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The nature and stakes of the exchanges between contemporary French and American poetry will be investigated by watching the game of pool that Emmanuel Hocquard and Michael Palmer have been shooting from across the Atlantic since 1981. The game occasions inquiry into the notion of influence and, once surpassed, into its alternative models (such as the echo chamber or the pool game), both as a means of considering the poet's paradoxical social condition (half way between solitude and community), and to examine the stakes of translation (a dark precursor, expanding the field of language). That these exchanges have managed to affect forms, genres, and language itself reminds us by contrast that, in the passage from recent French philosophy to «French theory», something was lost in the depths of the Atlantic.