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An interview with Michel Méresse
Jean-Michel MAULPOIX published in La Sape, Nr 43/44, Paris, May 21. 1996 Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
Michel Méresse : « If I had never read anything written by you, what book would you advise me to start with, and why ?
Jean-Michel Maulpoix : « Une Histoire de bleu » is undoubtedly both the easiest to start with and the one the most immediately at the heart of the work I have attempted to carry out for quite a few years now. It exerts what I would now call a critical lyricism. It expresses a subjectivity and, as a counterpoint, develops a criticism of common place clichés or of stereotypes which the subject drags with him. All this is carried through the analysis of a colour, since that book is exclusively dealing with the colour blue looked upon as a bag-word in which both what belongs to emotions and what belongs to belief dwell together. It is the colour of love letters, that of the ribbons bought by Emma Bovary from the passing street-pedlar, of the cotton shutters of the cart she dreams to elope in with Rodolphe. It is the colour of the sea, of the Virgin Mary … Hence, as opposed to yellow, for example, or to orangy that would be the colour of the East, it is surely the key-colour of Western interiority. I took as a starting point of that book the silent question asked by man being face to face with the sea. Why do we indeed stay so long watching the sea when there is, literally speaking nothing precise to be seen ? What do we watch then ? What is the specific attraction or magnetic force thus keeping us on the sea-front ? Such is that weird force that I wanted to express in small prose works and that I wished to analyze, and go through a writing with a fine tooth-comb, being both at the same time he who who watches the sea and he who observes what he contemplates, both simultaneously inside and outside, myself walking on that kind of sea-front or no man's land which seems to me to be the fundamental posture of writing. I would add one more thing about that book : having to ponder upon some extremely fleeting substance, I made the effort of defining the parameters of my texts and center them, i.e. page after page to proceed forward through organized small prose works which graphically reproduce that face to face they are supposed to give an account of. Hence, both on the formal and on the substance level, that book was indeed a decisive turn. It was indeed the very book which all of a sudden widened my public and it was due to that (relative) success that I was able to check the most surprising attraction force of that colour.
M.M. : … attraction or even fascination which is also to be found in other forms of expression, and in particular of course in painting. One immediately recalls Yves Klein's famous blue, for example …
J.-M.M. : Yes, all the more so since the starting point came from there. I remember one of Rilke's letters to Clara in which he said that, in the Louvre, facing La Tour's or Chardin's blues, it had reminded him of the fascinating filiations and variations of that colour in art, from the Pompeian paintings all the way to Cezanne's, and that he had imagined that someone would write some history of the colour blue. I did not write a history of the colour blue, but, rather, a blue story, in the same way as one says a money story or a love story …
M.M. : Within eighteen years, i.e. between 1978 and 1996, you published almost twenty-five books, i.e. more than one book per year. It is both a lot and few. « Normal », would you say of any writer of true literature, but may be a little less usual for a poet. What do you think of that ? Is it important (and on what level ? how ?) to publish a lot, and/or regularly ? And, in order to proceed one step forward on that rather anecdotic (or rather sociological) question towards something more essential : what is you incentive to write ? Where's the starting point urging you to write ? what's your « writing drive » ? Would you say (as a modern version of the poetical fit) that you only write in some state of emergency as to answer some kind of urge, or rather, even if one does not know what one is about to write, that writing starts with an act of will ?
J.-M.M. : I could explain such a vast number of publications by the fact that I am less someone who writes poems rather than someone who writes around, or towards the poetical. My work lingers on the fringe of a territory or of a notion by questioning them. Sometimes I say about my own texts that they could be defined in terms of a prose wishing to be concerned about poetry. This means that poetry, for me, is both a topic of research and of some concern. This accounts for the fact I publish both essays, critical works, but that I also always settle my books on the borderlines or on margins. Here is another way of answering you : I work a lot, I write in some kind of emergency, of urge, of fever. Even if, as I grow older, such an effervescence gives way gradually to slower elaborating processes. I feel I have to erect and to dig. I believe that this represents something that everyone comes across as one grows older. Some kind of maturity is precisely to be acknowledged in this very way of delving deeper into questions, of trying to grasp as closely as possible, of articulating more, of questioning more radically.
M.M. : Seething and effervescence of youth, so you say, and a radical digging of maturity. Then, precisely, since your first book (Locturnes, published in 1978), do you feel that you have succeeded in stepping forward towards some new thing (as some kind of progress, were it either ethical or aesthetical), or does each book ask over and over, however differently, the very same question ? Overhang and/or turning over of regrets ?
J.-M.M. : Both phenomena clash one with the other. Every one must discover one's little sentence and articulate it before one dies. The re-capturing of the very same obsessive question organizes one's work, whereas gradually some king of a clarification and checking takes place. Human life is in writing some kind of an obscure business matter that tries to be enlightened. Something struck me as being more and more obvious (it may seem extremely simple but it is almost as if I had to write all these books for it at last to stand out), and that is that we are first and foremost language. It defines us specifically as human beings since we are gifted with such a capacity of a language we are able to articulate. Poetical work, in so far as it precisely rests on language, highlights and questions such a capacity to articulate. It expresses and questions our capacity to link things, beings, words together. Hence the poetical discourse is thus able to discover the true adventure in the heart of the truly human : the questioning of that very enigma and of that true obviousness that we are. Poetry is the language of correspondances, of images and of metaphorical transports, i.e. the multiplication of nets of relationships and links. Such a way of setting conjunctions &endash; Michel Deguy would call them conjunctions/dysjunctions &endash; between the beings and the elements of the world, is truly what poetry does inside language. I can still verify this all along my publications of books one after the other. By the way it goes so far as that my present writing, with even more determination, goes even further in that direction, i.e. a generalized articulation so to say. As if the idea was to say everything and to say everything at once, to keep everything together, and so on.
