• 1 The Objectivists correspond to a nexus of American poets who began publishing in the 1930s with the (...)
• 2 Recent translations include George Oppen, Poésie complète, trans. Yves di Manno, Paris, José Corti, (...)

1The ties between French and American poetry are ancient and profound. In the introduction to his 1984 The Random House Book of XXth Century French Poetry, Paul Auster reminds his anglophone reader of the perennial contribution of the French language in general and French literature and poetry in particular to its British and later American counterparts, going back to John Gower and Chaucer. Focusing on the modern period, he claims that “American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French.” From the time of Baudelaire “modern British and American poets have continued to look to France for new ideas” (xxviii). From the early twentieth century, American poets have not only flocked to Paris in search of a cheap living and greater permissiveness, they “have been steadily translating their French counterparts—not simply as a literary exercise, but as an act of discovery and passion” (xxx). The reverse may not have been as entirely true, though one must immediately mention Poe’s exceptional French reception, his work championed and translated by both Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and Whitman’s early influence on the Unanimistes movement. But the late 1960s mark a turning point with now primarily the French poets turning towards American poetry not only with passion and curiosity but also with a motive, that of furthering French poetry. In the context of this surge of interest for American poetry in France since the 1960s, the reception of the Objectivist poets1 stands out for its exceptional endurance, in turn predicated on its ability for renewal. First brought to the attention of the French readers almost fifty years ago, they are still being discussed and translated.2 While the French reputation of other American poets tended to wax and wane over a decade or two, the reception of the Objectivists has been comparatively ongoing since the 1970s, each generation of French poets refashioning the Objectivist canon and critical meaning according to their different, at times antagonistic, needs. Championed by a significant number of major poets, the Objectivists have been enrolled to defend sometimes competing poetics in ardent poetic debates.

• 3 See the “Objectivism” entry by E. Berry in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (1993 (...)
• 4 The Wisconsin-based poet Lorine Niedecker and the British poet Basil Bunting have both been associa (...)

2The nature of the Objectivist “movement” itself can explain, at least in part, the ease with which it could be appropriated later on. Indeed, the very idea that an Objectivist movement ever existed remains contentious3 since Louis Zukofsky only came up with the term at the behest of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, who insisted he label the eclectic group of poets he had gathered at the instigation of Ezra Pound for the February 1931 issue of the magazine. In lieu of manifesto, Louis Zukofsky expanded an essay he had devoted to the work of Charles Reznikoff, a poet twenty years his senior. Entitled “Sincerity and Objectification,” it defined sincerity as “thinking with the things as they exist” or “presentation in detail,” and objectification as “rested totality” (Zukofsky, 1931, 273-278). Some of the poets featured in the 1931 issue were subsequently represented in the “Objectivists” anthology edited by Zukofsky, published by George Oppen in 1932 and in the cooperative Objectivist Press from 1933 to 1936. When they were rescued from almost total oblivion by Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley after the war, they tended again to be lumped together for ease of reference, especially after L.S. Dembo published interviews with George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky under the title “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet,” thus establishing the idea of a core quartet.4 As Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain have convincingly argued, the Objectivists are best conceived as a “nexus” which “magnetized” a set of characteristics and “historical responsibilities” (7). Stemming from Poundian imagism and its insistence on direct presentation but developed by its Marxist proponents towards an emphatically materialist, historically and politically conscious poetics, Objectivism has often been cast as an alternative model to dominant poetic models. In his 1978 essay “The Objectivist Tradition,” Charles Altieri posits the “Objectivist style” as an alternative model of lyric relatedness in concurrence with the symbolist style (DuPlessis, 25 sqq.). Where “symbolist poets typically strive to see beyond the seeing” and value evocation, Objectivist poets “seek an artifact presenting the modality of things seen or felt as immediate structure of relations” and value direct reference. The Objectivist thinks with things rather than about them and values composition and measure over interpretation. The formalist bias of objectification (perfection, rest, totality) is balanced with the ethical imperative of sincerity, the respectful attention to minute particulars and, in Oppen’s understanding, composition out of moments of conviction and a commitment to clarity. In his 1999 afterword to his original essay, Altieri demonstrates the inherent plasticity of the movement and its key concepts by extending the concept of sincerity to indeterminacy and the concept of objectification to the anti-representational constructions of several contemporary investigative poets (DuPlessis, 18). This plasticity was to allow for similarly inventive interpretations on the part of French readers, making for an exceptionally fruitful reception.

