The Piqueray Brothers: An Impasse for a Preface
by Luc Rémy

When I was asked to describe the way I experience the Piqueray brothers’ poetry, I felt a knot of ambiguous feelings.  I felt, simultaneously, a kind of shamelessness, a kind of suspicious timidity, and a kind of bored pride. Although one reads their poetry with devotion, and although one feels a profound connection with it, I think that, essentially, there is nothing to be said about it. Maybe this is just a way of letting myself off the hook.

Fortunately, there are a few secret props, a few adolescent tricks, a few little-traveled paths that come in handy at the impasses of reading. You could say they even make up a kind of technique. For me, this involves immobility. It is a matter of isolating oneself in a bare and silent room, with just enough light to be able to read, of opening the work with total innocence and plunging into it like a bucket into a well; of detaching oneself for a moment, and, maybe, of feeling a “nothingness” swooping up around us, making its escape. Early on, I realized that this well is a place where worldy men hesitate to go, no doubt for fear of coming up dry.

The brothers Piqueray have written little: barely two hundred pages, mostly for their friends (and their girlfriends).

“Oolyakoo,” “Swingtime,” “I Remember Clifford.” Oh yeah. The twin brothers are experts in jazz, but above all they are musicians in words: a little sax, a little trombone;  instruments that  underscore the brothers’ most intimate heartbeats. With instruments like these, rhythm is everything. The Piquerays’ powers of memory and mimicry let me relive the famous concerts of Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, and Carla Bley. I spent hours with them as they listened with rapt smiles, an index finger pointed at an ear sometimes, to emphasize an interesting passage. Natural duettists, the brothers often riffed on a common theme, each making the most of his own tonalities.
They are rightly seen as great humorists. Their visions are so hallucinated, so unlikely ­– the outer limits of their inner turmoil. Theirs is the argot of adventurers always crossing, clandestinely, the frontiers of language.

Consider this situation: Marcel and I are strolling down street in Ixelles when we pass a man looking stiff and formal in a flamenco dancer's outfit, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. Looking straight ahead, Marcel tells me that he is imagining the guy, in all his stiff formality, farting like a madman. There are a thousand moments like this with the Piquerays. For them, poetry is to be discovered in life. Nowhere else. But these two snipers never cease to pour out their emotions. They are true twentieth century troubadours, incurable romantics: many of their writings evoke the enigmatic Woman seen through a steamed-up window. Their women appear at the edge of the sea, surrounded by trees, or stretched out on a blanket of white carnations. It doesn’t matter if their women are geologists, singers, teachers, French, Russian, Spanish, Jewish, Brazilian. It doesn’t matter if they are called Laura, Francoise, Regine, Annie – the poets hold them all deeply in their hearts.

The brothers, however, are so different from each other when caught up in their little literary eroticisms. Marcel has the power to distance himself from things, and becomes the perfect clergyman. In Gabriel we find an anguish about his “history” that turns him into a bitter orphan, cast out of paradise.

I have the impression that I’ve said only the obvious: what is essential will always remain to be discovered, probably in what can no longer be expressed.
The Piquerays live on in the company their numerous brothers: those who somehow make death less probable. 

Read 8 Poems by Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray