Alexander Dickow is poet, translator and academic based in the USA. He spoke with Béatrice Mousli about his interests, influences and his most recent poem Hob’s Game.
Béatrice Mousli: A poet, you also are a translator and a critic, focusing notably on French poets and writers from the modernist era: are there ways they influenced your writing?
Alexander Dickow: It’s hard to measure influence, and even more so as the text’s writer. There’s no question that Max Jacob has played an enormous role in my scholarly career, and he’s had an impact on my writing, both in terms of principles and style. Principles, because I adhere to the notion that writing is work first and inspiration a distant second, that writing requires conscious construction and calculation and not just intuitive feeling around, and Jacob argues for this conception of writing. Mallarmé, who furthermore has similar poetic principles to those of Jacob, was a powerful force on my writing, one of the most decisive writers I’ve encountered. But two figures I often mention are the Count of Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) and François Rabelais. Lautréamont published the Songs of Maldoror in 1869; they are stylistically excessive; the prose is elaborate, ornamental, tortured, and voluntarily artificial. My own writing certainly aims for something like this sense of excess, which can also be found in Rabelais, of course, who is a 16th-century writer rather than a modern (I could also add the astonishing Béroalde de Verville of Le Moyen de parvenir). Lautréamont might be the “dark side” I explore in Le Premier Souper, whereas Rabelais is a more generous and comic writer; both are very much about bodies in language. These two writers made me feel like I had licence to do what I really wanted with language; they stimulated something transgressive in my approach to style. There are others who played similar roles in English, but they come later than these – John Berryman to some extent, and the incredible Amos Tutuola, for example, in the unsettling storytelling and slightly akimbo English of The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
BM: Hob’s Game will be, if I’m not mistaken, your seventh book of poetry: how does it fit in that collection?
AD: It depends on how you count, because some of those books are made up of aphorisms or critical fragments or of poetic prose, some are the “same” book in different languages (Appetites, MadHat, 2018 and Appétits, La Rumeur Libre, 2022), and so forth. Hob’s Game is playful like my previous work, and departs from them in its formal diversity (I use lots of metrical forms in Hob) and its partial use of dramatic form, which I’ve never used before. I’ve already written narrative poems in verse, such as in Caramboles (Argol Editions, 2008); the central two-part narrative “Prince/Dragon” plays with the conventions of the fairytale, which is something I do in Hob’s Game as well. So Hob’s Game is in continuity with previous works. The real outlier in my work is Le Premier Souper [The First Supper], my 2021 weird science fiction novel from La Volte, whose grotesque imagery and allusive prose has been compared to Cronenberg, Clive Barker and others. It’s much darker than other things I’ve written! I’ve been trying to translate it into English, but it’s a slow process, and somewhat painful.
BM: Painful? How is it to constantly work in and in-between two languages? Do you choose the language in which to write according to the project? Or is there another element at play?
AD: Most of the time, it’s great fun to work between and among several languages: it opens up whole new panoramas of possibility, occasions for variation. But it has been painful, yes, in the case of turning Le Premier Souper into an English version as The First Supper. I don’t usually mind self-translating – contrary to, say, Beckett, who complained relentlessly about the process. But self-translating Le Premier Souper feels different; there’s some drudgery involved. Maybe because the work is intrinsically less ludic and more somber in character. In any event, I can’t help but notice the book’s imperfections as I translate. I think this difference is related to the question of how projects end up in French or in English. When I undertook to write Le Premier Souper, I hadn’t written narrative since the age of 16 or 17, and I think it was easier to return to narrative through my adoptive language, less alienating than my own language for storytelling. But the question of language choice varies from project to project, and sometimes it’s mysterious why the project “wants” to be in one language or the other. Hob’s Game “decided” it wanted to be in English. But Un grenier [An Attic], a recent collection in French published alongside Appétits (La Rumeur Libre, 2022), only exists in that language – and it might be my most “experimental” work to date. Your guess is as good as mine, more often than not! Perhaps I’m like Robert Louis Stevenson, and there are little Brownies visiting me and telling me what to do.
BM: Besides ordering you to write in English, what else did your Brownies murmur in your ear while drafting Hob’s Game?
AD: Well, they particularly emphasized the arcane requirement of working with a wide variety of fixed or metrical forms. Hob’s Game includes a ghazal, a sestina, sonnets, blank verse, terza rima, a ballad, a rondeau, alliterative verse – you name it, and all woven into the fabric of the narrative in one way or another. Hence, the sestina, a form of obsessive return, features the main character, Hob, a sort of cosmic trickster figure, drifting on the ocean. The sea is also a form of obsessive return, so the form felt appropriate. The Brownies also informed me that I would require a dramatic form for the second part of the book, Duet With Commentary. I’ve worked with metrical forms before in my published work, particularly in the first few poems of Caramboles, and in part of my Rhapsodie curieuse, but never at this scale.
