This text was presented by Geneviève Robichaud at the Contemporary Literary Practices: Communities and Convergences study day on March 20, 2024. The text was revised by the author on April 4, 2025 prior to its publication on Discours/e.
I wrote a book called Everyone Carries a Room. Some will call it poetry, others fiction. I like to think of it as an essay.
I used to think it was a book about being stuck in a room that was always changing. I thought the speaker of the work represented stasis while everything around her was in constant mutation. I thought she was trying to figure out her relationship to the everchanging room. But I think, now, that it’s not that the room itself is changing. The room in fact contains fragments of many other rooms within it, porous time-spaces. These spaces open pockets that the speaker drifts into. But she is also their carrier.
Everyone Carries a Room is a book traversed by a series of erotic undertones:
I wanted to fuck you all night. I needed everything to be like fucking. Lust tinted.
Through the open window, love’s back in swing and the lady is risen.1Lyrics from a Johnny Flynn song entitled “The Lady Is Risen” (Country Mile, 2013 Transgressive Records).
But the erotics of it are not just carnal, eros also extends to thinking, to writing, to translating, and perhaps, most importantly, to the gesture of quotation: Gail Scott, Nicole Brossard, Anne Carson, Nathanaël, sentences that occupied the body and created an edge, a foreign tongue or cadence introduced to keep the space of desire open and electric (see Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet 36).
There are several references, in Everyone Carries a Room, to the mouth, to biting and gnawing, and to eating or devouring. On a somatic level, the text dreams erotic experiences and sensual encounters as textual:
I wanted to write this in a mad dash, like that novel I read a month ago and began translating. I read that one somewhere between one city and another. There was something about the writing. The rhythm deceptively simple. Short, direct sentences. The story so much more languid than its prose. I began translating the novel, trying to match the intensity and speed with which it had seemingly been written, which I was also doing to mask the fact that I was avid for a secret – the measure of which could be described as an upward fall. I read the novel in a mad dash as a kind of compensation; that’s how I got into translating it too. I did it in part so it would keep going, even when it was over. Its sentences were already so adulterated – written in French but inflected with such a strong American tradition that it seemed, translating it into English, that I was merely transposing it into some original context to which it had already and always belonged. It was not the speed of Jack Kerouac’s amphetamine prose line but the heady desire of a Lenore Kandel poem, in particular the transfixed speed of “To Fuck With Love (Phase III)”:
to fuck with love
to love with all the heat and wild of fuck
the fever of your mouth devouring all my secrets and my alibis2Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012: 7.
I thought if I didn’t translate it something in me would burst.
The talk I’ve prepared today attempts to think through recurring threads in the work: the presence of quotation, the references to translation, the influence of various texts on my reading and writing practices.
In what follows, densities are superimposed. Cadence, rhythm, call backs, crossovers, the sensuality of sentences catching on each other, like a snag, and, finally, the image of a door transposed, transported, carried and queried:
You try to answer the simplest of questions, the doors that no one may close, but you thirst inside a question.3Ibid., 121-22.
‘Which side of the door are you on? You do not know? You do not know. It is up to me to tell you.’4Anne Carson. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995: 89.
An entrance should be a door built as a kiss.5Ibid., 168.
*
I am reading Nathanaël’s Sisyphus, Outdone where someone carries a door through a door | This is demonstrable.
Meanwhile, Kafka writes and is translated: ‘Everyone carries a room about inside him.’6Nathanaël. Asclepias: The Milkweeds. Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2015: 123.
I am making my way in some dark room looking for other structures to love.7Peter Gizzi. Archeophonics. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2017: 25.
I keep rehearsing this idea of what is carried. I am fascinated by translation for this very reason, and for this very reason, I keep rereading Anne Carson’s preface to Antigonick, her translation of Antigone, entitled “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” where she confesses,
I keep returning to Brecht
who made you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back
a door can have diverse meanings
I stand outside your door
the odd thing is, you stand outside your door too
that door has no inside
or if it has an inside, you are the one person who cannot enter it.8Anne Carson. Antigonick. New York: New Directions, 2012: 5.