M.M. : « Saying everything. What is at stake is to say everything and I haven't enough words, and so on … » (I quote from memory) comes from one of Eluard's poems. He was a poet of clarity, if there was any. Just before, you were quoting a poet like Michel Deguy, whose work is not always easy to understand. Hence you open a good transition in order to allow me to tackle with you the problem of the relationships between modernity and legibility. When we compare you to the most contemporary poets, approaching your writing seems to be easier and more immediate : how deliberate is this apparent legibility at first sight (which may be some kind of a pretence, you'll tell us) or how does it partake from your project ?
J.-.M. : Most probably, I write what I would like to read, a voice that I'd love to hear, and I know I won't … Besides, I like its clarity and its watchfulness. It's one of the cardinal virtues of our language : Philippe Jaccottet says : an accurate balance of life, an accurate balance of voice. Such an idea of a right accurate voice, for lack of a truly accurate and right life &endash; never quite adjusted &endash; is very important to me, for it means both the accurateness of what is expressed and that which towards which one calls it. Besides, the formalistic researches are of mediocre interest to me. I am rather bored by them. I am not specifically convinced that one should modify language to make it utter new sounds or say new things. On that side, so many experiments have been attempted that we find ourselves in the position of heirs. When the extremes of minimalism and literality have been reached, what could remain to be done but start all over again and articulate once more precisely the stakes of the poetical, trying to grasp it and to voice the essence of the world around us. The poet's work is nothing else but trying to articulate and to analyze what is with reference to what is not or to what could be.
M.M. : In « Confession », the introductory text to A Theological Treatise for the use of Angels, published at Forta Morgana, you say with some kind of humour : « This booklet of pious impertinences must be read aloud on the occasion of the funeral of a butterfly, […] », and so on. Is such an injunction : « to be read aloud » an injunction to you would apply to all the things you write ? What is the part played by orality in the elaboration of your writing and its horizon of reading ?
J-.M.M. : It does play an important part. One of my major references remains Flaubert's, i.e. the asssociation of hard strenuous work, sometimes to the risk of castrating style (a kind of reduction of the pathos in style) and, on the other hand, the lyrical blows that do arise in such a reading aloud that one wishes to do with one's text, i.e. the moment when you gather them back to yourself. I impose my text the trial to be shouted aloud. I read them, I re-read them aloud. Besides, often only after a book has been published, when I am invited somewhere to read the text in public, then and only then do I really perceive it and become aware of it. Then there is some kind of after-effect a return-effect. All of a sudden do I see where there are too many words. I don't know what more I could say …
M.M. : Well, if of course it doesn't seem to be at the outskirsts of your work, what do you think of those, like Henri Chopin, who go very far beyond such a logic of orality up to defending and illustrating a poetry that would only be resonant or else as an enacting of the poet's body making the language resound in terms of « performances », as is the case of Julien Blaine for example ?
J.-M.M. : Those several « modernist » approaches, a sonorous poetry or, reversely, a poetry that would only be visual, such as spatialism, aim at a paroxystic target of the poetic writing, whereas what I am interested in is articulation, that is how to make all these elements play and hold together, almost to the point of making such a formal dimension disappear, almost absorbed when all is said in a language or in a style. Both voice and spatialism are active in poetical writing. The formalistic attempts which overvalue one of the components of writing are, when all is said, only anecdotically interesting. I believe my perspective is quite different…
M.M. : … beyond the curiosity that may have been entailed by such singular experiences beyond any kind of teaching that may have been drawn from such borderline experiences, I always felt harmful to deprive oneself of the totality of the poetical experience which is both sonorous and visual but also has to do with thought, with the body and quite a few other things, such as the expression of emotions. Rather than working on an extremely narrow basis as often some artists do today, in most artistic fields (I refer, for example, in painting to groups such as support-surface : i.e. to remain or not within the frame) rather than deprive oneself of the all the wealth that lay in classical poetry, one had better indeed try and seize this firmly bodily (if I may say so) taking into account the changes in the world.
J.-M.M. : Indeed, I share this feeling. I like the notion of entanglement. A human being, whoever he may be, is a very entangled creature in which the most contradictory drives and ideas coexist. Michaux says it very rightly : one is never alone in oneself. Is is true that the registry, the social law reduce us to an ID, to nothing but someone with which one goes along his way for better or for worse. One has a job, a status, whereas one fundamentally remains manifold. Poetical language is after all that space in which everyone keeps his good luck of being one and many at the same time.
M.M. : Such is the seat of otherness, par excellence …
J.-M.M. : … yes, it is the place in which all those more or less jointed bits that make a being try to keep together. I can't therefore imagine poetry in any other way than by trying to voice, from the closest possible, those contradictions, those paradoxes, such an entanglement, a net of relationships that make our substance and our common existence &endash; I insist on that word -. Before he disappears, the writer has this very task to carry out : i.e. to be able to cast a new light, as much as he can, or draw the threads of that skein were it only to make knots in it.
M.M. : What you've just said anticipates the question I had wished to ask you now. It is a difficult question, all the more as it is both an easy and a fundamental one : why do you write ? What do you expect from writing ? What may one expect from the act of writing ? and so on …
J.-M.M. : Running the risk of seeming to hide myself behind a far too well known formula, I'd take again that phrase of St-John Perse's who said that the best answer to that question would always be the simplest one : i.e. one writes in order to feel better in one's life. But to feel better in one's life does not mean bettering the quality of life, it means trying to go deeper into the contradictions we are made of. Nowadays, lyricism and poets are being put to trial and it is mostly always done in the same way. Someone like Christian Prigent for example speaks of a « dribbling gaping openness of the ego ». Such critical prejudices towards lyricism are unfair for they deny one of the dominant parts of one's individual existence and leave the care of its trade to the sole media soaps. Poetry, on the contrary, seems to me to have a lot to do and indeed very subtly with such a problem. It is that singular gesture in language which at once both voices things and questions them ; i.e., when all is said, becomes a gesture of cleverness. That won't indeed be done through ditty songs. It will only satisfy itself with weeping : ah ! why did you leave ? why did you go ? … remaining most of the time on the degree zero of sentimental expresssion. Whereas the poetical text is a text which both at the same time may express the stupidity and frailty one has within oneself and then at the same time work at the strengthening of one's conscience. Taking the measure of things, that's all, tossed about by detours and immoderation. This is why I find myself in a position out of touch with reference to so many things. I wish to stress peremptorily today on that topic.
