The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart by Jacques Roubaud

The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart Reviews

• 
  Geoff

  The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart, besides having undoubtedly the best title borrowed from Baudelaire of any work ever, seems also to me (along side Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, elements of his Life, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) to be among the apotheoses of the Oulipo’s obsession with the way words represent and replicate space. The book is dedicated to Queneau, and his obsession with word play, doubling or tripling words, repetitions, slang, etc. is an essential element to understanding why Roubaud does what he does here. Without some knowledge of Queneau’s methods, TFOACCFATTHH may not pay off. Also, this is an edition that would benefit from having the French text opposite the translation, because honestly I think this is a situation where a great deal is lost from the original. Bracketed words abound to emphasize that, hey, this joke is just untranslatable or makes no sense unless you understand the way the French works. But then an already lengthy poetry collection would be twice as long, and we wouldn’t want to intimidate those fussy consumers, now would we? Seriously Dalkey, I love you. Consider reissuing this with the French text.
  
  But if you keep in mind that you simply aren’t going to get every little reference and in-joke here, this book is delightful! I don’t use that word much, but this book is damn delightful! Carry it around in your shoulder bag, and when you find a spare moment in the day, especially mid-jaunt when the sun is beating down and a particular cloud has drawn your attention, or if you are having coffee somewhere and it is raining outdoors and the ambient conversation is lulling you, open it to a random page. I guarantee the poem you turn to will make you smile, or at least make you appreciate the space you happen to be occupying with a little more levity. Because if there is one thing this collection is not (as opposed to Roubaud’s masterful, but sorrowful Some Thing Black), it is not heavy. This book is light, celebratory, witty, sun- and raindrop-specked. My favorite pieces may have been the sonnets that compose the core of the book, but there is pleasure to sift through everywhere.
  
  A friend who has lived in Paris for years and does work with graffiti artists there told me recently that the reason Paris is so blanketed with street art (I mean pay attention, it’s even covering the very bowels of the metro lines), is not so much the turf battle or hip-hop inspiration that gave birth to it in America, or even the idea of tagging as some modern form of expression à la cave-painting, etc., but that the French simply love to see their language in its symbolic form. They love to look at their words. The French love French. They love hearing it, seeing it, playing with it, manipulating it, rendering it in all forms. Thus the brilliant design of their advertising posters. Thus the poems in this book, some of which are but visually interesting collages of street or place names, or lists of names straight out of the phone book tacked to the page in a pleasing pattern. The meaning is in the fact that these words representing physical places and beings in space and time are now themselves being plucked from those contexts and rearranged, placed within a new context of space and time, the page, where the author can take the Blvd. St. Germain or Rue St. Denis or the Canal St. Martin (to name a few saints), and move these massive places and all they contain and imply with the ease of a god, make a child’s chant out of them, dissemble and reassemble them as his playthings. Because that’s the loveliness of language- its symbolic ability to contain our worlds, to reduce or amplify, to exaggerate or specify, to clarify or obscure, define or reconstruct them, all at the will of the imagination- to make them our own, in a form that can be shared by everyone.
• 
  Eddie Watkins

  Reading Jacques Roubaud gives me the impression that he is a large man; not fat, necessarily - (though he has an insatiable literary appetite) - but tall and with, most importantly, a presence. He's a poet with a commanding view, but there's nothing domineering about him; in fact the abiding quality gleaned from what I've read is selfless humility, though his particular, and rather eccentric, mind is never absent. His humility has allowed his mind to freely express itself, along with its crazy quirks, without ever coming across as the least bit self-indulgent. This is perhaps due to his naturally self-analytical mind - a mind that never does not see itself, and so can treat itself as its own built in plaything and companion; his own mind expresses itself as an other, and so the possibility of self-indulgence is erased, as the self itself is an other.
  
  I think old Jacques Roubaud himself would like that last sentence, especially the final phrase.
  
