.” Hotels, as sites of luxury, are also the staging points for linguistic variations. Hotel Furama in Los Angeles lends its name to one early poem sequence. There’s a white piano in its lounge, a symbol for the improvisational play possible here. However, the real Hotel Furama is a brutalist structure next to LAX airport, where “the dictatorship rose up / all blue, all night / nuggets of interdiction.” An interdiction is a prohibitory decree. Interdiction is language that gets in between, that intervenes and says “no.” Interdictions that occur at the level of language include grammatical rules, an insistence on logical progression and demands for semiotic meaning. An interdiction is the opposite of Brossard’s language of variation and play, like the Hotel Furama’s cold and rational architecture. A language restricted by conventions and expectations, a dictatorial language, may be the language that “strains [the writer] unbearable,” or a language under unbearable strain.Meanwhile, “Paragraphs of Eternity” entangles high culture, history and art with cocktail hour and European vacations. The sequence features a woman named Emma, an academic who finds herself in Venice visiting bridges, canals, and museums. The art in museums and on streets “raises the rebellious side / of words.” White Piano makes the case that poetry is a luxury or at least full of luxury. The tacky white piano in the hotel lounge, the cocktails, and the exotic cities are excesses, like Brossard’s own wordplay and variations. An economical language that “says what it means and means what it says” is a dictatorial language and subject to the same austerity principles as the contemporary welfare state. Brossard asks for more out of language, as one might ask for more out of life, meaning opportunities for leisure or luxury. A luxurious language, by which I mean a playful and an aleatory language, is a rebellion against the authoritarian demands of semiotic expectations and economical styles. Culture is as much a bodily experience as are cocktails in White Piano, and the physicality of words both written and spoken attest to the real closeness between the body and art. “Piano Frontera” begins with a woman’s corpse on the USA–Mexico border. The sequence that follows is a variation on the eyelids, mouth, and head of the rotting body. The bodily experience of verbal language again come into focus:

almost not deadjust a palpitation a word snaggedin the soft fold of the cheek we all havea word caressed with the tonguelike a sliver of pepper, ire

Language’s tactile experience situates words into the same context as the rotting body.  Like the woman’s corpse in the desert, language decomposes (in opposition to musical composition). The poet, like the vultures eating the woman’s eyes, picks at the body to form new mutilations. White Piano is a quiver between linguistic composition and decomposition. It’s about luxury and authority and the role art has as a dialogue between the two.