M.M. : When asking you the question : « why do you write ? », I was referring to a well accepted idea, i.e. that writing frees one, that, when one has completed his book, one has all of a sudden become unloaded with something, one is freed from something and one feels better. Does that correspond to something you've experienced or not ?
J.-M.M. : Yes and no. It works both ways. Writing is both an exorcism and a garnering. It allows one's unconscious or subconscious substance that one carries within oneself to appear, it projects it on to the fore and starts upheaval in the very life of he who reveals it. It unbalances as much as it frees. I am not very learned on psychoanalysis but I believe poetical writing is less an outcome than an increase in one's consciousness and pain.
M.M. : Well, let's move one step forward and bid higher on the theme of pain. Due to the omni-presence of the theme of death in your work, you must surely have been previously accused of morbid complacency. Besides, you yourself in Don't look for my heart any longer (p. 128), you answer before hand by using a « he » to whom such a reproach is made. He answers that he can't do anything about it and wonders why no one understands why such an anxiety is beneficial. Beyond such a catharsistic function, can you say a little more about that link between writing and what you call the anticipation of the disaster ?
J.-M.M. : Here you mention in fact two complementary and yet distinct phenomena. First, there's the proportion of anxiety on which any writing feeds itself, may be partly because of the decentring and the questioning of time it entails. One projects oneself on to the future, there one regresses on to the past, memory is at work, the feeling of loss exasperates itself ; in short, one's very sensitiveness to disappearance becomes more acute. But, conversely, what also seems obvious is that the lyrical posture of the poet does not just consist in deploring the disappearance, it also consists in taking the measure of finitude and grounding the feeling of marvelling on the very disappearance, i.e. becoming basically aware that, were it not for this huge darkness, or for this huge absurdity which is death, there would be no perception of beauty, nor care for other people, nor any presence of the sensible world. A reversal thus takes place inside this task, a reversal which anyone should be able to carry on at a moment or another in one's consciousness, but that writing never stops entailing whenever a text begins and takes its shape. A reversal which precisely drives one towards a claim : one lodges a complaint, one registers a claim in front of the absolute, saying it is to disappear. There rests something that remains impossible to understand. And yet at the same time, there is the understanding of what's obvious : there begins the task of working on signs, intelligence, sensitivity and love, due indeed to such a precariousness and finitude. Michel Deguy on that topic says something I quite like : He speaks of the effort that every one has to do to become proportionate to one's nothingness. In his latest book, which he wrote in memoriam to his late wife, he speaks of Disproportion : Somehow trying and becoming atuned to one's disproportion. I personally believe that the task of writing poetry means working on proportion and balance. Taking the measure of what is, including immoderateness, including what is outside measure. Locating oneself in front of that. Here is how death comes to play an ever-insisting place. Born in november, I may be of a melancholic disposition …
M.M. : Now, indeed you smile when you say that, but next to that, or on top of what you have just described, of this compelling and exacerbated companionship induced by writing, next to, or on top of, some sensitiveness of the times due to the situation of the individual in the world at a given moment, of the writer in the world at a given moment in History ; next to, or on top of, such a posture that Maurice Blanchot would well sum up, can't we ponder over this question by reversing it ? Why are some individuals more attracted than others by writing, by this task of mourning and decentring you were just mentioning ? Wouldn't there be with the latter some kind of an intimate story, something more personal this time that may explain such a predisposition to melancholy in writing ? Isn't that dimension present in you too ?
J.-M.M. : Surely. Images appear, regrets too, childhood memories, the dream of a strong unity, of a stability specific to the days of childhood which was not yet a disjointed age, but rather a simpler time, weighed down with very little memory, with at hand a very strong capacity of presence and imagination. The loss of those days, the mourning of those days, also feed me. I suffer from, and draw benefit from, a lack of roots. I was hardly settled from a native back-region. I was born in a corridor between the Vosges and the Jura. My father was a journalist.Thus did I have a vocation for the « in-between ». I never knew any anchoring point such as I may erect it as a space where my own figure would have come to inscribe itself almost naturally in a protecting circle…
M.M. : You've just mentioned this stage so specific of one's childhood about which one can only experience nostalgia. Gombrowicz said that « man is sewn of childhood », to which one may add that the poet may be he who speaks about these links, at least does he explore them, question them, work with them. A nostalgia of the « green paradises of childhood loves » evidenced by many of your prose works with a « concern » for the poem, as you so rightly say. Would you say that such a nostalgia is an essential component of lyricism as you view it ?
J.-M.M. : I find it difficult to identify the nature of such a nostalgia. It must be personal, surely ; its genealogy should be traced by going into my personal history but only my books can do so… Is this some kind of collective nostalgia ? Surely. We are all the citizens of the end of a millenium. Is such a nostalgia linked with some kind of situation of today's poetry ? I may also be possible. I find it quite difficult to disentangle those elements…
M.M. : Well, if we generalize a little more : is it possible to imagine some kind of writing without nostalgia ?
J.-M.M. : I don't think so. I have the impression that there's always some mourning in writing. It's moonlighting work. One never writes with the South Seas ink. It's a way of looking at the world around us, at the other beings, and language itself surges from the way a forlorn child looks, from the child's way of looking at things in such a way as we have lost it, a way we know we have lost it, i.e. in the memory may be of what he had hoped or demanded that very look and in precisely the very mourning of what he couldn't see. That's why this link with the child which you mentioned when quoting Gombrowicz is not just a nostalgic relationship but also a feverish, nay a nervous one, some kind of impatience, of desire, the child would remain in us the far-away emblem or the hearth thereof…
M.M. : … which could be linked with the title of one of your books, Papers crumpled with impatience, a book in whose introduction you say &endash; if I remember well -, that it is precisely some kind of biography or rather some kind of impatience of urges, or even biographical yearnings. A book tormented by such an impatience, working on it, which is the desire common both to the child and to the poet. But to complete my previous question, I wonder if there wouldn't be a contradiction between the necessary forwardness of the poem and that feeling almost as necessary of nostalgia. Could both necessities be reconciled and linked ?
