“Forme” is one of Deguy’s most ambitious poems, and one in which the philosophical discourse is extremely skillfully blended with an evocative lyric voice. It uses Arthur Rimbaud’s lucious Le Bateau ivre, a signature poem written when Rimbaud was seventeen, as a means of examining the paradox of the necessity for poetic form in a poem that resists the strictures of formal constraint while demonstrating how effectively a fusion of form and feeling can be employed. Deguy assumes that his audience is familiar with Rimbaud, and sets as an epigraph Rimbaud’s overwhelming expression of heart’s desire, “Oh que ma quille éclate Oh que j’aille à la mer […].” Baldridge phrases this in a familiar fashion, “O let my keel snap O let me go to sea,” a certainly satisfactory translation. However, the sense of a dual perspective — form and a resistance to form — could be carried through the poem in terms of a splitting, while the second part of Rimbaud’s desire to overcome resistance might be placed in the subjunctive mode, as:

“O let my keel split O that I could go to sea […]”

or perhaps as

“Oh let my keel split
Oh that I could go to sea […]”

with the parenthetical extension implying the familiar content of Rimbaud’s carefully composed quatrains. Deguy’s poem, like many of the “passages on rhetoric,” is shaped like a prose paragraph:

“Oh que ma quille éclate Oh que j’aille à la mer […]”

C’est un poème qui nous le dit, poème qui reprend le topo de la navigation poétique, de l’éloge du nautonier, de la fragilité de l’esquif poème. Or le bateau, pour être ivre, doit ne pas faire eau de toute part ; doit demeurer distinct de l’élément qu’il affront, parcourt, invente : demeurer bien assemblé, pour affronter selon sa loi le parcours dans l’étrange. Et en l’occurrence rimbaldienne dont le vœu d’éclatement ne détruit pas la membrure du poème, celui-ci demeurait ajointé en lames bien parallèles, en lisse de quatrains dodécasyllabiques…

Baldridge’s translation:

“O let my keel snap O let me go to the sea […]”

A poem tells us so, a poem that sums up the topic of poetic navigation, of praise for the coxswain, of the poem skiff’s fragility. Now the boat, though drunken, must not spring leaks all around; must remain distinct from the element it braves, crosses, invents: remain well assembled, to brave according to its law the journey into strangeness. And in the case of Rimbaud whose wish to snap into pieces does not destroy the ribs of the poem, this latter remained jointed in fully parallel strips, in ribbands of dodecasyllabic quatrains…

Baldridge begins “A poem tells us so,” an effective declarative assertion, but Deguy is attempting to examine the ways in which the poem tells, while showing how it tells, so one might begin, “This is a poem that says it,” and then “a poem that recaptures the concept of poetic navigation” as a way of establishing the rhymic figure that Deguy sets with the “topo/poètique” resonance. Baldridge translates “de l’éloge du nautonier” as “praise for the coxswain,” suggesting reasonably that the poet is calling a cadence, but in a larger sense, “the skills of the sailor” are required to manage “the fragility of poetic craft,” a more metaphoric statement than Baldridge’s “the poem skiff’s fragility:”

This is a poem that says it, a poem that recaptures the concept of poetic navigation,
the skills of the sailor, the fragility of poetic craft.