I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

I’ve been reading/rereading Walter Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire’s Paris and thinking what a poor ‘flâneur’ I’d make, because I find it hard to slow my pace to a window shopper’s stroll or amble (lècher les vitrines is the French expression: lick the windows) stroll. At least when I’m going somewhere. For humans-watching a café terrace is best, as Perec has demonstrated in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (1974) when he sat in the window of the Café de la Mairie and noted everything he saw over a period of three days.

But now I must go for a walk. But where? Perhaps, the weather being grey and threatening rain, the river path might not be too crowded?

Beverley Bie Brahic