J.-M.M. : It reminds me of the image of the bow or of the lyre, of the contrary poles, those two extremities between which chords are braced. It's one of my most favourite image. There's an old Greek word referring to the art of throwing perfectly the javelins : it's the word « stochastics », i.e. the art of aiming right. Sometimes people say that the painter was able to catch the right colour, that the musician was able to find the right note, and that the poet was able to find the right word. But on what does the rightness hold to but to the tension of the instrument. Were it the lyre or the bow, it always rests on the tension of contraries. That's why there is pain. Sometimes people scoff and remind us ironically that some kind of a mythology of pain is closely tied to poetic creation. I believe it is tied to a trial of contradiction, to a tension between the power of lamentation and the power of celebration, between the will to adhere, to put in a token appearance &endash; because one needs it to be able to exist, just like that, to be here, in one's body, at this very present moment in one's life and in one's language too -, and at the same time one feels compelled to go back in time, towards one's past, and towards melancholy. Presently, I rather work with a strong desire and will to strangle the elegiac, i.e. to brutalize those powers of melancholy by confronting them with some space, some other speed of writing liable to harm them. But I am constantly aware of that ever-recurring return to an elegiac feeling, forever feeding that kind of interior workmanship of writing.
M.M. : Whether one does or does not (consciously or not) give more than its due to nostalgia or to the forward of the poem, to the baffling of the poem, something very often comes back in your writing, i.e. the concern, the worry, the desire for an everlasting beginning of what would then be poetic writing. Since it's also something very dear to my mind, and that I believe to be extremely important, could you be a little more precise on that notion of an augural gesture, of an augural decision in your work.
J.-M.M. : It is indeeed a very important idea. A Sunday afternoon in one's mind opens with these words : « it's always the beginning, the same uncertain adventure ». A little later, Don't look for my heart any longer begins with : « that which goes astray has no name ». In both cases, the book opens with a neutral demonstrative. In both cases, the inaugural gesture of writing means going towards the undeterminate. When editing A Sunday afternoon in one's mind in its new re-written, recomposed form, I realized to what extent that book was that of mourning the origins, and of a repetition of the beginnings. The latter is the book which, in my personal mythology, now, at this stage, erects and sets the very background of writing and delineates its outlines. It is the book in which the topic of the primary is more than ever present through, for example, the evocation of my grand-mother. Or rather of both my grand-mothers : the one who was a primary school-teacher in Franche-Comté and who taught me how to write, and the other who lived in the country in Lorraine and who may have incarnated a chimera of a native country. The book follows those figures of mourning, it skims through images of my childhood and lets in the adventure of writing in such a process of indefinite repetitions of beginnings. The task of covering up and of erasure of signs comes to take the place, so to say, of that kind of chimera of the origins that everyone carries in himself. Because the origin is precisely what one cannot reach. I thus left the last word at the end of the book as a counter-epigraph to a quotation by Valéry : I have an idea of a maximum of hidden origin always waiting in me. This obscure source of the origin, of the primary, both impossible to be disentangled and wasteful, feeds writing.
M.M. : According to the publishers, when one looks at your bibliography, there's a certain confusion in the ranking of your books between prose, poetry or miscellanies, e.g. Locturnes is sometimes ranked in the Miscellanies, sometimes not. You, yourself do willingly gather all your books that are neither essays nor miscellanies in the twofold denomination of prose and poetry which is significant. truly, and in this doing very much like Michaux (« genres are enemies which never fail to hit you if you fail to hit them yourself ») and, like most contemporaries, since the the border line which traditionally used to separate the literary genres is no longer pertinent according to you. For all that, wouldn't there be any longer any line separating prose from poetry ?
J.-M.M. : To come back to what I was saying a little while ago, such is the very problem I wish to tackle. If such thing as poetry does exist, there should exist something called the poetical and liable to be identified as such. Now, I still don't know. I am still trying to find out what may the poetical be. The second observation which I would make and which might bring some attempt to answer your question would be to interpret in terms of speed the difference between prose and poetry. That is poetry begins where prose goes faster or much more slowly. When prose moves faster, it's like the engine of a car that would be racing or like a bolting horse. at that moment, the subject is assailed by far too many contrary things to be said on the very same and single topic, too many paradoxes, to many sensations or postulations crowding in him. He can no longer articulate in the same way. Conversely, poetry may also be an extraordinary slowing down, and I refer to Michaux's La Ralentie, i.e. that very poem that voices precisely some kind of depression and all of a sudden the pulse of life beats much more slowly. Here it is in terms of rhythm that I may make the distinction for lack of a better one at present.
M.M. : In order to move further on and start from the previous question, lets admit that I would now know nothing about you. Let me open your book entitled The Imaginary writer and if I read at random, I may believe I am if not reading a novel, at least reading a narrative and then very quickly I realize that there's no narrative threadbare properly speaking. How can one define the poetics of that book, what is its relationship, on the one hand, to fiction and, on the other, to autobiography ? What was your intention when you wrote it ?
