New at Sibyl
Jean-Marie Gleize
on contemporary French poetry
Où vont les chiens?
[excerpt: read full essay here]
‘Où vont les chiens?’, ‘Where do the dogs go?’, this question is posed by Baudelaire in the last ‘prose’ poem (in Spleen de Paris) in order to evoke a kind of literature that would correspond with urban, modern life – a kind of poetry which is adapted to those ‘sinuous ravines’ of the cities where the ‘poor’ roaming dogs are, the famished dogs. This question is also relevant to poetry: ‘where does poetry go?’, ‘where do the poets go?’.
This question has troubled me for far too many years, and this is the reason why I cannot separate my poetic endeavours from a critical reflection on these. This critical reflection constitutes both the context and condition for my poetry (which for me constitutes the conditions of legibility).
...
I reserve an important place for the historical line of theoreticians and practitioners of sortie critique: Rimbaud, Ponge and Denis Roche. This lineage within ‘poésie critique’ (or critical post-poetry) is characterised by foregrounding the principle of ‘de-lyricising’ poetry and by the search of some kind of ‘objective poetry’ (the latter is announced – but not defined – by Rimbaud in one of his letters ‘du voyant’). In our modern (or modernist?) tradition, there might exist a literal objectivism or an objective literalism (which, by the way, always refrains from calling itself by that name, to present itself like that or dogmatise itself as such) which is made evident in the works of Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean Daive, Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, Dominique Fourcade…, oeuvres that are drawn upon as Sortiesprogresses. This corpus (which is objective objectivistic and literal), which represents the lineage of critique, has affinities with the classics of experimental modernism, the relevant inheritors of the historical avant-gardes: poésie sonore, poésie concrete, poésie élémentaire, poésie-action or performance poetry, which are e.g. represented by poets like Bernard Heidsieck or Julien Blaine, and it is also has affinities with the most recent generation, that which emerges during the nineties; the origin of this generation is centred on the publication of two volumes of Revue de Littérature générale (‘RLG’) in 1995 published by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi at the publishing company POL; it is a book project which may partly be perceived as a manifesto (it being technical and practical rather than theoretical), the propositions in which many recognise themselves or against which they position themselves: C. Hanna, O. Quintyn, N. Quintane, M. Joseph….
It is necessary to direct our efforts towards a description of the way in which contemporary poetry is organised in France after the death of the avant-garde, after the death of the neo-avant-garde from the sixties and seventies, an époque where this movement was organised around the predominant groups of poets and magazines: the ‘textualists’ of Tel Quel, the ‘formalists’ of Change, and various groups inspired by them, along with groups in the periphery who were subjected to the necessity of not defining oneself in relation to or as a reaction against anything else but these hegemonic groups. In the eighties and nineties this field is dissolved, and one bears witness to a destruction of the field which, thus, becomes extremely blurred to the extent that everything from this time on can coexist; this allowed serious attempts at restoring traditional lyric poetry to reoccur; restoration, that is, a ‘return’ to a previous condition which is prior to the sterilising ‘catastrophe’ from the years where the systematic destruction of fundamental poetic values took place, i.e. the destruction of the lyric tradition: expression, the lyric I, emotion, metre and prosody, song… I am content to merely name in passing this moment, which is extremely interesting for the abundant resurgence of discourses which openly and aggressively are regressive (there are numerous texts that need to be looked out and analysed…). It is in this context that I have proposed the idea (an idea that I pursue in Sorties) of comprehending the field after the sixties and seventies as a clear division into lapoésie (which I write as one word) and repoésie on the one hand, and néo-poésie and post-poésie on the other hand. The former willingly inherit the formal and thematic aspects of traditional poetry either to be legitimised by the ‘magistrates’ or incontestable ‘officials’ (Valéry in the beginning of the last century and Yves Bonnefoy today), or they inherit it as a reactionary mode: they are composed by the new lyric poets from the eighties, the re-lyric poets in continuation of whom a number of suggestions follow – from prosaic lyricisms to emphatic lyricisms (e.g. James Sacré and Pierre Oster). The latter part contains those who could be called the reformers or refounders of poetry, those who want to change poetry through a permanent reinvention of itself and its various forms; this is what I call neo-poetry, which is both the ex-formalists of Change ( they have close affinities with the Oulipo-group) and the neo-experimentalists (performance poetry, elementary poetry, etc.). They depend on the term ‘poetry’ in so far as they recognise themselves herein, but they also use it to flaunt a distance to what we understand by poetry. Last but not least post-poetry, i.e. poets who no longer define their poetic praxis in relation to questions which concern the intra-poetic debate: verse or non-verse, verse or prose, poem or non-poem, image or non-image etc.; poets who reflect on what they do, the non-identified objects that they produce, the ways in which their works circulate (in the book or outside the book), in another context. Just like the term ‘sortie interne’ applies to the ‘modernist critics’, it may also be used to designate the post-poets, and I believe it has an actual effect concerning the latter ones. All that is left to be done is to state that something different happens in different way. I.e. when one speaks of post-poetry you continue to place these movements in relation to poetry, in relation to the poetry from which they had sought ‘operation’ (to repeat Mallarmé’s comment on Rimbaud). Yes, but it is necessary to point out that there is a difference between post-poets and critical poets (non- or contra-poets), and this difference concerns 1.) the way in which they move outside any reference to formal, technical and theoretical questions, questions concerning poetry, so to speak, disregarding pretensions of novelty, 2.) the fact that the textual or other objects that they produce are very difficult to recuperate within any generic frame. I continue to assume that post-poetry is not an optical illusion. It tends to proliferate among us.
There is no doubt another possible way of understanding the term ‘sortie’. It is inspired by Francis Ponge and it is connected with the effort in prose, the effort to invent a prose in prose, it is the effort to exit the circle enchanted by stylistic sublimation and by the idealising poeticity or re-poeticity (the key word here is: avoid to ‘arrange things’…). This other way of perceiving the exit has to do with the role which may be attributed to the literary activity after poetry. Let me quote the very short text by Ponge (which I reproduce here) from Cahier de l’Herne:
The Church glorifies humility. Be careful! This is not the same
thing. On the contrary.
Christ degrades the powerful.
The church lavishes on the powerful.
Arise ye wretched of the earth! I am the one who incites.[tr. Serge Gavronsky]
This text is written in 1942. At that time, Ponge was a member of the Communist Party. As early as in the thirties he says that it is important to ‘teach everyone the art of founding your own rhetoric’, the art of ‘resisting words’; or phrased differently: to resist the dominant ideological discourse, which surrounds us, which traverses us, which we interiorise to the extent that we no longer speak but are spoken to. When Ponge wrote in 1942 that ‘je suis un suscitateur’ (‘I suscitate’) it did not signify that he wanted to found a literary movement, he simply declared and suggested that when all is said and done, the act of writing ispolitical. It is necessary to let those speak who do not speak or no longer speak.
We, the readers, must bear in mind that our culture juxtaposes politics and discourse and sense (the ‘message’); this is one of the fundamental aspects in what we name ‘commitment’; and politics is also juxtaposed with the technical modalities of representation, of mimesis; this is what we call ‘realism(s)’ which is/are historically inseparable from the social conscience of the artists and the writers: critical and romantic realism(s) in different guises of ‘socialist’ realism ...
"Oúvont les chiens" is a talk given by Jean-Marie Gleize at the conference "Poetry Today" on October 20-21 2009 at Aarhus University, Denmark. The talk published here is translated by Louise Højgaard Marcussen & Lasse Gammelgaard.
