DERRIDA'S IN/VOICE

CHRIS TYSH

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Derrida's In/Voice
by Chris Tysh
Copyright © 2020

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: by Sarkis. Trésor de Mémoire: MacVal, Vitry/Paris, 2012.

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-369-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940724

BlazeVOX [books]
131 Euclid Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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BlazeVOX
Acknowledgements

Part I (“Arcades”) takes its titles from “Envois,” the first section of Jacques Derrida's
La Carte Postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris, Flammarion, 1980. Translated by Alan
Bass as The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago & London, Chicago
University Press, 1987. The lines I quote are my translation.

Part II (“Return to Center: A Semi-Cento”) takes its language from “Envois.”

Part III (“Entre Nous: A Graft”) is a mash-up of “Envois” and my own text, Canal, a play,
published in In the Name, Past Tents Press, 1994.

Some of these poems have previously appeared in Barzakh, BlazeVOX 20, Journal of Poetics
Research, and The Recluse. Gratitude to all the editors.

The author extends her gratitude to Wayne State University for a Josephine Nevins Keal grant.
 Contents

I: Arcades .................................................................................................................................................. 11

II. Return to Sender: A Semi-Cento .................................................................................................... 63

III. Entre Nous: A Graft ....................................................................................................................... 75

IV: Turnstile ............................................................................................................................................ 89

French Lessons .......................................................................................................................................102

For Bruno, Becky, Julian, Diana and George, as ever

and for the caravans of the displaced,

the migrants and the refugees, may you find sheltering skies along the way
DERRIDA'S IN/VOICE
How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

I: Arcades
Without borrowing, nothing happens*

darkness mirrors

a sense of malaise

where rubber meets road

a doorway to what

comes next

Au revoir les enfants

chance will never abolish

Un Coup de Torchon (dir. Bertrand Tavernier, 1981)

on the eve of WWII

in a forsaken colonial town of French West Africa

Eddy Mitchell, bad boy of French rock 'n' roll, plays Nono,

a moronic, lubricious layabout dressed in a marinière and cotton

pedal pushers

*
Sans emprunt, rien ne commence (410)

13
 tricolore, bougnoule

need I say more

fuck the empire

and its muddy rivers

El pueblo unido jamás será vincido! (Frederic Rzewski, piano composition, 1975)

In a letter from Black Mountain College, April 22, 1957

John Wieners writes to Schuyler “Dearest Jimmy:

Bring an excitement form wise — not just word-wise excitement but the twist of the hip —”

this way before

FOH's tight pants

poetics throw shade

on noun and verbs

cheat sheets

taped to the top of my skirt

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Tomorrow, I'll write to you again, in our foreign tongue*

the thread that ties this

text

lies

in the scattered fragments

I carry in the bowl

of my dress

like stolen coal

thin ice on railroad tracks

from the outset

the relational shifters of discourse

pronouns in particular

—that orphaned I-you structure—

hold a récit in place

the way she's taught

*
Demain je t'écrirai encore, dans notre langue étrangère (273)

15
 to pinch the seam

on a whole-grain loaf

while I

perds le fil

lose track

of the film

I mean dream

so resplendent

just a minute ago

behind my eyelids

awakened by the early bird

caucus

I harbor an intense sensation

au creux de l'estomac

une sueur froide

unbuttons my shirt

still wet

lampe de chevet qui s'allume au toucher

siphons the perpetual flow

of images

ebbing now across the lit up room

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 the architect of rumble strips (bandes sonores)

goes out the door

tout doucement

Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2003)

tips the soundtrack

toward silence

Scarlett's pink undies notwithstanding

mouthing sweet things

in a Tokyo bar

sayonara, motherfucker

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I've become your wife*

during the Prague spring

a month after Russian tanks

roll into the city

cut across street signs

painted over

causing the convoys

to rumble east and west

and back again lost

monkey wrench up their ass

cobblestones' uneven ground

at dawn

the virtuosity of rebellion

music to our ears

*
Je suis devenu ta femme (235)

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 drawing time in 5/4

piano, alto sax, bass and drums

a girl (just married) in a thin madras dress

stands on Portobello Road

fingering dark velvets, silk and linen

vintage threads placed like a fan of days past

cigarette à la main

the stranger flicks a fag end

at thigh level now in flames

syncope

stanza break

in the general collapse

of senses

autrement dit synaesthesia

one needs to heed the code, mood and structure

verbal arrangement

between words and world

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the presence of the body

in each versograph

alerts the reader

to piecemeal subjectivity

la femme en morceaux

other slogans will follow

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Sometimes I wish all was illegible to them*

nothing so strange

as

adho mukha svanasana

downward-

facing dog

illegible

these vast American cities

Baltimore Cincinnati Detroit

ragged crumbling piers

abandoned

like Moses in the bulrushes of the Nile

true dat

as per The Wire (David Simon, 2002)'s clipped parlance

*
Parfois je souhaite que tout leur reste illisible (221)

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in the scribbled chords of the theme song

something ruined

occluded

not meant to be brought back

from the dead

tongues falling away andante

behind a steep bluff

a narrative emerges

a premise or promise

in spite of the text's effort

to front its own unreadability

what eludes the human sensorium

or perhaps ça crève les yeux depending on your standpoint

is the foolishness of being right

more foreign than the thin hand-

writing on the back of an old photograph

“to a groovy chick”

only groove I find in a pocket dictionary

means furrow, rut or trench

This whole va et vient

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to and fro movement of discourse

poofs up my checkered skirt

as I step on the metro grate

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They invent and ferry falseness*

sharp knives in our back

raise a drawbridge

forestalling evening's verdict

replicative angst

under its exposed struts

though the open rib-

cage admits a steady

breath making it clear

we're not ready to shove off

this mortal coil just yet

Someone in the back row

raises a paddle

to bid on a tangle

of glass pillars and spirals (Vladimir Tatlin, “Monument to the Third

*
Ils inventent et trimballent le faux (218)

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International,” 1919-1920)

fer, verre et acier

modernity's plunging neckline

the ineluctable narcissism of the 1%

nothing but a chorus line of shapely legs

deep in the game

the problem with this

phrasing on the page

decentered subject matter

fissures split-screen lyricism and cultural references à gogo

it only works

in the wee hours

when the small window of the critic

bangs shut

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