J.-M.M. : First, let me say something in general. In all my books there are moments of poetry and moments of prose. In writing, I enjoy very much the multifariousness of speeds, as one would say of an engine. There are moments when speed rises, moments when it moves more slowly, moments when it stabilizes. As regards more precisely The imaginary writer, that book comes very close to an autobiography and sometimes to a confession. Its writing tries both to penetrate the maze of a subject and to undertake some kind of an inventory of what a writer might be. I tried to delineate the imaginary portrait of that creature who does not exist : i.e. the writer. One may point at writers, or give some of his books to read, but the writer as such does not exist. It's a function, or a notion. I had wished to get into the portrait of a notion, so to say. Thus, I conceived him as a patchwork of many persons in one, pottering about some kind of imaginary autobiography into which my own features may have slipped. And at the same time when that kind of scanning of the imaginary delineation of any writer's existence, i.e. a kind of writing in its tighest conjunction with a single existence. In this text, one can see a few moments &endash; I'd rather say « flashes » - of poetry, i.e. places through which writing in some way comes « into » the writer : entrances, exists, displacements. First to beget into the world that creature which, in a first part, I had made a strenuous effort to create as well I could, to delineate, first mixing with my own features to other features and which, in the second part, is displacing itself, moves right and left, gathers a few fragments of reality, i.e. what I call my photographies and post cards. And there, writing changes, i.e. one is no longer reading a novel, neither a narrative as such, nor an autobiography, one reads what was called in the 70's a « text » made of different jointed modalities of writing working together.
M.M. : To move on to the next scene, let me ask a more general question on the relationships you wish to have with the novel genre. First, two remarks borrowed from The bees of the invisible : in the last part entitled the abridged dictionary of the infinite, you say that you have written it for the characters in a novel which I won't write. Then, when referring to the term « novel », you take up again Valéry's famous and ironical beginning : « the marchioness left at 5. ». Hence, do you refuse to give in to the novel through bias as the surrealists, at least at the beginning, pretended to, or is it the novel that refuses itself to you ?
J.-M.M. : It's rather the novel that refuses itself to me. I am no good at telling stories. I have quite a weak vision of the novel. I have read too few of them among our contemporaries to know a few of those answers to this unavoidable problem of the marchioness leaving at 5. that had been asked to Valéry and to all those who write verse, since no one knows when she goes back in. How can one tackle those sentences, those tool-sentences ?
M.M. : … yes, except that in En lisant, en écrivant Julien Gracq who often ponders again and again on that problem of the relationships between poetry and the novel, critized &endash; as you know it &endash; very pertinently Valéry's analysis…
J.-M.M. : … yes, I do agree. But let's say, as far as I am concerned, there are quite a few different things at stake : I don't know how to tell stories, I don't know how to handle these sentences ; besides I live in a far too disjointed temporality and the novel implies some kind of continuity, a timing of work or a way of working which is not mine, and then I would add that surely my own touch, my own prose speed doesn't go all that well with the novel genre.
M.M. : We know it and you yourself have repeated it : since Baudelaire, the poet is also a critic. This concern, which is also a very contemporary one, turns you into an essayist, into a critic, but also never leaves you both in your poems and in your prose works. When all is said, such a desire for lucidity on the ins and outs of the poem, doesn't this questioning on the nature of the very poetical run the risk of waning the desire of the poem as such ? How do you feel that personally ?
J.-M.M. : If I reckon the kind of texts I write these days (an extract of these will be published in this issue), such a critical concern doesn't wane in me the poetical appetite. Only it spares my writing from both some kind of innocence and some kind of pretention. That is it re-evaluates constantly what should or should not be done. It works like a gauge, at least like some worrying concern exercizing itself with reference to the very task of writing. For example, it may spare me from falling into some formalistic bias, for I do believe that the reading of, the study which I carry out about the works of other poets leads me to be aware that practicing such or such kind of poetry rather than any other doesn't have much sense …
M.M. : … it relativizes things …
J.-M.M. : That's right. It relativizes our task and that leads me to belong to a more global articulation process, so one might say : i.e. never leave anything aside, never to take the side of a form rather than an other, to remain in the very concern of language in some way.
M.M. : About your critical essays, if one understands easily that you may have been interested in Michaux or in Jacques Réda, your latest book was far more unexpected : i.e. the commentary of René Char's Fureur & Mystère, published in the Foliothèque.
J.-M.M. : It's true that it was an order. It was a challenge which I wanted to pick up, but at the same time, it belongs to that interest, to that global curiosity which I may have towards modern poetry. This being said, I would not necessarily write on all authors. If I wanted to be more precise, I would add that I had my Char period when I was a student in the 70's, when I started going to university. It's an important discovery when one's studies stopped learning anything new after Apollinaire. All at once (apart from Prévert whom I had read a little) I was jumping from Apollinaire to Char who represented a language, a specific relationship to the metaphor which I knew absolutely nothing about, I had never heard of along my studies. Hence, was I deeply moved. Hence working on him a year ago was also an opportunity to work again on the reading which I might have carried out when I was younger, to reassess all that …
M.M. : … then, after such a re-reading, what kind of judgement would you pass on this work today ? Is he still the same ? …
J.-M.M. : … I won't allow myself to judge, for there were far too many easy criticisms on Char. I believe his poetry is a very powerful one. It's a kind of poetry in which I didn't like all that much the twitch, the kind of authority, an ethical committal mandate of the poet, I felt very awkward. Now, reading him behind his bias, behind such an almost statue-like image one has about Char, I found again the element of uncertainty, of frailty. This is what enabled me to carry this book towards its end with out being all at once sick or weary when confronted to this work. To me, he remains one of the greatest poets of the century. It would be the same with Saint-John Perse : if I were offered to write on Saint-John Perse, even if I am not sure to want it since I have far too many things to do, I'd say yes just to have the opportunity to take stock of the situation on Saint-John Perse.
M.M. : When you study Jacques Réda, you very well show the path he followed, how taking the side of the flesh, such a voice seems to be opposed to those who dig and scoop out right to the bone ; how his ambition &endash; and that more and more &endash; is « to make verse or prose reach their full musical energy ». Now up to now, I believe, you've mainly explored another direction : neither the blank writing with its huge gaps, its huge blanks between words, neither a will as strong as Jacques Réda's to « make music » from language, but rather a willingly muffled prose as far as its sonorous effects are concerned (which would be closer to a recitative rather than to the purple passage and syntactically atonic. Can you say a few words about that path ?
