The Grand Hotel of Foreigners

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and a
poet. He is the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Claude Beausoleil’s prize-winning poem of 1988, “The Grand Hotel of
Foreigners,” could also be called “The Grand Hotel of Strangers,”
since the words for foreigner and stranger are the same in French. The
poem is elusive, written in a very general if evocative style. The great
French poet Yves Bonnefoy has observed that French poetry is written in
essences and resembles a crystal sphere, while English poetry is written
with concrete details and resembles a mirror. Beausoleil, paradoxically,
writes to defend his Quebec tradition (from Nelligan to Aquin, he says)
against false classicism, false internationalism, which aligns him with
the concrete rather than with the essences; yet his style has the
glitter of the crystal sphere more than the inclusiveness of the mirror.
But he believes that the marble facade of the Grand Hotel is false and
that the staff’s condescension is founded on superficiality. He
prefers the wounds of real experience to the detached grandeur of the
Hotel. The poem is difficult but repays repeated readings.