Speaking Alone

senseless here’s the man with the crystal contractions

with the rumor of sand with a doll’s past tense

at the hollow step in a bed of distress

nevertheless present at the passage of spring spring Tristan Tzara wrote this poem during the summer of 1945, weeks after the end of World War II, and so this particular “spring” may refer to the horrific final season of the war.

man as long as he passes his stop is wall

wall of heavy shoulders

and now the light is black

the sun salty

water no longer quenches the children’s eyes

their words wooden

voices no longer recognizable in the little space

left ajar in their gullets of sky

and like justice at the bottom of the well

verisimilitude verisimilitude The French word here is "vraisemblance," which combines "vrai"(true) with "semblant" (semblance or appearance). It can translate to "likelihood" or "verisimilitude" here because perhaps the well in the previous line functions as a mirror; truth's appearance reflects the disorienting layers of reality in the weeks immediately following the war, during which many in Europe, though newly liberated, were still hungry, ill, and displaced. reflects the tarnished gold of summer’s escapes

the frankness of their hungers

howling dogs outrageous vacations

dogs with your tongues out

tugging at the rope until you lose

that rainy look in your hempen eyes

lost lost in a fur pelt

dogs who cheat the night

in the well of justice

true forged water

and lose the sparkling stones

the iron of the walls

like never seen before

horrors distresses faces

passed passed over passed away

from earth from potash from vitreous smoke

sludge sludge on the horizon

nothing but sludge where wewe Ironically for a poem titled “Speaking Alone,” this is the only first-person pronoun in the poem and refers to a group of people docking in an isolated, uncanny, imaginary landscape. Henri Béhar writes: “Tzara composed this poem while he was lodged at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, in Lozère, where he had long conversations with the patients, even befriending some of them. From then on, his poetry tried to speak not for them but from their point of view, through a kind of empathy of which few poets are capable. [. . .] He puts his poetic practice at the disposal of the very strong emotional demand that he had felt in his interlocutors.” dock

and islands of grassy vertigo

the cobblestones are deserted the loves uneasy

why love only avarice

and everywhere the void the laughable transparency of the ravine

man among men and the ditch up front

the wind underneath and from each side silencesilence This section, with its layered images and metaphors, enacts a mythic challenge to logic. Scholar Elmer Peterson, citing Tzara’s 1947 lecture, posits that Tzara believes “the essence of poetry is in the recapture and expression of these myths which our rationally ordered society has subverted.”

you entered the dwelling place of dead tenderness alive

and in each step you recognized

yourself as an enticing answer

the world hasn’t changed from ash for you

nor has anguish crucified itself

a little loss a little gain it’s always the weight of windowpanes

bearing down on your dark forehead

but you are lucid in these hours that look like you

walking among your footsteps which the scales tally

through the starry years on the tree of painstarry years on the tree of pain Stars and trees are two of the shapes used by Joan Miró in the 72 vivid, iconic lithographs he created for the original artist book publication of Parler seul.

confined in the horizon of voices

no wall can resist your warm memory

faced with the broken voice

rats can run between your legs

the fine grass has yet to escape your call

with an invisible noise on the mouth and fingers

you came out alivealive Marius Hentea writes of Tzara’s long period of isolation and silence during the war: “Even in the most damning solitude, the need for personal connections and human warmth remains." He continues, "It is through these connections [. . .] that the final poem can end with a triumphant cry.”