J.-M.M. : Yes, I would call it prose as the exercize of a critical lyricism, i.e. both the place where a certain kind of content would be articulated and expressed , not necessarily an emotional one but a moral, ethical, imaginary substance, nay all the latter together, that need to find a way of propping themselves on to images, figures, objects and at the same time a critical return on that expression. But from that very point of view I am not very far from Réda, when he chose the traditional French rime to develop that idea whereas I would rather use prose work. What's at stake is to unfold more, to go in more resolutely into the prosaic of such a prosaic substance towards which ther's a twofold work to be carried out, a task of unveiling and a task of ransacking. In The Imaginary writer, I write that in every writer there's a shopgirl's heart. Such a substance on which someone like Prigent may be ironical, and so on. That highly subjective, sentimental and elegiac side of literature always seems to me to be established in one way or other in writing. The question at stake being to know it will dealt with. What kind of difficulties should it grasp ?
M.M. : Let's ponder a little more on that question of the prosaic which seems important to me. In an interview, Jacques Roubaud, after having reminded us that the « formal ways through which one distinguishes between poetry and what is is not really vary according to time and places", Jacques Roubaud stresses that there must be two different orders, then he adds : « the choice of specific border lines is the poets' business. The recommendation that may be made to them is never to give up poetry and wipe it out or close it in prose. » What do you think of that after what you've just told us and with regards to your own progress ?
J.-M.M. : I would answer to him that poetry is in prose, that poetry moves through prose, that poetry is the speed of prose, that I cannot conceive poetry outside an extremely conflict like, lively, changing, mobile relationship with prose. I willingly play on the confusion between both meanings : the prosaic, i.e. the objects of the world, the substance of history, what happens, what takes place, such is prose. Prose is in the newspapers, one would say. I believe that in the coming months, I'll adopt a new technique. Yesterday evening I saw Moretti's film, Intimate Diary, and I noted the idea that I too should move about with newspaper clippings…
M.M. : … not riding a scooter, I hope ! (laughs)
J.-M.M. : … not riding a scooter (laughs), but I will indeed use more of these clippings. There lies prose. Besides, prose is also (as Molière put it) what is not written in verse. Then I play on the confusion of both these terms: the zero degree of a maximum pre-formalized language and the zero degree of what happens. Such is the place where the literal takes place for me, in all this ordinary substance of both things and words mixed together. Now, as I was saying before, the speeds, emergencies, urges and precipitates, cristallizations start which entail that sometimes it is in the speed of the verse line that it will come through whereas at other moments, it is this reflexivity process that will come first. There's a quotation I'd like to use here, a quotation from the painter Eugène Leroi who said that there were two kinds of artists : «artists of the window pane and artists of the mirror ». What belongs to the mirror-like is all that refers to reflexivity, a reflexivity of the subject or reflexivity of language looking at its own self, watching its reflections. It's one of the dimensions of literature, it's a dimension of our relationship to language. Language is what enables us reflexivity. But at the same time the pane (and I would add either door or window) is what enables to go towards the outside, to clutch and to grasp all that surges, all that takes place to let it in, to give it a right to be established in the poem, may be to make it them afterwards work mirror-like… Here is where I stand in that very tension between the pane and the mirror. I don't know whether, when I say all that I truly answer your question, but once more I would add that my formal choices are never biased. If some form surges, or must surge, it is from this triangle : a subject, a world and the evolution of their relationships.
M.M. : I think that behind Roubaud's quotation there's his whole conception of poetry and his own way to work as an extremely formalistic mathematician-poet…
J.-M.M. : Yes, but there is all the same with him fundamentally a Defence and Illustration of poetry. He is a traditional man. He is far more traditionalist than I may be. He worked on the troubadours. He believes in poetry. I am no such strong believer. I don't know what poetry is. I don't have any poetry to defend. That's why up to a point if poetry goes and loses itself into prose, undoes itself in it, if it has to, anyhow we won't decide. We only move along history. Any theoretical proposal wishing in some way to inflect towards a direction or another seems ridiculous to me.
M.M. : We all know that it never takes place like that.
J.-M.M. : A minute ago, you were mentioning the critical feeling and what it may have developed in me. It unfolds in me the feeling that we do not produce literature truly in the range of its forms in order to make choices, to gather works, and so on … Before anything might be said, it's the history in which we live that makes us write like that at a given moment. Valéry said once that the weariness of the senses creates, etc… anything can be a source of creation but for he who signs and endorses the work, that kind of pessimism or distancing of the figure of the poet would I surely make mine. I don't particularly wish to save the poet's figure. What's his weight in reality, in the history of his times, what's the right weight of that poet ? I don't know really.
M.M. : A while ago, when mentioning René Char, you told us that you had been particularly interested in him and in his work when you were a student in the 70's when starting your university years. Now you've just insisted on the weight of a period in which one lives and its impact on one's literary production. Well then, even if the trial poetry starts to itself is not recent, there still remains that the hegemony of human sciences on the field of knowing and the pregnancy of formalist and linguistic patterns in the 60's and 70's have radicalised the suspicion that the poet directs towards the exercise of poetry writing. In order to make things a little more simple, would you say that you went through that period which I would call the Tel-Quellian ?
J.-M.M. : I went through that as I was writing a PhD thesis on lyricism in a time when it was too far from being the fashion. I wrote it very precisely between 1976 (when I took the agrégation) and 1986. Writing a PhD on lyricism did not mean starting a Defence and Illustration of lyricism but studying a notion nobody has taken the pains to study backwards a vast array of preoccupations that may have still been those in those days even if it was the time when one was leaving them behind. From those years, I haven't kept much. I was a student in a rather classical institution, i.e. the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and then I taught in a secondary school, a technical school. I saw all that from quite far. Quite a few books fell from my hands when I tried to read them. Denis Roche never really interested me ; Marcelin Pleynet did, at least a few things. In those years, did I however work as a critic. I worked for La Quinzaine quite regularly. Hence I read quite a few contemporary authors, I discovered one after the other people like Hoquard, like Pierre Royet-Journaud, I wrote quite a few papers on Jabès. With that we left the structuralists and went back to the true poets. In was indeed interested in those works, those true modernists (though I believe the term doesn't mean much), to those works which were at the leading edge in the evolution, in the history of recent poetry. For the rest, I must confess that Tel Quel and the way they worked did not seem to me to have much to do with poetry.