• 5 I am concentrating on issues of poetic theory as articulated by the poets, at the expense of a clos (...)

5While Marjorie Perloff (1989, 1990, 2006) and Serge Gavronsky (1994), early observers of the French-American conversation in poetry, have already highlighted and analyzed the primary importance of the Objectivists, I hope to offer a more comprehensive historical account of their reception. Concentrating on issues of poetic theory,5 my aim is to bring out the landmarks and articulations of the French reception of the Objectivists, to show how the controversies attending the interpretations of Objectivist poetics served to further French poetics and, more generally, to shed light on the complex dynamics of reception, textual circulation and canonization. I identify three main moments of this reception, focusing more specifically on the key figures, institutions, publications and events around which these different readings of the Objectivists crystallized, and I dwell on those moments when competing readings of the Objectivists came into conflict. In particular, I show how the Objectivists helped revive formal poetry after Surrealism while also providing a model for an anti-poetic prose poetry; how they spearheaded the movement to do away with an idealistic understanding of the poetic, while providing a disciplined poetics of presence which seemed able to resist lapsing into the sublime and smuggling in transcendence; how they helped break with the hermeneutic reading model and bring about a literalist reading in the 1970s, while also providing the key text for a second foundation of literalist poetics in the 1990s; how they served as the common reference sealing the friendship between contemporary poststructuralist French and American poets, while also fueling alternative views set on reconciling formal exigency and the visionary dimension in a humanist search for a “common song;” how they helped redefine poetry at a time of crisis, providing limit-cases challenging the structuralist or formalist definitions of poetry in favor of pragmatic or heuristic definitions.

• 6 Three years later, Serge Fauchereau supplemented his theoretical introduction with a sizeable antho (...)

6The Objectivists were first brought to the attention of the French readers by Serge Fauchereau, a French critic, professor and curator, whose 1968 Lectures de la poésie américaine gave an unprecedented view of the wealth of modern and contemporary American poetry.6 By placing the chapter devoted to the Objectivists right in the middle of the book and entitling it “La poésie en Amérique,” Fauchereau singled out the Objectivists as the first deliberately American movement (134). This central position also stressed their role as sole link between what Fauchereau calls the Pound-Williams-Cummings trinity on the one hand, and Charles Olson and the Black Mountain group on the other. In his opening paragraph, Fauchereau noted a surge of interest for the Objectivists in the 1960s and, possibly under the influence of his friend and informant Robert Duncan, stated that Louis Zukofsky appeared to be considered among the three or four greatest poets alive.

• 7 Founded in 1923 by Romain Rolland and led by those poets of l’Abbaye de Créteil who helped populari (...)

8It is through Fauchereau that Jacques Roubaud first heard about the Objectivists and in the 1977 special issue he guest-edited for Europe,7 he calls this discovery “a true revelation” (24). In the conversation with Charles Dobzynsky and Serge Fauchereau that inaugurates the issue, Roubaud says that he had known about Williams, Pound and Cummings but, like everybody else, had been under the impression that American poetry was something minor and not very interesting. When Fauchereau asks him what attracted him to the Objectivists, Roubaud answers:

• 8 In his interview with L.S. Dembo, Zukofsky says: “if that thing has lasted for two hundred years an (...)

