Natural Gaits

by Pierre Alféri

Pierre Alferi is one of the exciting new breed of French poets who are becoming increasingly popular among younger readers of poetry.
Dealing with sequence and movement, Natural Gaits combines the analytical and scientific with an ongoing, almost breathless, poetic voice; the poem reads almost as if a scientist were to recite his most recent analyses by playing a long saxophone "rather than erratic leaps / oscillations; inversion / of the chord (but each / simple insoluble mood / forgets all the others - not their effects / their becoming (except / for that always latent mood / so clear it would leave nothing / in a latent state and would put / an end to oscillation...." Alferi constructs a linguistic machine of impacted grammar that drives the poem in absolutely breathtaking directions.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Pierre Alféri (French: [pjɛʁ alfeʁi]; 10 April 1963 – 16 August 2023) was a French novelist, poet, and essayist. Alféri was the son of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier.

Reviews

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

It comes as no surprise that Jacques Derrida’s son, Pierre Alferi, is an incredible poet; what is surprising though (and I don’t know much about contemporary trends in modern French poetry, this has been my only real exposure, so I don’t know if this is a general thing in the French poetry scene) is that Alferi is a poet in the vein of Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Bruce Andrews, and David Bromige. His use of twisted, jazz-like abstract syntax reads just like Coolidge — albeit, which is no surprise again, more philosophically oriented. Natural Gaits is a sequence of 10 poems that are highly abstract meditations on experience and language. Like Andrews, he takes words to their edges, instead of a focus on words for their meanings, he considers their use in terms of “sound, texture, rhythm, space, and silence” (Andrews, EDGE, 11). Rather than meaning, that is the referential aspect of words, the work is based on “fragmentation and the qualities of words other than (and along with) their meaning. The words aren’t related at the center but by their edges (connotation, etc.)” (Andrews, 11). Of course, there are plenty of things that Alferi is doing in his own vein — there is a wide range of reference, unlike Andrews, more like later Coolidge there is a sense of narrative in the poems; maybe narrative isn’t the best word but what I’m thinking of is that they are building up a new kind of syntax from a broken down language; Coolidge, in his early work, experiments with syntax to build it back up again in his monumental works like Polaroid and A Book Beginning Here and Ending Away. Alferi himself prescribes a method of reading, his own sort of poetics, which also, I think, rings true for Coolidge too:

“a reading in which
clarity
is not a matter of depth
and analysis but of speed
and angle.” (28).

And a famous statement of Clark Coolidge’s poetics:

“Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.”

[heyyonicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sympathique recueil de poèmes assez bien découpé. J'ai apprécié les quelques références à l'univers des machines et aux relations sentimentales humaines, qui m'ont rappelé parfois l'univers des machines célibataires. Cependant, rentrer dans la bibliographie de ce genre d'auteur sans en savoir plus sur lui ne me paraît pas permettre de saisir la profondeur de son œuvre, j'imagine que je suis passé à côté de beaucoup de subtilités.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blank stare
arrested
—clearer
sharper—by a wall
blind and blank where the shadow
deepens and its circle
shrinks. So small
but so clear, so sharp.