M.M. : Hence, during those years, with an unusual way of answering to the dominant stream of those days, you were writing your PhD on lyricism, a thesis which, if I read carefully enough A Morning English way,then Orpheus' voice &endash; takes into account a few aspects of modernity in those days. Since lyricism, as you analyze it, becomes in fact a very wide, welcoming, open, we could even say porous, notion …
J.-M.M. : … absolutely.
M.M. : … one even wonders whether lyricism, as you understand it, were not similarily some kind of definition of poetry, some kind of a non-definition, when all is said ?
J.-M.M. : … absolutely. What I found precisely interesting was to work on a concept that had no scientific pertinence, entirely suspect, entirely old-fashioned, impossible to qualify. It meant working &endash; and there was I indeed on the leading edge with reference to all these discourses &endash; on an anti-notion which was the only kind of notion that seemed to me liable to be adequate to present some kind of a discourse on poetry. And in the word lyricism, I found the maximum tension taking place between the originary (the lyre), i.e. the emblematic instrument and the neologism (a late comer since it only appeared in the 19th century in our language) both in order to point to an active principle at work in any poetical adventure. Whether it's being defined from the high or from the low, no matter how, but which is indeed its core.
M.M. : Another notion that may be difficult to define, another core for any poetical venture could be the reference to the notion of what is sacred, i.e. what which could just as well be that of the infinite, of mystery, of what we elude, of what slips from us … For you, writing, and you repeat it to us several times, may be the only possible seat nowadays if not of the sacred at least of the nostalgia of the sacred. Must we therefore consider poetry as some kind of Godless religion ?
J.-M.M. : Without a God, without the Gospels, without saints, without … A church uncertain of its God, Cioran said.
M.M. : You also wrote on Leon Zack, an instinct for the heavens…
J.-M.M. : … Mallarmé's words …
M.M. : The notion of an elsewhere, of something demanding to be fulfilled, the same way a void should be fulfilled. Is poetry liable to exist without this movement towards, without such an aspiration towards the infinite, without the backcloth of the sacred ? In other words, would a materialist writing of poetry be possible ?
J.-M.M. : I don't quite know. I don't even know at all ! (laughs). I wonder whether the poetic text would not reintroduce, in some way or other (and by saying that, I refer to texts like Guillevic's which may be understood as small materialist poems, or Ponge's) some kind of religion which every time it profanes. A religion very simply understood in its etymological meaning, i.e. « linked » to some kind of elementary religion, i.e. linked to a back-ground, a back-world so to say a way of digging deeper and deeper (in the very presentation of the most ordinary object, nay the most familiar) until one places it on a horizon of a back-world, or giving through it a feeling of back-world. From that point of view, there would surely be something of the sacred or of the religious. Sacred in the same way as one keeps away from its herd the animal destined for the sacrifice, such an object is all of a sudden isolated from ordinary reality and takes a new stress one wasn't previously aware of and which lets somme irrational be caught sight of. But that's the way of asking the question. I, personally would tackle the problem the other way round and say that whatever unbelief or agnosticism is ours, it is obvious that what is at stake is both at the same time the language and the question asked of the being himself, of an absence of meaning in one's existence, this very riddle that we exist precisely at this very moment, hence poetry is what questions our being in language in that very space that it also questions. And I don't see how it may bring any answers. I can't figure it delineating sacred figures or giving away consolation prizes. On the contrary, I view it as radicalizing the questioning which is ours on the very void we find ourselves. And sometimes we can't prevent language in us to claim for its due. Such is that fabulous power that enables words to voice things that don't exist. Through words we have access to what does not exist. When Rimbaud says : « I hanged gold chains between stars », even with a space shuttle, it can be pretty difficult ! Language enables us to say love words, it enables us to give information but it also enables us to say what is not, to invent what is not. Fundamentally, it has to proceed with that very dimension. Hence poetry is where such a power of questioning and claiming may rest. One comes to register one's complaint as one does at the police station because there may have been some kind of theft somewhere (of God, of the sacred, of anything. No matter who stole it ! Whether he either left it alone or ever existed !). Somewhere a feeling of theft exists : a theft of one's childhood, of unity, of the origin, I don't know. One comes to register one's complaint in language and at the same time the trial is started. A whole procedure starts according to writing and a verdict has to be returned. What's that verdict ? It's the text and then it starts all over again, and so on … This is how I view things a little. I don't know whether the metaphor I chose hereby is the right one. But what I mean is that there is a dimension in us that despite such or such partisans of any poetical solution or bias : there is that and that too. Without which life has not much meaning. I don't know what feeds most strongly this desire to write, whether it aims at stitching up what's broken, or at exasperating, or at stirring the knife in the wound of what has been torn.
M.M. : You know Cocteau's word : « I am a lie who tells the truth », or Aragon's « once upon a time reality » in Le Paysan de Paris. How do you locate yourself with reference to both these phrases going towards the same direction ?
J.-M.M. : I have a lot of respect for poets like Yves Bonnefoy or Philippe Jaccottet who locate themselves in a truth of speech…
M.M : … yes indeed a truth of speech, or moral truth, the truth of the poet locating himself in the world…
J.-M.M. : That's it. I would be different from them on that very point claiming as I do in poetry the right to say anything (which is not obvious). A right for some kind of exorbitant, attentive, rushed language with its weaknesses. To use once again my metaphors of driving, I would say that it is a strange story of a controlled skid, that is there's both abandonment and recapture, of vaporization and concentration. One has only to have written just a little to know that the stuff of writing is as much made of will as of relinquishment to language. One yields to easiness, one is caught by indraughts, then one recaptures, one re-examines, one starts again : it's some kind of making the clutch slip, of skidding … The truth of speech is for me a way of going in, of delving totally in the flux of all those contradictions, paradoxes and approximations which language may cart along. That's why I lift the embargo on the image, on prose, on feeling, on all that. I wish to get all that into the poem and that it would bring some substance back from it, gives it some new air and some conflict so that things may once again take place. I view it as a romanesque and a dramatic place both at the same time. The maximum of substance, the maximum of characters. Here do I speak from a strange place since only those who have read two or three extracts from the huge text I am writing at present can understand what I mean. But I think of people like Whitman, like Pound, a lot of American poets.