9Roubaud makes quite clear that he sees the Objectivists as a solution to a personal and a national problem, a lever to counter the moribund but still pervasive Surrealist influence. Throughout the 1970s, Roubaud was reading far and wide in search of remote poetic models to counter the Surrealist influence that he had initially suffered under: he found them primarily in the Troubadours, in Japanese medieval poetry, and in American poetry, above all in the Objectivists, in Gertrude Stein and in some of the New American poets represented in Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960. In the mid-1970s, Roubaud was also reflecting on French verse. In his book on the demise of the alexandrine, he criticized what he terms the vers libre standard (standard free verse) propagated by the Surrealists and increasingly popular worldwide. The alternative poetic models he turned toward are all strongly formal and, unsurprisingly, Roubaud took a keen interest in Zukofsky in whom he may have seen a predecessor, a poet who shared his concern for the renewal of form and his growing distrust for avant-garde gestures.8

• 9 In 1973 in Action Poétique 56 (“Poésies USA,” 12); in 1977 in Europe 578-579 (“Une littérature méco (...)
• 10 “A”-9 is composed of two canzone that respect an exacting rhyme scheme and invisible letter-based c (...)
• 11 In the conversation reproduced in the 1977 issue of Europe, among the appealing characteristics of (...)

10In the 1970s, Roubaud wrote at least three introductory notes9 in which he refined his views and modulated Zukofsky’s reception. His 1973 notice begins with a grand canonizing gesture: radicalizing Fauchereau’s assertion of Zukofsky’s importance, Roubaud calls him “the most important American poet of the century.” Roubaud expresses his fascination for “A”: “this monumental, fascinating, off-putting, contradictory text, both attractive and difficult” (Roubaud, 1973, 12). He emphasizes some unforgettable “formal feats” and a wide range of formal poetics. He adds that no one seems capable yet of tackling critically the problem posed by Zukofsky’s poem, that most critics play down the political and technical dimension of the work (“A”-9 and “Mantis”) in favor of the merely autobiographical (“A”-12). In his 1977 presentation, Roubaud elaborates on the Zukofsky/Pound parallel and, in 1980, he goes on to call Zukofsky an “anti-Pound” who has provided opposite answers to the same questions. Zukofsky follows Pound’s injunction to make it new but he doesn’t seek modern meaning in “the solar dust of their original fragments but through a meditation of the formal seen in the formal” (Europe, 78). Stressing the political and technical dimensions, Roubaud lays emphasis on form, “a meditation on form, in form itself,” as exemplified in “A”-9,10 or “Mantis,” poems which strip formalism of its arguably reactionary overtones, flaunting a brilliant reconciliation of radical formalism with radical politics.11 Incidentally, in the battle that raged between Parisian avant-garde coteries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this represented a pointed attack against Tel Quel where Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet championed Ezra Pound. For Roubaud, Zukofsky offered not only an original combination of radical politics and formal experimentation but, unlike Pound, had opted for the adequate politics (Marxism) and poetics, i.e. Zukofsky’s “objectification” in which poems aspire to the condition of object, as against Tel Quel’s prescription against genres in favor of the “text” and écriture.

• 12 “A,” a xeroxed periodical which ceased publication when Zukofsky died (1976-1978) and ZUK, a four-p (...)
• 13 La notion d’obstacle (1978), Les objets contiennent l’infini (1983), La poésie entière est préposit (...)

11In the 1970s, Roubaud was the French poet who most outspokenly and discursively shaped the French reception of the Objectivists, doing so in major poetic venues: the communist-friendly magazines Action Poétique and Europe, as well as an anthology of American poetry published by Gallimard. But, just as importantly, this initial decade of reception was shaped by the gestures of two poets: Anne-Marie Albiach translated the first half of “A”-9 in 1970 and Claude Royet-Journoud entitled two of his magazines, “A” and ZUK,12 after Zukofsky, and started using objectivistically-loaded words in the titles of his own books: obstacle, objet, préposition.13 Royet-Journoud and Albiach didn’t need to learn about the Objectivists from Fauchereau. They lived in London in the 1960s, avidly reading contemporary American poets many of whom were published in England at the time; Zukofsky’s “A”-1-12 was published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1966, and three books by Lorine Niedecker were published by Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh and Fulcrum in London in the 1960s. The British poet Anthony Barnett introduced them to the work of George Oppen. In each of his introductory notes, Roubaud mentions Albiach’s translation of the first half of “A”-9, calling it very beautiful in 1977 and “exemplary” in 1980. The reason why it is exemplary, I suspect, is that it replicates Zukofsky’s endeavor and formal feat: to paraphrase Roubaud, it constitutes a meditation on translation as form, in the translation itself. That both Jacques Roubaud and Anne-Marie Albiach should have initially focused on Zukofsky’s “A”-9 makes clear that, for this first generation of French poets, the appeal of the Objectivists lay in an original combination of form and politics.