Meter and rhyme are seen as antithetical to a “forward-looking” poetry, but that is now, in my view, an academic position, because the norm is free verse and prose. I don’t believe it’s possible to leave forms definitively behind; that’s a modernist notion, as if art were headed in a certain direction, never to return, making those left behind just a bunch of stale reactionaries. I don’t share that view of poetry, and to that extent, I am postmodern, I suppose (another dated notion?). There’s no reason not to retool what has gone before; the present is different and will twist the salvaged material in a new direction – as long as one is artist enough to hear the present. I don’t presume to be able to hear it, of course, but it’s an aspiration. In any event, whenever someone claims that something in art is outmoded, it makes me grumpy. It’s outmoded until someone does something daring with it. And when I spot a dominant mode, I try to resist it. There’s plenty of free verse, and even plenty of formlessness, in Hob alongside the fixed or metrical forms – I wanted it to be an everything book, formally speaking; which of course, it’s not, in the end.
BM: I like the idea of this festival of forms, and I have to say I was struck while reading by the “jubilation” (same word in French and English apparently?) with which it feels it was written. Does that describe your writing mood?
AD: Absolutely. I’m among those lucky bastards who find considerable joy in the writing process – it has its painful moments, and when it doesn’t work it can be deeply discouraging, but when it works I find it most fulfilling. And this work was exceptionally jubilatory to watch unfold. At times, it felt like the work just knew where it needed to go, and I’ve rarely experienced that feeling of necessity before, not in any genre. It’s the closest I’ve come to being an effortless spectator of my own imagination. As for the relationship of that jubilation to the content, it’s not a simple one. Hob, the trickster-god of this book, is not a “good guy”; he’s amoral, a force of nature at best; at worst deeply evil in spite of his demiurgic creativity; he’s full of envy and spite, though always with humor (!). I once described Hob as a child playing in a graveyard (and indeed, Hob lands in just such a boneyard), but that would only be accurate if the child, like Hob, were the author of the death around him (along with begetting every newborn). But life too is a complicated celebration at best, is it not? I was reaching for a sense of that kind of celebration – one that must take place, but with a keen awareness that it is also an impossible celebration. What does it mean to thank God, or if you’d rather, to count our blessings, knowing all that we know? That’s a big part of the question I’m asking. And there’s jubilation in the kind of contradictions at work here, because they make the work limitless in its possibilities, in the directions it might take at any given moment. This is akin to dada’s wild (anti-)principle of self-contradiction, which is a sign of the chaotic energy at work in everything. Contradiction is generative (and destructive), whence Hob’s boundless creative (and destructive) energy.
But if there’s a fundamental note in the work, it’s still ultimately celebration, isn’t it? Mourning and shame and abjection take a back seat to that; these are subterranean, while Hob’s festival roars on overhead. Hopefully these negative components still introduce some dissonance for the reader, something that makes it not a numb and inane spectacle, but a slightly unsettling one even in its most exalted moments. That’s what I hope for when I’m feeling foolishly optimistic, at any rate.
BM: I read the work as a celebration of literature, of the literary. I found so many references, to the point that I felt at times that I was finding some, where there might be none… Is there an intention of celebrating the literary in your inclusion, your braiding of fairy tales, Greek and Latin texts, biblical stories?
AD: A poet I’ve read for a long time and who I’ve been working on lately, Philippe Beck, writes: “Un livre devrait être toujours une bibliothèque de Warburg en petit,” a book should always be a Warburg Library in miniature (Une autre clarté: entretiens 1997-2022,” Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2023, p. 113, my translation). I doubt my cultural allusions are as eccentric as those of the Warburg Library, or even as those of Philippe, but I share the latter’s interest in the work of intertextuality gone wild. A poem converses with all other poems. I conceived of Hob’s Game as an encyclopedia of literary forms, or perhaps something less ordered, a concatenation of forms, a cacophony of echoes. There are certainly fairy tales – Goldilocks turns up – and the Middle Ages by way of the jealous husband (Ligelos = li gelos, the old Occitan term for this figure) or the faery ship (which is a reworking from Marie de France’s “Guigemar”). The Shakespearean schtick of reworking Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns up again, revamped once more, though Hob plays a different role here (the folkloric figure Robin Goodfellow, sometimes referred to as Hob, is synonymous with Puck, and thence Shakespeare’s Bottom – a whole network of the same character in different guises). But in addition to the conscious reworkings, the pastiches, the parodies, there are doubtless whole sets of unconscious allusions, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love it when texts take me down weird literary rabbit holes, so I tend to replicate that logic in my work. But this is doubtless the most intertextually dense poem I’ve ever attempted.
For all the talk of postmodernity as a kind of brassage or mixing-up of eras and styles, contemporary poetry is quite nearsighted, historically speaking. References are largely 19th and 20th century ones. I’m interested in expanding the conversation, in sending the echoes backwards as well as forwards in time. Maybe sideways, too.
BM: I want to add to intertextuality the intralinguality and plurilinguality of the text, which gives the text a texture like no other. By intralinguality, I mean that you use the English language to its full potential, and in all its forms – dialects, Old English- as well as in all its modulations – academic, administrative, mob-underworld like… And it gives the text an alchemical feel: I love the Warburg analogy you mention here, to which I would add, and bring in the conversation, one of the Institute’s members, Frances Yates. We travel through literature, we jump from one room to another in this house of literary memory, and we travel the language, all of its levels, and some of its derivatives. Is that to give us a glimpse of Hob’s powers, or is it the workings of echoes here too?
