People like to say Marseille in Marseille.
Dutch poet and writer Erik Lindner stayed 3 months at the Centre International de Poésie Marseille, France."Marseille marks you", François Lespiau told me, as he got me of the plane and drove me to the city. It was April 2004 and I was about to stay in the city for three months. Lespiau is the administrator of the Centre International de Poésie Marseille (cipM). At that time I did not really believe him. Maybe I thought I had been marked enough by other things, places, and circumstances. But having stayed there I must admit that Lespiau was right. Marseille leaves its mark on your forehead.
It is funny how often you hear a city’s name when you stroll through it. Take any big street in the afternoon, the Canabière or the Corniche, which dramatically follows the coastline, and in all the conversations around you, you can hear where you are. People like to say Marseille in Marseille. It seems the name is a code: I am here, and this is the consequence.
The cipM is housed in the Vieille Charité, the ancient hospital on the hill called Le Panier, and surrounded by small medieval streets. It has a gallery, a few offices, a publishing house, it shares the space with the art cinema in town for its poetry readings and debates every Friday evening, and it has the largest library of contemporary poetry in Europe. The library is founded on the collection of post-war American poetry by Jacques Roubaud, and it accumulates all French poetry books and reviews after 1945, and also many in other languages.
Marseille is a weird town. It is literally the edge, the port of Europe. Everybody you meet has an Italian uncle. It is a rough place, quite a hard city, but at the same time it is also friendly. And easy to get out and about. A bus takes you down to the white cliffs, the Calanques, where the sea disappears into coves of stone and rock. A boat that stops at the Island If goes to the Îles de Frioul, desolate Islands in the sea in front of the city. I acquired the habit of swimming in the sea every day after lunch in Marseille, thanks to the librarian Éric Giraud.
In Marseille, I learned that you have to be stable to take up a residency. It is not always easy. In his weekly article in The Guardian James Fenton recently wrote that being a writer in residence is like a state of divorce: you are without your partner and resemble someone being rushed quickly through IKEA to get some furniture. But if you can understand French and are into contemporary poetry, if you are open minded to a varied, international contemporary poetry, I advise every serious poet to pass by the cipM. Even if you haven’t been selected as a writer in residence, it is still good to visit the centre. The people who work at the cipM are calm, professional, which is quite amazing if you know the French poetry scene. They publish very well edited books. As a resident, you are invited every Friday evening to join in their programme and you can work and study in the library, even after hours. Moreover, they give a decent grant. In return you have to give them a manuscript with unpublished material. They make a book of this. "La refuge" is developing into a collection of poets from all over the world.
"Marseille is a golden prison", Sarah Kérany wrote to me in a letter. There is more sun than the rest of France. The fruit is cheaper, and so are the bars. But if you live there, you cannot get out. You are trapped. Some don’t want to get out anymore. As a resident, you are a passenger, you are a visitor, but you are there for a while. It really is a remarkable experience.
I owe a few texts to this stay in Marseille, the final sequence of my third book and a short opening to my fourth. They asked me to present the anthology Le verre est un liquide lent; 33 poètes néerlandais (Farrago, 2003) and there was an import-export translation session, with three French and three Dutch poets. So for one week Marseille was suddenly full of Dutch poets. I got to know the work of former residents, like the American poet Peter Gizzy, and I met Pascal Poyet who lives in Marseille.
The poets apartment in Rue de Refuge, which is about to be moved to another address, is quite basic. It used to be just a few streets away from the cipM, in the Panier. Note that from May onwards it is hot and everybody lives outside, in front of their house, so the streets tend to be noisy.
Erik Lindner
www.eriklindner.nl