• 14 While Serge Gavronsky and François Dominique chose to translate the semantic meaning when they tran (...)
• 15 Letter of March 9, 1969 to Albiach kept at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University (...)
• 16 Emmanuel Hocquard provides a lucid account of “the radical reversal implied in substituting the ina (...)

12Albiach’s translation has been reprinted three times since 1970, most recently in 2011, and has attained to something of a mythic aura, for reasons one can try to account for. First, she translated a poem of formidable formal complexity and semantic obduracy. And she did so in a very personal way, making forceful decisions, choosing to translate the form rather than the words.14 She repeated Zukofsky’s posture, composing a prose paraphrase or commentary (“Contrepoint”) just as Zukofsky had provided a prose restatement for his own poem in a 1940 privately published pamphlet. Secondly, Zukofsky approved of the translation,15 and several French poets did too: Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye, Alain Veinstein, Jean Daive. To my knowledge, Albiach and Royet-Journoud are (with Fauchereau) the only French poets who corresponded with Zukofsky and Oppen. Thirdly, “A”-9 haunts Albiach’s most celebrated book, État, published in 1971, a year after her translation. État revealed Albiach as a poet and, after Jean Daive’s 1967 Décimale blanche, implemented a new poetics in French poetry, which violently defeated representation and hermeneutic reading and established a literal reading.16 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, proponents of littéralité continued exploring the Objectivists’ work and acclimatizing their poetics.

• 17 Louis Zukofsky, Un objectif & deux autres essais, trans. Pierre Alferi, Un bureau sur l’Atlantique (...)

131989 stands as an annus mirabilis in the French reception of the Objectivists, with a three-day international seminar on the Objectivists at the Abbaye de Royaumont, the translation of Zukofsky’s theoretical essays including “Sincerity & Objectification” by Pierre Alferi, the translation of Reznikoff’s Holocaust by Auxeméry and two special issues devoted to the Objectivists by Banana Split and Java.17 1989 also marks the coming-of-age of a new generational reception and a change of emphasis.

• 18 That same year, 1989, Hocquard also established “Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique,” an association and Fr (...)

14Convened by French poet Emmanuel Hocquard, the Rencontres Internationales de Royaumont were held from September 29 to October 1. They featured presentations by Charles Bernstein (on Reznikoff), Michael Davidson (on Oppen), Lyn Hejinian (on Zukofsky), Michael Palmer (on Objectivism), as well as discussions with other invited poets including Objectivist Carl Rakosi, David Bromige (who chronicled the event), Stephen Rodefer, Joseph Simas, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean-Paul Auxeméry, Yves di Manno, in addition to Pierre Alferi and Judith Crews who provided translations. The event is sometimes referred to as the first international conference devoted to the work of the Objectivists but Hocquard insisted that he “never intended an academic-type colloquium on the Objectivist movement”; his primary aim was to invite “contemporary American poets whose work I have known and valued […] to France to share with contemporary French writers their present reading of the Objectivists” (Poetry Flash, 22). Hocquard here clarifies the stakes of an Objectivist reception orchestrated by poets as opposed to academics: the focus is not on historical reconstruction but contemporary creation, the shaping of the field. In hindsight, the conference contributed to the recognition and canonization of the Objectivists, and sealed a Franco-American friendship18 on the grounds of a common lineage and a certain interpretation of these ancestors. The conference also revealed diverging interpretations of the Objectivists, indicative of fault-lines among their admirers in France and beyond.

• 19 An avant-garde group of poet-critics who started publishing in the 1970s, the Language poets reacte (...)
• 20 The feature that Yves di Manno discovered in American poetry and has been trying to promote in Fren (...)

