Joseph Massey

Joseph Massey est né en 1978 et vit à South Deerfield, USA. Il est l’auteur de Areas of fog et At the point, chez Shearsman Editor. « Matin : une autre interprétation », que nous proposons dans la première livraison de L’usage, fait partie d’un nouveau livre à paraître  chez Omnidawn, To keep time.  Le travail de Joseph Massey prolonge la veine d’un minimalisme objectif (représenté, aux Etats-Unis, par des poètes comme H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout...)

Dans une recension du premier livre de Massey pour la revue Jacket, Rob Stanton s’exprime ainsi :

"Largely because of the memorable heft of Pound’s and Williams’ tenets – ‘Direct treatment of the thing’, ‘no ideas but in things’ – this tradition is too often seen as purely empirical, foregrounding direct translation of the world perceived into clear and communicable images. This isn’t untrue, but it implies something altogether too passive, as though a poem were ideally some decorative watercolour, to be glanced at approvingly now and again, but in no way troubling. It is more productive and realistic to see such poems instead as irresolvable collisions between keen observation and the actual materiality of words on paper, their very brevity tending to emphasise their self-conscious madeness as poems. One need only juxtapose three undisputed classics of the genre –

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. (Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’)


Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir. (H.D., ‘Oread’)


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens (Williams, from Spring and All)

to see the range of only-tangentially-mimetic textual play on offer: Pound’s rhythmical smarts, spreading four stresses over first 12 and then only 7 syllables to give the second line its cumulative punch; the stately repetitions (‘Whirl’/’whirl’, ‘pines’/’pines’), emphatic pronouns (4 appearances of ‘your’ in 6 lines, and 2 of ‘us’) and unforced enjambments in H.D.’s address to the sea naturalising her basically strange and counter-intuitive metaphor; and, biggest wink of all, Williams’ opening stanza showing the mind always already sifting, sorting and positioning. The full range of what this kind of poem can offer is perhaps better summarised in Zukofsky’s rethink of Pound’s dicta: ‘The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound and intellection’. Massey’s work certainly fits this bill, combining a vivid depiction of his immediate Californian surroundings with an uncanny microcosmic sense of vowel and consonant music. (…)

Areas of Fog is a big (127 separate poems) grouping of small things (longest poem: 35 lines). It is impressively ‘complete’ and encompassing for a first book, which raises the question of where Massey will go next. Will he retain the geographically specific bent and dig deeper? Will he turn to bigger canvases or simply intensify his current approach? The presentation of this book – the contents page lists only the five section titles, most carried over from earlier chapbook appearances – suggests he definitely sees his work in constellations if not actual sequences, so it could go either way. The precedents mentioned earlier suggest either option: many (Pound, H.D., Williams, Oppen, Reznikoff and Niedecker) moved on to larger forms or alternated, while others (Creeley, Eigner, Armantrout, Grenier, Friedlander) chose or choose to perfect and hone their more focussed technique. It should be exciting, whatever happens. Dangerous word to throw around, I know, but more than a few of the poems in Areas of Fog strike me as perfect:

      Honeysuckle
scent like
an open vowel

wrung out
in the rain’s
gloss-

olalia."


Dans sa deuxième livraison, L'usage publiera d'autres travaux de Joseph Massey.