In writing Everyone Carries a Room, I wanted to build a catalogue that didn’t move toward completion but to what is small, like the crack in the wall that lovers whisper through.
In this room where I am, a person can be the door, another the room. A person can be the crack in the wall that lovers whisper through.
A wall which we imagine is plain and solid, is actually originally, on the contrary, made of a series of bars, which of course allow for intercourse; it’s a sequence of pieces of wood or of iron and emptiness, void, and that relate, and that after all resemble somehow the piano in a vertical way.9Transcribed from a talk Hélène Cixous gave as part of The New School’s Affinities: Villa Gillet’s Walls and Bridges Series. There are a number of unmarked ellipses.
Someone played the piano, a tune, a weird simulacrum of happiness while someone else smiled sentimentally. ‘You’ve got it to give away.’
But you may remember that ‘Wall’ is a very important character in Shakespeare’s Mid Summer Night’s Dream and since the actors have to play an ancient play which stages lovers who are disruptively defined—Pyramus and Thisbe—they cannot join except through a wall. But our actors have difficulty because they are not supposed to bring a wall on stage, so they bring Wall, and Wall is Snout, Snout is Wall. A wall is something through which you love and whisper…10Ibid.
I want to know more about the dis-continuum of what is carried from one moment to another, from one room or person to another. I am interested in the inhabitableness of it, its poetics of co-habitation, its sometimes “here” has no walls feeling.11Lisa Robertson. “Untitled Essay.” Nilling. Toronto: Bookthug, 2012: 73.
Later, reading Chantal Neveu’s coït, I would think again of walls and whispers, de mur à mur. In coït, there are lines like bars. Lines like bars like sheet music. Words like a specific set of notes recorded as they fall. Like rain. Like letting go: ‘aller ensemble’, cum et ire — coït. That’s Neveu again.
There is a scene in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where there is murmuring through walls also. It’s near the close of the book where Orlando watches a reel or flicker of images, a kind of stop-motion passage, where the house no longer belongs to her but to time, to history, and as she watches the great wings of silence beat up and down the house she sits in the gallery as time unfolds, and still peering further, she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a cowled figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands clasped, and a book in them, murmuring—12Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Perhaps it was not a monk at the end of the corridor in Orlando, murmuring across time, but the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, a specter, though he lay dying in a vast Spanish bed, the murmur of which I transcribe here by way of the great gardener of forking paths, Borges:
A woman has placed a yellow rose in a vase. The man murmurs the inevitable
verses which—to tell the truth—have begun to weary him a little:
Blood of the garden, pomp of the walk,
gem of spring, April’s eye…
Then came the revelation. Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise. And he sensed that it existed in its eternity and not in his words, and that we may make mention or allusion of a thing but never express it at all.13Jorge Luis Borges. “Yellow Rose.” A Personal Anthology. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. With various translators. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
It is Monday and it is raining, and I am arguing with myself and writing about some sad animal in some small room trying to grasp something related to itself, and also separate from itself, a shared thing, and it is also a tricky thing, and a necessary fiction, to reach across this space for something else. And bittersweet, this reaching for you.
In the afternoon, I wonder if you are peeling an orange.
How do you mark the relief, the relations between, these other spaces when there continues to be a suggestion that we are somehow surrounded by other spaces in which exciting, ungraspable things occur.14Renee Gladman “The Sentence as a Space for Living” 107.
the way space reaches out from us.15Rainer Maria Rilke. “What Birds Plunge Through Is Not the Intimate Space.” Translated by Stephen Mitchell. The Paris Review. Issue 82, 1981. https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6856/untitled-rainer-maria-rilke
I think of Nathanaël, once more, writing about how to translate is to touch and about that moment where “everything is inscribed and nothing is legible.”
I want a kind of listening that imprints the listening.
Nothing gives any sign.
Epiphany or closure, I wonder.
Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.16Andre Breton. Nadja. Quoted in Patti Smith. Babel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978: 13.
