Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty

Abstract

Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty Eric Prieto (bio) Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of us traverse unseeingly in our day-to-day lives. He has also led a notable second career as a jazz critic, having written extensively on the music and its history. The relationship between these two pursuits seems to be a lopsided one: the influence of his poetic preoccupations on his jazz writing is clear and pervasive, but the influence of the music on the poetry is much less obvious and harder to characterize. And yet it played a crucial role in his development as a poet. Réda spent the early part of his career in search of his own distinctive voice and thematic territory. He found it in his somewhat eccentric approach to the evocation of place, which is most tellingly characterized by the apparent aimlessness of the flâneur, who works in what appears to be a random manner (à l’improviste), devoting himself to ephemera, and unapologetically refusing to monumentalize his subject matter. Having realized that his poetic vocation lay in this direction, but unsure precisely how to explain what made this subject matter so compelling to him, Réda found himself in need of a set of aesthetic principles—a way to explain and justify his poetic practice, if only to himself. It is, I argue, through his study of jazz that he was finally able to develop the vocabulary necessary to articulate such a set of principles and become the poet of place that we know today. In order to understand what is at stake in this endeavor, why he might deem such justifications necessary, it will be useful to consider a question from the essay/poem “Où, comment, quand, pourquoi?” [where, what, when, why] which problematizes his ongoing obsessions with flânerie, travel, and the evocation of place. Motorisée ou non, la petite monade, Que cherche-t-elle encore, avec la promenade, Qui ne soit dans ses jours déjà tout contenu?1 [Motorized or not, our little monad, What on Earth is it looking for in its excursions That is not already completely contained in its days?] [End Page 89] Every word in this passage will resonate for assiduous readers of Réda—from the question of the mode of transport (motorized or not), to the hint of alienation or isolation implied by the term “monad,” to the nuance of repetition and frustration implied by the term “encore.” But it is in the third line that the real import of the question surfaces. What, Réda asks, can he learn from his poetic peregrinations that is not already “entirely contained” in his daily life at home? The question is so striking because it seems to call into question, however playfully, the entire course of Réda’s poetic career. The problem is not one of understanding the appeal of travel or flânerie (such pastimes need no justification), but of reconciling his urge to write about his peregrinations in a way that shows an almost complete indifference to the kinds of monumental, one-of-a-kind attractions, epiphanic encounters, and lessons learned that are usually deemed to justify travel writing and urban poetry in the Baudelairian tradition. If Réda’s travels always lead him back to the banal and the quotidian, then what makes this kind of experience seem more meaningful to him than, say, solitary meditation or the domestic realities of his day-to-day existence at home? The answer, which comes at the end of the same poem, remains somewhat obscure, even potentially misleading: […] nous n’aurons été Si mouvants, si divers, que pour chercher l’unique Passage qui peut-être à la fin communique Avec ce point toujours caché sous l’horizon Dont la douce clarté n’est d’aucune saison, D’aucun soleil parmi l’herbe qu’elle illumine. (40) [If we have been So restless, so shifting, it is only to seek the singular Passage that may in the end communicate With this...