15That this conference, organized in the outskirts of Paris, was discussed and denounced as far as California in several issues of Poetry Flash, an institution in the Bay Area’s literary culture, proves that its stakes were legible, and exemplifies the feedback or, in this case, backlash effect that the French reception of the Objectivists may cause in the United States. Carl Rakosi, the sole surviving Objectivist, was invited at the conference and, as he made known in a March 1990 letter to Poetry Flash, strongly disagreed with many things he heard. This included Bernstein’s stress on Reznikoff’s Jewishness and the participants’ interest in opacity and language. Clearly hostile to Language Poetry,19 Poetry Flash editor Richard Silberg characterized the Royaumont mind-set as “formalistic, extremely theory-bound and centrally concerned with language in itself and with problems of meaning” (Poetry Flash, 22) and denounced the commandeering of the Objectivists in the service of a Language Poetry agenda. The main fault line crystallized around the term “opacity,” dividing those who believed in communication and distrusted theory (Rakosi, Yves di Manno and the Poetry Flash editor) and those who embraced the “era of suspicion” and the “linguistic turn”: the Language Poets and Hocquard who, while himself a great believer in the ligne claire, expressed surprise and dismay at the idea that some still believed in the so-called transparency of language. Yves di Manno described the Objectivist meeting as a turning point in his life and a leap into the public debate. Invited to speak about his experience as a translator of Oppen’s work but angered by the “textualist clichés” he heard, di Manno rewrote his talk during the seminar and launched into “a long and rather polemical historical overview, insisting on the social dimension of the Objectivists’ work as well as the epic tradition they were part of” and denouncing “the narrowly formalistic rhetoric which had until then dominated the debates” (di Manno, 23).20

• 21 As Hocquard explained in San Diego in 1987, these poets fed on the theoretical food that abounded e (...)

16Di Manno’s reaction points to an interesting paradox at the heart of the Franco-American poetry connection in the 1980s and 1990s. Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach and other poets identified as proponents of poésie blanche or, in Hocquard’s term, “negative modernity”; they had kept at a safe distance from the “theoretical and polemical turmoil” (Gleize, 1992, 124) of the late 1960s and early 1970s and generally refrained from any theoretical pronouncements or jargon. But their work bears the mark of the theoretical investigations of this era of suspicion.21 Contrasting it with the “triumphant modernity” of the pre-war avant-gardes, Hocquard defines “negative modernity” as riddled “with suspicion, doubt and questions about everything, itself included” (Hocquard, 2001, 25). It is precisely this common theoretical background that enabled a true conversation with the Language Poets. Indeed, in his preface to the 49+1 Poètes américains anthology (1991), Hocquard identifies “the shared assumptions between French and American poets of the same generation” as: [1] “emphasis on language itself, taken as the substance or material of the poem and not merely as an instrument of expression or aesthetic veneer; [2] richness and complexity of formal invention; [3] mobility, freedom and dynamism of a vigilant poetry, breaking with those formally and ideologically academic and conservative models that exist in the United States no less than elsewhere” (Hocquard, 1991, 13-14).

• 22 Just as Roubaud must have felt his own project anticipated in certain aspects of Zukofsky’s endeavo (...)

17Although Hocquard readily quotes Oppen and Zukofsky, it is Reznikoff’s Testimony that provides him with the decisive model for littéralité. Composed over several decades and only published in full posthumously, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative22 portrays turn-of-the-century America from the statements of courtroom witnesses that Reznikoff sampled and versified.

• 23 In his 1989 talk at Royaumont, Michael Palmer had mentioned Oppen’s stance “against literary contri (...)