‘I am happy having you worm your way into everything.’
I know you meant work, but the hole or tunnel in outer space that would hypothetically connect different galaxies or places together, is also what connects us here: our wormhole.
Crossing the threshold of the door, Oh dream only a woman’s mouth could do it as well as you.17Gail Scott. Heroine.Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 9.
It makes me think of another beautiful problem, which has to do with translation, I suppose, but only in the tangential way you might find yourself writing through words that don’t properly belong to you, and which you approach and carry back to your own as a matter of quotation. I am interested in the erotics of this patterned way of working through others’ words, allowing them to infiltrate your own, your own body-text.
They were hungry sentences, one and the same mouth, a carnivorous confrontation between joy and solitude…(They were) sentences that did things in grammar and in the wind (…) sentences with honey, with rice, with fragrant oils and death in abstentia.18Nicole Brossard. Fences in Breathing.Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Book, 2009: 99-100.
How do you introduce the generosity of a sentence? Or the way reading a passage from a book or encountering a work of art or piece of music or film sticks out to you, jagged, infiltrates your being like some kind subcutaneous perfume.
Will it seem sentimental even though what you are trying to say is not something about you and your relationship to this material but something of its character, something intrinsic to what it brings to the world: an intellectual curiosity, an ecstatic poetics, an appetite for beauty,
Inescapable.
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under
my heart19Anne Carson. Eros the Bittersweet. Dallas and Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2022: 51.
I have to carry you.
o one, o no one.
Coming back from London, Paul Celan tells me that he has seen God under the door: “A ray of light in my hotel room.”20Jean Daive. Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2020: 32.
Will we?
being away from you I have to feel you like some people feel god. projection from and to in time.21Patti Smith. Babel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978: 158.
Sentimentality is useless to the revolution.22Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 55.
‘I was so so so nervous, I just texted you instead.’
Is it a narrative problem (the failure to speak of what [or of whom] we love)? The problem of the “not articulable” rather than the “inarticulate”?
On the radio, someone says mothers are beyond representation, that is why, when it comes to fiction, they are often dead.
Mothers are like civilization, fragile in front of their television sets, forgotten like some ancient knowledge.23Nicole Brossard. Mauve Desert. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2015:174-75.
In a film, a woman named Laura takes pictures in plaid capes, silk blouses, turtle-neck sweaters and high boots. When she moves, her legs part her slit skirt ina rendition of 1970s glamour. The camera undermines the openness of the city. Even in Columbus Circle, against the backdrop of burning cars, death is proleptic or her photographs are.
In the middle of the stairwell, art and sex and death are bound together.
In photographs, my mother laughs. Only time wears thin.
I look like my mother when humanity in distress looms in the distance and with a great laugh makes one go pale.24Ibid.
The image of Gail Scott’s heroine, in the bathtub, masturbating, thinking about her future novel.
Oh Mama why’d you put this hole in me?25Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 31.
There was the smell of paint. Not lacquer but oil, linseed and walnut. People hanging around art galleries or dingy bars. The smell also of cigarettes on people’s clothes as they came in from the cold. November? There was the smell of smoke like someone had just blown out birthday candles. The heat of a room that’s been exhaled in by warm, drunk mouths. Talking. Something stale and sultry. Insinuating each other into the night. Mouths. Arms. Legs. Unfamiliar beds.
‘Isn’t flesh exquisite, moving euphorically.’
The smell of sweat mixed with saliva and cyprine. A room with yellow flowers on bedsheets, a pair of stockings, on the floor a catalogue of wants, an archeology of longings, a book entitled To Be at Music,26Norma Cole. To Be At Music: Essays and Talks. Richmond (CA): Omnidawn Publishing, 2010: 174.
relief. devotion
and relief. from
come what may another The Underlands.27Robert Macfarlane. Underlands: A Deep Time Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019.
At night, Carrie plays red on the television screen. Brian De Palma’s circling camera whirls around to Katie Irving’s “I Never Dreamed Someone Like You Could Love Someone Like Me,” pandemonium about to erupt.