AD: French is in some sense present in my work no matter what, I suppose, since I work constantly in both languages, and across them. I think you’re referring rather to Hob’s tendency toward grammatical slippage, solecism – his language veers between high classical style and a version of English that’s very wobbly indeed, full of approximation. That’s sort of a signature approach in my work, whether in Hob’s language or in my previous books, like Caramboles. So it’s not echoes per se, not conscious ones – at least as far as that grammatical play is concerned. But Hob’s powers, as eminently creative (at least I like to think so), certainly give rise to different kinds of language, a mosaic of jargons. My ideal image of Hob is that of a linguistically or poetically limitless figure, a chameleon without constraints of form or color, an inhabitant of any style at will. In short, yes, ideally, the disparate linguistic texture of the poem is supposed to give the reader a glimpse of that ability to inhabit language across all boundaries, just as Hob can theoretically inhabit any kind of body. Hob’s Game is not precisely a poem of memory, except insofar as it remembers literary forms, styles and works of the past and present (and perhaps the future). There’s very little of an obvious autobiographical dimension to this book, and I tend to think of remembrance in terms of that kind of autobiographical logic. I fear I don’t know Yates’ work well enough to comment further than that on the topic of memory… I love the idea of an alchemy, however. I can imagine Hob’s delight at witnessing the blossoming of the iridescent cauda pavonis just before realizing the Great Work!
BM: The work is in two parts. The first one could be described as a monologue, while the second, subtitled “masquerade” is not a dialogue, but a “duet”, that feels often more like a duel. So the poem slides into theater (I use slide here as the first part has some theatricality, mainly expressed typographically), and other voices than the one we knew of Hob are inserted. How was it useful for you to break the monologue at this point?
AD: I actually wrote Duet With Commentary, the second part of the book, first. So Hob’s Labor, the first part, is actually a kind of prequel, even though the reader encounters it first in the book. Duet With Commentary is a sort of drama featuring three characters: the lovers Anah and Aviv, and Hob. The title of Duet With Commentary is of course ironic, since it involves three characters (at least insofar as Hob can be considered “one” character), not two! Which gives the beau rôle to the one making the commentary.
But the question is why I broke it into two parts. There are a couple of reasons besides the internal logic of the tale, which seemed to demand that Hob’s “origin story” be separate from the story of Anah and Aviv. One of these additional reasons is that I’ve wanted to make a long poem work for a while, and this is the first such poem I’ve brought to completion. I had just finished the dramatic part (Duet), another form I had never explored, and the long poem felt like the next place to go play. There’s definitely a continuity between the two parts: Anah and Aviv are already present, albeit in a nascent or ghostly form, in Hob’s Labor, where the “monologue” occasionally breaks into pieces…
BM: Your Jewish identity / Jewishness shows through the text: what does that mean for you? what prompted you to do so? Is there something autobiographical in the text, some personal traits shared with Hob?
AD: Those are difficult questions!
Hob is only sort of inevitably autobiographical. He can be cruel, jealous, malevolent and so forth, and I don’t think I bear those flaws (I hope I don’t!). I like to think of his playfulness and vitality as my own, but who am I to say? Hob is also a god, a demiurgic figure who pulls worlds out of thin air – and his inability to find a pair of boots is a contradiction that I think belongs to the genre (see Coyote, Maui, any number of other mythological demiurgic trickster-figures). It would be presumptuous of me to call such a godlike figure autobiographical, wouldn’t it…?
As for Jewishness, I think the most Jewish part of the story is the theodicy-like passage that Hob discusses at one point, where Hob wonders what sort of god he is – a human one who knows weakness and imperfection, a distant god who has removed himself from his clockwork world, a god guilty of all the world’s ills, and so forth. It is Jewish to wonder about the problem of evil in relation to God, perhaps. Aside from that, I’m not sure. Certainly some of Anah and Aviv’s romance in the second part, Duet With Commentary, doubtless evokes the Song of Songs.…
Much of the answer to the autobiographical question, and therefore the question about my Jewish identity, is liable to remain hidden from me, for better or worse – perhaps for better, I think.
Portions of Hob’s Game have appeared under the titles Hob’s Labor and Duet With Commentary in the journals Firmament, Snow, New American Writing and elsewhere.
Alexander Dickow is a poet, translator and literary scholar who teaches French at Virginia Tech. His literary works in French and English include Caramboles (Argol Editions, 2008, bilingual poetry) and Appetites (MadHat Press, 2018). He has translated work by Sylvie Kandé, Max Jacob, Gustave Roud and Henri Droguet. His scholarship includes Le Poète innombrable: Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire et Max Jacob (Hermann, 2015).
Béatrice Mousli is the author of numerous works of literary history as well as four biographies published in France by Flammarion. The latest, Susan Sontag, was published in 2017. She recently completed a historical essay, ‘Tahar: a Kabyle citizen of the Empire’ and is working on a biography of Marguerite Yourcenar. She teaches Francophone literature at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where she is also the founding director of the Francophone Research and Resource Center.
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