  So he's a charmer, and he never tries to say anything that can't be said (following the dictates of Wittgenstein), which helps to give his poetry an earthy airiness and clear specificity. Roubaud's mind is also obsessed with numbers and counting (he was a professor of algebra in Paris) and the streets of his hometown. This helps to make of him a psychogeographer (if I even understand that term correctly) in that he likes to walk (God he despises cars!) the city using strict but arbitrary methods, such as only following streets named after artists to see where it will take him, and as he walks he mentally notes down street addresses and the names of people therein, while composing these very poems in his head. Some of his poems are about nothing but street addresses and the names of people therein, in fact, or just a list of street names themselves; while another is a list of license plate numbers. Rather than overly conceptually clever these instances come across as, yes, charming in Roubaud's hands.
  
  This is a book that gives the impression of a man logically in love with his city, of a man who traverses that city in a leisurely eccentric way with eyes wide open to mundane things of various interest, and so the reader vicariously grows more appreciative and concsious of his or her own surroundings in a deep but in a way also very superficial way in that human psychology is virtually absent from the poems; the inner life being one of logically ordering things and keeping within logic's light, rather than strolling through the darker murkier recesses (a welcome counterweight to my own inner inclinations).
  
  Jacques Roubaud you wear your brilliance lightly and I welcome your light into my life.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  If the following two-line poem amuses you in any way, albeit slight, this poetry book is for you:
  
  “Rue Pavée”
  
  Rue Pavée
  is no longer paved.
  
  Genius! Jacques Roubaud’s most recent collection of poetry explores the streets of Paris, the idle hours spent ambling around this distinctive city, with an emphasis on place names over scenery. Roubaud responds to work from Queneau (the first cycle is a take on his collection Les pauvres gens), Verlaine, Rimbaud and esoteric historical figures. From meditations on death to playful Oulipo antics, wilful obscurity and silly throwaways, this is about as deliciously uplifting a collection as a poor deprived Scot could expect to read. I have a sore throat and stuffed nose right now (a detail you all needed to know), so this is the perfect medicine (that and Glycerine). Read Roubaud, read Roubaud!
  
• 
  Alexandria

  I was not a fan of the frequent usage of parentheses. Although I understand and appreciate the meaning I found they broke up the flow for me. The soliloquies on death were lovely. The confession was my favorite and I will be thinking of it for a long time.
• 
  Tosh

  By reading these Paris city poems by Jacques Roubaud, one can sense that there is an "Oulipo" stance with its wit and presence. But then again, this is probably one of the best 'poetic' books on Paris. In fact it reads like a map - and for some reason I am drawn to the visual aspect of Paris and how its streets are placed in sections and how it is attached to the big boulevards.
  
  There is a dual aspect to these poems. One is the importance of a language that investigates Paris, but also it is an accurate portrait of a city. So what we have here is Paris as it is laid out by Roubaud's wit and observation. And it goes back to Baudelaire, Queneau, and various French Surrealist poets, with respect to how writing is very much a form itself -and that form represents Paris itself. So not a critique on other writings on Paris, but a nod and a tip to the hat to those who came before and was seduced by Paris' presence.
  
  My only complaint about this book is that it isn't bilingual, but then again I am sure there were budget considerations. And the translation by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop is pretty readable and fun - and fun is a big part of Roubaud's work.
• 
  sadeleuze

  The poet offers here a nice collection of parodic or more personal pieces around Paris. One feels that his project is similar to a sketchbook, trying various approaches to capture the face of the city. We stroll in Paris, stopping on forgotten details of the daily life, lists of names, streets, there is a little bit of everything; it is quite pleasant to read.
• 
  Ethan Sanchez

  Je l’es trouvez assez original mais je n’aime pas la poésie donc 3 étoiles c’était trop.
• 
  Michael Farrell

  delightful poems on paris's streets (rues and boulevards), in some way after queneau and hugo (i dont know the originals)
• 
  Nav

  As a collection, it kept up the same sensibility throughout. It just isn't my cup of tea.
• 
  Sonia

  Une poésie à la fois drôle et très sensible, une littérature de marcheur, d'arpenteur de ville. J'aime quand la contrainte, et c'est ici incontestablement le cas, sert à donner un cadre à la littérature et en tire le meilleur.