Found! Poésie trouvée (Part 6).

I have touched upon, in earlier posts, the peculiar jolt one is dealt when a specimen of poésie trouvée is stumbled upon.  

     So it was all the more surprising to discover such a specimen lurking in my own prose.

     Simply, it’s a paragraph from my novel concerning the fortunes of Klara and narrator Éveline who – against all expectations – find themselves falling very much in love.  

     As to rhyme, it’s an unconscious pairing one might say.

     A snatch of dialogue. Klara speaks first . . .

Two Graces.

Detail from Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture (1814), 

commissioned for Empress Josephine and now exhibited

in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

(Source Wikimedia.)

        ‘We agreed. Agreed. For both of us.’

        Klara drew close to me.                

        ‘We are not looking for what we do not want. Because . . .’

        ‘Because we have found what we . . .’

        ‘Need,’ she pronounced throatily.   

        ‘Need.’

 

For more examples of poésie trouvée see my earlier posts . . .

That Cry in the Night

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2021/08/that-cry-in-night.html 

Immured Mustard Field

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html

The Unsought Text

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

Ways of Seeing
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.html 

A Touch of Fever

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-touch-of-fever-poisoning-of.html
 

 

 

That Cry in the Night

                                 That cry in the night

                                 can be a train whistle,

                                 an owl,

                                 or curlew

                                 flying inland in the evening –

                                 the meaning is always the same;

                                 a door swings open

                                 and lets the cold wind in.

Found poem                  

from prose (page 17)                  

The Waiting Game                  

a perfect novel by                  

Kate Christie (1962)                  

                                         

For more found poems see: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.html 

and
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html
 

A Touch of Fever: the Poisoning of a Philandering Husband.

Another specimen of poésie trouvée struck me the other day when reading the transcript of an inquest into a case of death by domestic poisoning, a philandering husband despatched allegedly by his wife, the victim having died in extreme agony after being taken ill on his return from an angling holiday in Hampshire, a trip cut short by his complaining of ‘not feeling well’ and having ‘a touch of fever’.

‘Not To Be Taken.’

A Snatch of Conversation.

A few minutes later the wife herself was 

being examined again by her counsel

about the flask of whisky which she said

was in her husband’s possession

before he went on his fishing holiday.

‘He was packing his bag, and I noticed

a new flask of whisky being packed away

among the contents.

I asked who gave it to him.

Was it a friend?

He smiled and remarked,

“Ah Ha!”

“Oh,” I said,

“then perhaps you have

bought it yourself,”

and he grinned,

and said,

   “He He!”.’

The wife joined in the laughter which 

this explanation caused.
She added, ‘That was the whole conversation.’

See also, poésie trouvée, the unsought text:

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/colour-blind.html

and

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

and

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html

Immured mustard field. Found.

Last night, reading for the first time that classic of prison literature, Die Zelle, by a distant kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek, I stumbled upon a specimen of poésie trouvée no less poignant than any love poem composed by Neruda, yet this was a prose fragment (my line-breaks as original punctuation, page 54), and all the more powerful in its intensity for being written out of four years of confinement in a Siberian forced labour camp ... a vibrant memory for the prisoner that persists to shimmer in the dark.

The Field of Mustard

We lie down in a field of mustard,

the yellow blossoms sway before our eyes,

we look at each other,

we do not say anything,

I bend over her,

once I push my tongue between her teeth,

she draws back,

I write my wishes on her face with my breath,

she answers me with her breath,

for a long time we talk with one another

in a language no one speaks ;

next evening I wait for her,

she does not come.

Horst Bienek (1930-1990). Distinguished award-winning German novelist and poet. He was a student of Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. In 1951, he was arrested on political grounds by the NKVD and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to twenty-five years of forced labour in the notorious Vorkuta, a gulag. He was released due to an amnesty in 1955. His first novel, Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968, filmed under his own direction in 1972), focuses on a prisoner who, in the isolation of his cell, fights for mental and physical survival in the face of sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate. A first person narrative, it uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf.

For more found poems see: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.html