18“Suddenly you see something” (Dembo, 212) is a pronouncement by Zukofsky that Hocquard often quotes. It embodies his concept of elucidation. For Hocquard, the business of poetry is the logical organization of thought or, in Wittgensteinian terms, the logical clarification of thought. As such, it has nothing more in common with literature than with any other language-based activity (Hocquard, 2001, 22). The work of Hocquard is a continuous escape from literature, from its “fuss, its sleight of hand, its meta-discourses, its simpering airs, its intimidation” (Hocquard, 2001, 448).23 As against literature, Testimony offers Hocquard a model for literality or, as he makes clear in “La Bibliothèque de Trieste” (1987), for a second foundation of literality. Both first and second literality share an awareness that the real is inaccessible and that language is bound to fail in its attempt at representation. But while the first literality, initiated by Albiach and Royet-Journoud in the 1970s, experienced the impassable gap between words and things as a form of terror or ecstasy, the second literality, predicated on differential repetition, joyfully engages in grammatical investigations of a very practical nature. The foundation on this second literality marked an important turning point in French poetry, away from mid-century Kojevian and Blanchotian negativity. It offered a theoretical frame for all the techniques of sampling and appropriation to come. It also marked a turning point in the French reception of the Objectivists. In becoming the exemplary instance for this poetics of copying, Reznikoff’s Testimony imposed itself as the emblematic Objectivist reference from the 1990s onwards.

• 24 See William Carlos Williams’ famous statements: “There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: (...)

20If Hocquard’s endorsement and interpretation of Testimony have proven so crucial for French poetry it is because his insistence on procedure made it palatable for a younger generation of poets increasingly invested in sampling, mixing media and combining high and low material. Hocquard has provided a key in articulation between the poésie blanche of the 1970s and a new generation of poets who began to publish around 1990, with Pierre Alferi and Olivier Cadiot in the forefront. The two mammoth issues of the Revue de littérature générale constitute a landmark in late twentieth-century French poetry. Edited by Alferi and Cadiot, these strikingly attractive 400-page volumes made a clean break with the avant-garde magazines of the 1970s by presenting themselves as cross-generational tool boxes rather than coterie-driven manifestos and works in progress. Alferi and Cadiot’s opening piece to the first volume entitled La Mécanique lyrique obliquely assesses the appeal and limits of Objectivism while couching their presentation in Objectivist terms. If only to avoid the loaded reference to genres and “texts,” they refer to literary products as “objects” and conceive of them in mechanical terms.24

• 25 To my knowledge, Gleize was the first academic to respond (positively) to the work of the poets ass (...)

24More than previous go-betweens, Gleize has sought to reveal an underestimated Objectivist tradition within French poetry and pointed to Rimbaud and Ponge in particular as indigenous proto-Objectivists (Gleize, 2009, 117): “I try to establish that there is a diffuse French Objectivism, with Ponge representing one possible manner. Like its American counterpart, French Objectivism necessarily devotes a very great attention to language” (Gleize, 2002). Already in his 1992 A noir, Poésie et littéralité, Gleize had delineated a literal current taking its source in Romanticism and going through Lamartine, Stendhal, Rimbaud, Artaud, Ponge and negative modernity. Taking up Rimbaud’s request for “an objective poetry” in a 1871 letter to Izambard, and in the wake of modernité negative,25 he called for a poetry that is objective, literal, neutral, violently simple, naked, impersonal, prosaic, couched in simple diction, a poetry that refuses images and metaphors—in other words, a poetry that is antipoetic. Pursuing the attacks on la poésie (poetry as ideal, as washed-out lyric) launched by Francis Ponge after World War II and taken up by Denis Roche in the 1960s, Gleize has called for an exit from poetry: hence the term “post-poet” that his followers have adopted.

• 26 Fauchereau, however, had from the start rejected any similarity between their projects, relating in (...)
• 27 An essay published as part of a collection entitled New Objectivists and partly devoted to the Ital (...)

25Ponge’s focus on the object makes him an obvious candidate as a French cousin of the Objectivists.26 Benoît Auclerc has usefully clarified Ponge’s Objectivist leanings.27 While Ponge shares with his American contemporaries an interest in the trivial, stubbornly closed object, a certain prosaic simplicity, a distrust of verbiage (which he famously dubbed “la pompe lyrique”), a refusal of sentimentality and a generally anti-lyrical stance, he refuses objectification. Even Oppen, much less of an ostensible formalist than Zukofsky, reaffirmed the importance of objectification in his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo and stressed “the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That’s what ‘Objectivist’ really means […]. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem” (Dembo, 160). But after 1940 Ponge increasingly refused to objectify his writing, to indulge in what he called “a poetic abscess,” preferring various forms of notes or drafts. He also refused to call himself a poet. In the wake of Ponge and Roche, many contemporary French poets refuse the term “poet,” and call themselves “writers” instead. The stance for or against poetry as an independent genre creates a sharp line of demarcation in the world of French poetry. Auclerc suggests that for some French poets, “resorting to the Objectivists may appear as a way of avoiding Ponge” (Auclerc, 159). It is by implicitly letting Ponge contaminate the American Objectivists that Gleize can describe their movement as “in certain respects, antipoetic” (Gleize, 2002, 116).

