Béatrice Machet
(France)
TREMOR
It’s a headquake / faults in the brain / rifts at the bottom of the grey matter / and the electric power running through the eyes first then invading the consciousness extinguishes / and the concussion grows stronger.
It’s due to temperament / always a kind of overflowing movement followed by remorse / dotted with splinters so as to imitate the hedgehog / something like beneath a gruff exterior / so as to scratch letters / an healthy peeling makes skin flakes rain / dandruff are to words what scales are to snakes / causing the tongue to split.
It has it drilling and it relieves the dark and it goes meet wells till the confluence of flows/ trembling head into which the unconscious idea of a web/ of a delta as a set aside land and in front of eyes the lanceolate sidestroke swimming / tossed though hold back by the water pressure / vaguely wavily oval.
With a plane with a file a scraping of concentrated shadows before they explode at the heart of night in the head / they have hands till blood at wrists to be exchanged / until death does them part a faithful knot as far as a scream on the edge of eyelids /
In the light of thirst a bunch of branches and of ramifications under the skull / don’t make a forest / not even a bush not even a bundle (of nerves).
Someone is speaking to me with eyes that are not yours someone in the night flirts with my madness’ shade / sweet I don’t have any halo but this shadow accompanying me from eye-socket to temples where blood pulses / and it says all my head and my body in the night of my living death/
It’s about…
It’s about speaking and it’s about movement
It’s about how to travel through words and the way they move
It’s about how to be moved and how to voice it
Thus it’s about how to go away into a poem
The way you can tell you go by somebody’s side
This body by your side you could caress it and it would stay
silent while your gesture and posture would speak
without betraying the poem
TAKING WITHIN
a movement to be named
taking within
then carried in one’s voice
spreading like water
where the level of the ground is
at its lowest
when eyes cannot absorb the night
for always some lightning in their skies
something like an embrace
the magic of whispers
this strength would defy gravity
would prevent love’s allies
from being wrenched
would grant shadows some flesh
something that was taken within
is released out
with breath going further
farther and farther than sound and voice
does this movement mean
as etymology teaches
comprehension
when it is taken with
and without even thinking
given back
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BIO
Béatrice Machet is a French poet, whose dance lessons as a child influenced and still influence her writing. She is also working on and translating contemporary Native American authors (about 30) whose texts and works she translates into French. After having been involved in the French science-fiction milieu, she met Jean-Hughes Malineau, a Gallimard editor, who encouraged her to begin a career as a poet. From this initial meeting, each published poetry book of hers will testify to an evolution in her writing practice. Author of 12 books of poetry in French, two in English since she dared to directly write in English 8 years ago, plus many chapbooks and “livres d’artiste”, author and translator of three anthologies about contemporary Native American poetry, she is used to collaborating with artists from all kinds of disciplines such as painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, video-makers, dancers and choreographers, and with whom she performs her poetry. She is on editorial boards of french poetry magazines such as Recours au poème, Sur le dos de la tortue, Les cahiers d’Eucharis. She has had writer residences, gives many lectures about Native American literature, is regularly invited in international poetry festivals in France and abroad. She leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges as a visiting creative writing professor (as far as the US and China). Her work is translated into Dutch, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, English, Spanish, Albanian, Russian and now into Chinese.
New books: For Unity, ASM Press 2015, Les gens-pierres avec le peintre Henri Baviera 2015
Salse Sans Pareille, éditions le petit véhicule 2016
Poésie du dernier souffle, éditions du Frau 2017