2. My Training


I do a lot of portrait poems which, like my love poems
stem from fashion poetry, since I've always been a fashion poet.
In the beginning, I wanted to be a full professor and travel
around the world, but it didn't work out that way. When I was
18, I was in Singapore and flat broke. The Singapore Straight
Times--it's still being published--offered me a job as a poet.
I had a beat-up Smith-Corona, but every time there was something
to write a poem about, I got there too late. After two weeks they
fired me, and for a long time I didn't have any money. My inspiration
also comes partly from news poems. I really admire newspaper poets.
In my opinion, news is an exciting field for a poet. I've studied
the work of the papparazzi poets very closely. For me, their poems
are very powerful. I think that poetry has been made too intellectual.
Especially by beginners, or those who study poetry but don't dare
push the button.

3. The Subject


Q: As a poet, you are an anti-formalist. Your reaction
to fine arts implies that poetry must, first and foremost, be
the uniqueness of a look at a subject and not only at the form
in which the subject is arranged.
A: Absolutely. The subject--that's the big question.
That's what I'm interested in.
Q: How do you work up a poem?
A: It's a long process. Something no one knows about
is that I do all of my work in crayon first. I always carry
around a little notebook in which I can jot down the minutest
details concerning poems that I'll write some other time. I
can't type. So I scribble down handwritten notes on props,
lighting, the compositional parts of my poem. Perspiration
under the arms, puffed-up lips, a kiss, a man's shoulder, a
woman's hand, the inside of the elbow, the interplay of muscles,
of vowels and consonants, a man and woman naked to the waist,
a man.

4. The Message


There is no message in my poems. They are quite simple
and don't need any explanation. If by chance they seem a little
complex or if you need a while to understand them, it's simply
because they are full of details and that a lot of things are
happening. But usually they are very simple.

5. Drafting a Poem


It's the drafting I'm interested in. I also enjoy writing
at night, for the simple reason that people can see through my window
that I am writing. To be seen: I'm fascinated by that. Every poet
has his obsession, and that's mine. I'm used to using everything
around me. When I write a poem about diamonds, for example--and
I like writing about them on a beach in sunlight--I always have
trouble with the insurance companies. They don't want you to take
a step without a bodyguard. When I look at these poems, the hardest
part was conveying the notion that these men were armed. The woman,
the diamonds--they were easy. But I didn't want the bodyguards to
notice that they were being put in the poem. Like a lot of poets,
I am also fascinated by store-window mannequins. I like to lead the
reader on a wild goose chase. Often the women in my poems seem like
mannequins and the mannequins seem like humans. The mix-up amuses
me, and I like to play on that ambiguity in my poems. Another one
of my obsessions is swimming pools. When I was a boy, I competed
in sports a lot. I love water, it fascinates me like swimming pools
fascinate me, especially the ones in big cities.

6. A Special World


The world I write poems about is very particular: there
are always, or almost always, the same kind of characters. There
are always women, women who are apparently rich. I write poems
about the upper class because I'm well acquainted with it. And
when someone asks me why I never show the other side of the coin,
I reply that I don't really know much about it, but that there
are other poets who can do a marvelous job. I prefer to stick to
what I know. If I wrote a poem about women in a poverty-stricken
setting, it would be completely false. People have said that my
poems have nothing at all to do with reality. That's not true:
everything is based on reality.

7. Women


I don't work very much in my study because I think that
a woman I'm writing about cannot come to life in front of a wall
of books. I want to write about how a woman of a certain milieu
lives, the kind of car she drives, her setting, what kind of men
she sees. It doesn't matter where they come from--New York, Paris,
Nice, Monte Carlo. Their nationality doesn't matter either. The
women of a certain milieu, no matter where they're from, all look
and dress alike. I am very impressed when I travel from one
continent to another, from Paris to Beverly Hills; the women
can't possibly resemble each other, but their clothes and makeup
are always the same. It's a sign of the consumer society. You can
buy a Saint Laurent anywhere in the world. I wanted to show in my
poems the rules of a certain society. It's just bringing out into
the open certain types of behavior.

8. Provocation


Q: What does the desire to provoke that so often underlies
your work mean?
A: I like and look for reactions. I don't like kindness or
gentleness. I want to provoke, but not by choice of subject, although
I do need certain subjects in order to create new poetic effects,
and especially to find new rhythmic tension that the choice of
these subjects allows me. If I drown a woman in props, or if I
juxtapose her to a signpost, if I contrast nudity, say, with clothing,
if I ask her to wear a black bra under a light-colored blouse while
I'm writing about her, I obtain or I'm looking for new interactions
of tension which seem at first surprising but are then accepted.
The only provocation I hate is that of the surrealist image. It has
no place in my world.

9. Vulgarity


Q: A certain number of poems have been published under your
name that are not without some vulgarity. How do you react to that?
A: I totally believe in these books of mine. I love vulgarity.
I am very attracted by bad taste--it is a lot more exciting than that
supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of
looking at things. I am proud of a poetry collection like Sleepless
Sluts. A little less of Secret Channels, which was incredibly
successful. I don't write poetry for myself, not for art. If the poetry
world rejects me, all I can say is, "Good luck to the world of poetry."
If I look for a real point of view, I'm not going to start by looking
at what my critics will accept so I can conform to that. That's why
in Sleepless Sluts all that sadomasochism still seems interesting
to me today. I always carry chains and padlocks in my car trunk, not
for me but for my poems--and by the way, I never make the knots real
tight.