It’s spring. The factory is fat and cold.
You look, outside.
You arrive through the fields, through the countryside.
You pedal in the air, transparent and closed in.
The countryside is yellow and green.
You pass through anonymous trees. The path crunches, fragile.
You ride on sharp crumbling stones, dry pebbles, gravel.
Slight creatures fly against the wide flat sky.
From far away you see it. It’s set on the grass, light. The sheet metal is thin, undulating.
The windows are all open. The air circulates, identical.
You put away the bike. The courtyard is paved with rounded stones.
In the back, scaffolding. The paving stones make a strange surface, calm.
You cross the air. Between the stones, grasses poke through.
Nothing disappears, ever. The air swells, at each instant, with odors.
You advance through the round courtyard. The sky above, naïve. You are afraid, endlessly.
Women arrive in soft blouses. You have eyes, you see their breasts.
Space is divided. It’s terrible.
You are not protected.
You come, you go. Cruel and soft spring.
Factory the factory, first memory.
You are in the workshop, outside it’s raining.
The rain falls. Sharp absence.
Things are, contrary, unreal, real.
You have an apron and a bike.
You buy some objects, sure.
You want them.
You cross the city, serious.
The streets go very quickly, broad, narrow, broad, narrow.
There are many little colored kiosks, trees, benches.
Dogs wag their tails, agitated.
You walk, surrounded by houses. Often doors open, and you see the staircases inside. You stop when you see them rising, steep, behind the door.
In the middle of the city, the river flows, all alone, and things, you always already know them, surprised.
You get off the bus, you walk.
Up there, the raw sky, blue and white. You go along the fence.
Behind it, there is the empty lot.
You look between the slots, from outside.
The dirt is spread out, spread out, orange.
Everything begins, without creation. Offering.
You are there, behind the fence. You see the scraps.
People circulate, in caps, dragging bags.
There are bits of paper, soft, disgusting, and there’s plastic. The plastic is old, used up. Slab and fragments. Some locks are lying around.
Rust is there, mysterious.
Piled up barrels, shovels and skins. Square crates, simple. You also see animal stuff.
Hardened rags, in a ball. What testimony.
Doors are ajar, standing. The sky remains fixed.
Mirrors, also, in frames.
Certain forms are enveloped, it’s unthinkable. The worst are small and fat.
The ground changes, in places. Viscous puddles. Also, corners dry like eyes.
A fire burns, in the middle.
You look through a slot. It’s so real.
from Excess—The Factory
Leslie Kaplan
translated from the French by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap
Faced with the desire, or with the ethical summons, to write about an alienating and often hidden place in society, Kaplan wrote L’excès-l’usine, a book-length poem that exposes what is unformed in the factory environment, and acknowledges the distance and separation that the environment creates between people and objects. Kaplan’s poetic voice moves and circulates through the factory with its heaps of wire, sheet metal, its assembly line rhythms, and its open yards. As such, she renders into poetry what is political life—the position of the workers in this factory and their isolation from the value of what they are producing. And yet, her poetry seems to discover and record a sharing of sense-perception across the community and space of the factory.
Leslie Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, but raised and educated in France. Beginning in January 1968, Kaplan worked for two years in a series of factories, and participated in the events of May 1968. L’excès-L’usine (Excess—The Factory) was published in 1982 with Hachette. Since then she has published over a dozen works (novels, essays, and theatre pieces) with P.O.L. and Folio (Gallimard). Her website contains a number of essays and brief translations in English. Her most recent theatre work will be performed in Paris, Caen, and (in an English version) Denver in Spring 2016.
Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013). A chapbook of prose, The Silence that Fills the Future, was recently released as a free pdf from Essay Press. Objects from a Borrowed Confession (prose) is forthcoming from Ahsahta press in 2016. Carr was a 2011–12 NEA fellow and is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the English department and the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance Ph.D. program. She regularly collaborates with dance artist K. J. Holmes and is the co-founder of Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery.
Jennifer Pap is an associate professor of French at the University of Denver. She has published articles on the presence of the visual arts in the language and thought of French poets such as Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Ponge. An article on Leslie Kaplan’s L’excès-l’usine has appeared in the December 2015 issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (formerly Sites). In collaboration with Julie Carr, she has translated Apollinaire’s Alcools as well as Kaplan’s L’excès-L’usine.