• 28 Roubaud translated the first volume of Testimony in 1980. Témoignage, Les États-Unis, 1885-1890, Pa (...)
• 29 In his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo, Reznikoff defined the Objectivist as “a writer […] who does (...)
• 30 This is by no means a strictly French critique: Geoffrey Twitchell-Waas also finds sections of Oppe (...)

26While Jacques Roubaud agreed with Gleize that several Objectivist works constituted generic borderline cases, he drew opposite conclusions from this diagnosis. In 1996, in an essay entitled “La tentative Objectiviste” and published in the second volume of the Revue de littérature générale, Roubaud offered a clarification on the Objectivist movement in which he vindicated “a radical Objectivism” and posited Reznikoff’s Testimony28 as the paradigm of “a (radical) Objectivist attempt in poetry.” While the general public commonly associates poetry with sentimentality, “Radical Objectivism” demonstrates a “conception of poetry so remote from what is generally considered as poetry that it runs the risk of not being recognized as such” (Roubaud, 1996, 36). But Roubaud’s goal is to keep Testimony firmly in the domain of poetry both against those who would exclude it as lacking in feelings and lyricism and those, like Gleize, who would enlist it in their anti-poetic project. As Burton Hatlen has pointed out, “Reznikoff levels language down to almost prose—but the ‘almost’ is the key word here, for we are constantly impelled to try to define the ways in which what we are reading is not prose” (DuPlessis, 53). In his clarification Roubaud discards Ponge in a pointed parenthesis: “rhetoric is often a disguise for a conventional, if not regressive, moral; see the example of Ponge” (Roubaud, 1996, 36). Works identified as “diluted Objectivism” are discarded on the same grounds. For Roubaud, “late Oppen, late Rakosi,” the late Williams of Paterson, and Reznikoff’s “Horse” give up on the drastic Objectivist tenets29 and give in to “the Anglo-Saxon inclination towards the moral lesson.”30 Furthermore, where the dividing line at Royaumont had passed between the champions of opacity and those of transparency, Roubaud implicitly rejects this opposition as false when he claims that Reznikoff’s highly-legible Testimony and Zukofsky’s most obdurate 80 Flowers both embody radical objectivism in spite of their varied surfaces and accessibility: the difference is one of material not of method. Incidentally, Gleize offers yet another take on that opposition when he claims that the truly “modern obscurity of poetry [resides] in the extremism of its simplicity” (Gleize, 1992, 15). The muted argument between Gleize and Roubaud in the 1990s demonstrates Testimony’s exceptional ability to support competing interpretations and be enrolled in the service of starkly different poetics.

• 31 Initially proposed by Daniel Bell, the term “intellectual technology” was extended by anthropologis (...)

28Further down, Leibovici notes that the purely aesthetic apprehension of poetry has heretofore obscured its capacity as purveyor of intellectual technologies.31 Leibovici is less interested in Reznikoff’s aesthetic achievement than in his radically simple compositional procedure which throws the United States and its legal system in a harsh light. In Poésie action directe (2003), his post-poet fellow Christophe Hanna had already sought to redefine poetry on heuristic and pragmatic grounds. Furthering Alferi and Cadiot’s view of the fetishized object as the curse of poetry, Hanna launched an attack on the “poetics of the bauble” (8). Finding that “almost all theories of poetics are essentialist,” (10) he criticized Jakobson’s poetic function of language and his view of the poem as autotelic, in favor of a pragmatic approach to literature: “One gives up on a poetry conceived as a provider of aesthetic objects subject to a judgment of taste in favor of a positive poetry conceived in concrete terms as an exercise in language with a heuristic goal” (121).