‘Holy Mackerel.’
Have we caught up with it?
(H)ow melancholic can a heroine be? I mean can she be modern and still lose face?28Gail Scott. Furniture Music. Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2023: 69.
God knows you gotta give (it) to get (it).29Ibid.
It’s rare that anyone is living.30Ingeborg Bachmann. Malina. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm. New York: A New Directions Book, 2019: 238.
The screen is soft as tissue, no cartilage, and you fantasize about touching it. You put your whole face to it. You dream of its lips swallowing you. You thrust your tongue, vying for its open mouth, for the rise and fall of come what may, for the dream of what bites.
‘What do you have to offer?’
‘Come here.’
You are empty as a receptacle looking at the screen. Bodies in iron clad leather.
Eventually, all the images will disappear. You will.
Don’t you know, these spring nights, the air’s so erotic.31Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 73.
Words after the fact. A crossing place.
What elsewhere can there be to this infinite here?32Samuel Beckett. “Texts for Nothing 6.” The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989. New York: Grove Press, 1995: 123.
Notes
- 1Lyrics from a Johnny Flynn song entitled “The Lady Is Risen” (Country Mile, 2013 Transgressive Records).
- 2Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012: 7.
- 3Ibid., 121-22.
- 4Anne Carson. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995: 89.
- 5Ibid., 168.
- 6Nathanaël. Asclepias: The Milkweeds. Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2015: 123.
- 7Peter Gizzi. Archeophonics. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2017: 25.
- 8Anne Carson. Antigonick. New York: New Directions, 2012: 5.
- 9Transcribed from a talk Hélène Cixous gave as part of The New School’s Affinities: Villa Gillet’s Walls and Bridges Series. There are a number of unmarked ellipses.
- 10Ibid.
- 11Lisa Robertson. “Untitled Essay.” Nilling. Toronto: Bookthug, 2012: 73.
- 12Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
- 13Jorge Luis Borges. “Yellow Rose.” A Personal Anthology. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. With various translators. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
- 14Renee Gladman “The Sentence as a Space for Living” 107.
- 15Rainer Maria Rilke. “What Birds Plunge Through Is Not the Intimate Space.” Translated by Stephen Mitchell. The Paris Review. Issue 82, 1981. https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6856/untitled-rainer-maria-rilke
- 16Andre Breton. Nadja. Quoted in Patti Smith. Babel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978: 13.
- 17Gail Scott. Heroine.Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 9.
- 18Nicole Brossard. Fences in Breathing.Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Book, 2009: 99-100.
- 19Anne Carson. Eros the Bittersweet. Dallas and Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2022: 51.
- 20Jean Daive. Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2020: 32.
- 21Patti Smith. Babel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978: 158.
- 22Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 55.
- 23Nicole Brossard. Mauve Desert. Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2015:174-75.
- 24Ibid.
- 25Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 31.
- 26Norma Cole. To Be At Music: Essays and Talks. Richmond (CA): Omnidawn Publishing, 2010: 174.
relief. devotion
and relief. from
come what may - 27Robert Macfarlane. Underlands: A Deep Time Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019.
- 28Gail Scott. Furniture Music. Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2023: 69.
- 29Ibid.
- 30Ingeborg Bachmann. Malina. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm. New York: A New Directions Book, 2019: 238.
- 31Gail Scott. Heroine. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987: 73.
- 32Samuel Beckett. “Texts for Nothing 6.” The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989. New York: Grove Press, 1995: 123.
To cite this article:
Geneviève Robichaud
Geneviève Robichaud’s research and writings focus mainly on the poetics of experimental writing and translation. With Erin Wunker and Sina Queyras, she is the co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House Books) and is the author of a chapbook, entitled Exit Text (Anstruther Press), and a book on translation poetics from McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure. She is the co-translator, alongside Danielle Leblanc, of Nous, Jane (Les Éditions Perce-Neige), a French translation of Aimee Wall’s novel We, Jane (Book*hug).
