Not I

The title of this exceptional work is given unsearchable depth by an epigraph from St. Paul: ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’. Ventriloquise examines the ways in which this not I may be found, and may speak in poetry, beginning with the crucified self – ‘Each bared morning is a fine time to die’ – as it contemplates the creation and is disturbed by continually hearing the ‘one re-re-repeated Word’. How, in his poems, can the poet be, not impersonal but at once there and not there? How can he become ‘the one who knows how / to keep silent in song’?

The answer is partly through a particular form of translation, something that the opening poem brilliantly exemplifies. Its first part offers three versions of the same passage in the Tao Te Ching, not by Denny but by three other translators. Its second arises from a phrase attributed to Aeschylus by Maurice Blanchot. Above all, while these sources are acknowledged, the whole poem is silently ventriloquized by William Carlos Williams, whose triplet form steps down sure-footed across the page. Translations are already revealing in this perspective, since they belong to no one, and Denny goes further by trans-lating the originals, carrying them across to his view of reality. By small touches, he opens Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ to the world as continually falling and yet as continually being plunged ‘in glory’.

To show the fallen and falling world Denny calls on Chénier, Ronsard ...