After Some Sleep and Coffee: Hocquard

Okay, I think I've managed to corral my enthusiasm a little bit here so that I can be a little more informative about the reasons behind my excitement.

I've pasted a series of Hocquard links below, but as a quick and general sum of his writing, Hocquard's work operates often with the most simple words and direct expressions in language. His poems aren't "poetic" in the tradition of lyricism, imagism, or objectivism (though I think there are some similarities in spirit with the Objectivists, between Hocquard and George Oppen for example but not so much WC Williams.) In some ways the same fixation with simple, abstract language that is often a part of John Taggart & Juliana Spahr's work is also in Hocquard's work. Whereas in the work of Taggart & Spahr there's a lot of emphasis on repetition to make this simple language uncanny, in Hocquard's work it's much more about just simple, semi-strange sentence put on top of another simple, semi-strange sentence, and on and on until a couple sentences like "I see a leaf. I pick up a leaf." sort of explode. He also strings in sentences that are quite directly philosophical; the odd thing is that usually these sentences don't end up being prescriptive. There's a lot of discovery being transmitted via the poems and documented within the poems.

At any rate, here are some links:

Here is his biography with a couple links at the Duration Press site.

Here is page one of a series of pieces from A Test of Solitude translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.

This page is in French which I need to learn now, but it's also got a picture of the man with cigarette akimbo.

Here is a link to an organization he started called Un bureau sur l'Atlantique.

Here is a press release for a reading he did at Barnard.

Here is a good, brief essay about the bigs in contemporary French poetry: Hocquard, Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud.

Here is an interesting essay about contemporary French poets by Cole Swensen.

Steve Evans on Hocquard.

And that's probably enough for now -- enjoy.....