Pierre Peuchmaurd, Apparently Part of the 97%

          The most recent issue of Gulf Coast has an international bent to it, with several poems, stories, essays, artwork, and interviews either by or about international authors and artists. I plan to write a bit more about the issue later, but for now, I just wanted to discuss briefly the late Pierre Peuchmaurd (1948-2009), a French poet I encountered for the first time in this issue.

          Peuchmaurd had two poems in the journal, both translated by E. C. Belli – “It Will Come in My Left Lung” and “A Few of the Words I Was Mysteriously Allowed Until Now.” Both were very good. In fact, they’re two of my favorite pieces in the issue so far (though I’m only about halfway through). Like other French poets I’ve read, he shows a mastery for imagery and the subtleties of language. According to his contributor’s bio, early in his life he encountered André Breton, a large reason he spent his life creating surrealist pieces (although, to be honest, the two poems in Gulf Coast didn’t strike me as overly surrealist in the traditional sense of the word – a good thing, since I’m personally not always a fan of the movement).

          And, well . . . that’s about the extent I can write about him. Pierre Peuchmaurd is a good example of one of those international poets we don’t currently have a lot of access to here in the United States. Even trying to Google him – the old failsafe way of finding obscure information in this day and age – brought up practically nothing in English. I also searched Amazon to see what titles might be available by Peuchmaurd, and the site actually listed several, only all in French.

Like many other American poetry readers, I know I have trouble just keeping up with the many good poets we have writing in English here stateside. Yet sometimes I come across a good international poet like Peuchmaurd, and it just reminds me that there’s a whole world of poets out there and by limiting ourselves to those writing only in English, we are missing out on some great work.

This actually is a good opportunity for me to plug a blog I sometimes check out. The Three Percent Blog is a blog dedicated to modern and contemporary international literature. It takes its name from the fact that of the books published in the United States, only 3% of it is work in translation. And as the blog further points out, in terms of literary fiction and poetry, that number actually drops to around 0.7%. These numbers certainly are indicative of how self-contained we’ve become in our reading habits. To help break this habit, I certainly encourage everyone to go check out Three Percent. Whenever I head over there, I’m always finding cool new books I need to add to my list. They do some great work.