Sam Riviere was born in 1981 and grew up “with music and artworks collaged from other music and artworks” – a practice he sees becoming more widespread, especially for poets who, like Riviere, “compose using copy-paste key strokes, search engines, AI software, and are accustomed to unfettered access to the storeroom of culture”. He does not regard this as regrettable or unnatural. On the contrary, he argues, the myth that an author’s own personal experience is their only resource disregards “the real collaborative and collective history of poetry, which is not a landscape dominated by totemic geniuses like giant oaks, but a field of activity in which ideas and methods, like seeds in the wind, continually circulate, spawn and resurface”. This approach is a return, in fact, to the oral tradition, the goals of which were not originality or individual reflection but an appeal to the listener’s own experience. “Anyone who likes poetry”, Riviere says, “has had the experience of recognizing themselves in a poem they connect with, knowing in some way that the poem is theirs in a way that is unprovable, indisputable, and doesn’t deprive anyone else of an equivalent experience with the same poem.” Poetry does not emerge from some unique inner space but from “dialogue, exchange, imitation, adaptation and other collaborative practices”.
“Past Lives”, a loose repurposing of Baudelaire’s “La Vie antérieure”, was first published in the TLS in 2018. It recalls the poems of John Ashbery, which, according to Riviere, “recede to a low-level ambience, almost a drone, an atmosphere”. Only when you get closer do they “open out into assortments, combinations, meetings, agreements, conflicts”. The sleepy decadence of Baudelaire’s original (“My home was long beneath vast porticoes which the suns of the sea tinged with a thousand fires”, in Francis Scarfe’s translation) turns, in Riviere’s version, into edgy Central European ennui, while the disturbing presence among slaves of Baudelaire’s speaker (“naked perfume-laden slaves refreshed my brow with palms”) becomes a mysterious and faintly sinister hotel affair with an “austere older woman”. The circumstances may be very different but Riviere’s lover, like Baudelaire’s slaves, is attempting “to diagnose the obscure disorder that brought me here”: a malaise that goes over the head of language and period and finds a felt place in the reader’s attention.
Past Lives
(Baudelaire)
Time to make a new list …
In a warm herbaceous night somewhere in Central Europe
We are walking towards a hotel garlanded with crows
And the sky is negatively charged,
Mauve, green, yellow, rose …
All evening I’ve been exasperating an overproductive Fulbright
And drinking beer without noticing,
Watching clay-court tennis and 24-hour television,
My sentences acquiring an American inflection
As our phones intercept messages of unknown origin.
He’s annoyed the moon won’t come out in any of his photographs
And appears only as lens flare …
We’re hundreds of miles from the sea
And everyone here believes we’re spies,
From the ancient twins who own the cinema
To the clique of beautiful anti-fascists
Sitting on the south side of the square without instruments or placards,
As if calmed by the steady moonlight.
Even the austere older woman I share my hotel room with seems convinced,
With her bulky 20th-century video camera,
Short skirts and overly formal presentation …
Every night she switches it on and with a professional fervour new to me
Attempts to diagnose the obscure disorder that brought me here.
SAM RIVIERE (2018)
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