In some ways, Richard Jones’ sixteenth poetry collection, Paris, is a love letter to the city, a book of recollection and retrospection in which the poet acts as a flâneur, strolling the streets of the resplendent city while cultivating new responses to what he finds. A term coined by Baudelaire, the flâneur observes the city and surroundings, both figuratively and literally, walking for walking’s sake, not hurrying to get somewhere, simply paying attention. As Walter Benjamin described him, the flâneur is a modern urban spectator investigating the city and contravening the capitalism and alienation in the burgeoning city. In Paris, we sense Jones’ blended identity as both cultural critic and an aesthete reveling in the hidden delights and dangers of the city.
An example of Jones’ flâneur is found midway through the volume in “The Drunken Boat,” channeling Rimbaud’s poem in which the boat, personifying the artist and flâneur, is free to drift from place to place beyond the constraints of society in order to experience the world, from delightful images to more sinister threats from which it liberates itself through the poet’s expansive imagination:
This morning on the rue Ferou,
I found myself caught unawares
by “Le Bateau Ivre”
Arthur Rimbaud’s poem
carved on a wall that runs the length of the lane.
In the narrow cobblestone street
I translated the first lines into the air
then stepped aside
to let a bicycle rattle past.
The bicycle woke to the fact
I was walking Saint Germain’s winding streets
a little bit like a drunken boat myself
adrift on a sea of reveries.
Rimbaud’s poem brings back a memory of Jones’ youthful enthusiasms; he initially identifies with Rimbaud and reveling in art as a means of liberating one’s self “with hope for [his] future.” But this is followed by aspects of Rimbaud’s life that reveal Jones’ disillusionment with Rimbaud and the hopes he had as an impressionable young man. In the next stanza, the beauty of nature and the art of poetry coalesce through Jones’ renewed delight with the poem:
Perhaps because of the generous light
and the delicate blossoms
the poem’s final image moved me —
a sad child at twilight
squatting by a cold black puddle
and releasing a toy boat …
I must’ve repressed it when I was younger —
that Rimbaud the man was never free,
never happy or loved,
never content
to be a little boat bobbing about
on a sun drenched, windswept sea.
The connection is clear between Rimbaud’s boat and the solitary and introspective route of the modern artist personified by Jones’ persona. The artist as flâneur celebrates having no direction in particular, just as the drunken boat is tossed about at the whim of the ocean’s waves. One must lose oneself to find oneself, and yet the imagination can reveal terrifying events as well as joyful ones.
Reminiscing about his early idealization of Rimbaud, Jones returns to his journal writing, a motif throughout the poems, where he reviews the day and the location where he was strolling and recalls a bicycler with a loaf of bread and books in the basket riding past him. Although he rejects a life like that of the rider which he finds superficial, he envies him for not undergoing the artist’s “bottomless despair.” Jones then gives rise to another image of the rider lying on a sofa and having a compositionally perfect evening, with “a bicycle / leaning by the door of the city courtyard.”
Captivated by Paris’s rich cultural landmarks, Jones expresses his appreciation for the masterpieces of the Renaissance or Impressionism and the artists themselves, often speculating on the art works and the life of the artist who produced them. Throughout, he expresses reverence for the natural world as an art in itself, so that the artist is someone of sensibility more so than an artisan. Often he reveals cultural differences as the Old World faces off with New World, suggestive of a Lambert Strether in Henry James’ The Ambassadors.
However, as much as Jones may revere them, he is less interested in hagiography of ancestral artists like Rilke and Rodin (as in the first poem in the book) and more invested in a quest for his own style. Reviving Rilke’s wish to emulate Rodin’s ability to “rescue inwardness with a stone,” releasing the spirit within, Jones tries to achieve with his private pilgrimage through the beauty of the French landscape:
Rodin told Rilke
that before he could ever hope to make a poem
he must learn to see.
That was the secret. Secrets and keys.
The poem “Tin Cups” particularly impressed me with its artful composition, confirming to the flâneur’s desire to merge with the crowd, feeling himself both a part of modern city and apart from it. He is preoccupied with metaphorically drinking from the same cup as the artists and poets before him:
Across from the Saint-Paul station
I fill my water bottle at a Wallace fountain
Here on the rue Saint-Antoine,
I rest my hand on Charity’s slipper
and drink until my thirst is quenched.
As I disappear down the steps of the metro
I remember that from the fountain’s side
tin cups once hung —
tin cups so that anyone may drink.
The street is named after the martyred saint, and the fountain depicts Charity, the highest form of reciprocal love in the Bible manifested between God and humankind, an unselfish love that extends beyond the principal receiver to all others universally. Art, like religion, triumphs over time, just as it exposes inconsolable losses.
Finally, in “The Flâneur,” the poet visits an exhibit of rarely seen masterpieces of impressionist art by Monet, Degas, and Renoir. These painters found they could capture the transitory effects of sunlight by working en plein air, just as Jones composes his own poems and “doodles” in the open air of the French capitol and countryside.
In the poem, the poet opts out of standing in line with the Impressionist-loving Parisians by “separating [himself] out,” knowing that he has the time and leisure to come back when it is less crowded. Once freed from his itinerary, he delights in tastes and perfumes, sensual pleasures, reminding himself that every lost paradise can be sought through the imagination.
Jones’ salutary journey through Paris concludes the collection with these lines:
Then I waked home across the Seine
by way of Pont Marie,
thinking about my desk and lamp
as the French sun set
and the lights came on
like a soft hand touching my cheek.
As the French sun sets (transforming nature into culture, as Impressionist paintings appear to do), the poet is ambiguous as to whom that “soft hand” belongs; art can imitate life, but it cannot change it. Paris may not require readers to be knowledgeable about art, but seems to insist that they be willing to change their lives because of it.
[Published by Tebot Bach on February 15, 2021, 88 pages, $18.00 paperback]