M.M. : In what way does this new approach enable you truly to « say everything » ?
J.-M.M. : Public domain, i.e. the book I am working at, as its title indicates, is open as much as it can be to everything that takes place, to everything that's being said, to what I feel, to what I see, to what crosses the street in front of me, just like that. Which also implies a relative surpassing of the author, some kind of pleasure to join the world. I am well aware that in a text like that, with the form I have chosen everything is possible. I let the « huge unquestionable opulence » be uttered, as one would say. I ramsack poetry. I do believe that hereby as a result in some way or other I settle up with it &endash; at least for my own self &endash; it's the sack of the Winter Palace. Now I can't conceive the exercize of poetry in any other way than aiming at vast projects.
M.M. : Why then ? For having used too many brief forms ?
J.-M.M. : Yes, may be …
M.M. : To get out from the writing of fragments which you claimed you had belonged to ?
J.-M.M. : Yes indeed, I am just leaving from that very period which was after all my melancholic period. The fragment is first and foremost melancholic.
M.M. : … melancholic ? Yet, as you say yourself somewhere, the fragment is a beginning, an everlasting beginning…
J.-M.M. : Yes, but Public Domain, that poem I am speaking about, is at the same time a particle accelerator, e.g. I write that « photographies of naked women are fighters » ; it's a particle or « it's not sure that the flea on the mouse fears the cat » (Laughs). That's rather funny. It's a text that wishes to be funny at times but following on in speed. Let's imagine a gymnast doing rolls, after his roll, a cart-wheel, well things like that. It is a question of sequences, of fades in-fades out and of seeing how all this holds together. Once more it's no formalistic research, it's plainly things as they happen to me, signals as they come to me, it's my own « W.E.B. », my net. « My metaphors in armed bands are making Xerox copies » : I showed that yesterday to my daughter who burst in laughter and said « you're really doing anything these days » (laughs). « The poet is a billposter ». Such are fragments, they could be isolated, or turned into titles, but they are linked or chained together in some way.
M.M. : I will also find some kind of link. You've just said : « they could be either isolated or made titles of ». About that, I thought I'd noticed with you two things that have to do with that. You'll tell me whether I am right or wrong…
J.-M.M. : I can see it coming and I know it's good …
M.M. : First thing : Reading in The Portrait of an Ephemereal the first collection : « it could take place on a beach … », something I had already previously felt all of a sudden became quite obvious to me : every text begins with one (or two, or three) opening sentences usually quite short, quite basic (subject, verb, complement) which are like the exposition of a theme which for each page (i.e. the rest of the text) you develop variations. Second thing which I thought I had noticed is that you have a certain tendency towards aphorisms.
J.-M.M. : As regards your first remark, it refers to something I tried to systematize even in A History of blue. We know, since we've heard about it, that love exists, then, off we go, I go a little deeper almost as if it were some kind of painting whose title were above it rather than under it. It's a way to illustrate Valéry's idea according to which lyricism were the development of an introductory exclamation and the development that follows. Besides, where I knew you were heading to, and your analysis is quite right, is that indeed I have the feeling, more and more, that lyricism aims towards the maxim form for it is its transport, its point of cristallization. What is at stake is to locate a target, lying so to say in an undeterminate, in that extraordinary fluctuating and rather virtual space which is that of the poetical. I have the impression that the task of writing consists in locating the signs, in grasping them. There's one of Michaux's verbs which I like very much and that is « to grasp ». And the maxim is here to fall as often as it makes the energies fall. One shoots rockets and then each rocket falls down again. It's a fall. It may be a melancholic one. It's the clot falling. And at the same time the maxim is the point where it becomes concrete. it represents everything that has been looked for after groping around, and it inscribes itself all of a sudden.
M.M. : But isn't this tendency to aphorism a little contradictory with the speed requested by poetry you were just mentioning, with its kind of urge ? The maxim is after all a moral truth in one way or other aiming at some kind of timelessness…
J.-M.M. : Yes, a timeless truth but placed in such a context, surging in such an environment so to say that it becomes infinitely relativized. One has the impression that man is a multiplier of truths. The space, the process with which I am working at present reaches such an accumulation of maxims of that kind that is a little like Michaux's « slices » of knowledge. Now that from that , further than the feeling of a relativity of things, a kind of ethics of energy, or something of that kind, could surge, that's indeed a possivbility. I have no idea of whereto it aims, whether it is only part of a ramsacking process of whether it aims at a true positiveness. Anyhow, we were quoting Char a little while ago, well we seem here to be quite far from a logic of aphorism that would truths : the poem is the achieved love of a desire having remained a desire.
M.M. : Yes, all the more so as with Char there's always some kind of utterance.
J.-M.M. : … yes an utterance. Here on the contrary he appears as a mad prophet, someone far more desperate…
M.M. : Let's change of subject. A while ago, you mentioned Moretti's Private Diary. Personally I did enjoy a lot watching that film, particularly the first two movements …
J.-M.M. : Yes, the Vespa ride in Rome and then the Odyssey revised and corrected through the islands …
M.M. : for then in the third part, where he ironically mentions his illness, I feel that the film loses some of its fantasy and universality. But my question is not on that very film but on images in general, those brought to us both by the cinema and by the TV and other audio-visual media today. If I want to question you on that it's because, as I was reading the first page of The portrait of an ephemereal, I was struck by the pregnancy and the clarity of the frame installed even if you use the conditional mode. One feels that one is on a stage with a theater back-cloth or on the setting of a movie of an utmost precision, even if it is more that of a dream than some realistic setting. Hence my question : what influence may the imperialism or film or TV images have on the imaginary world of contemporary poets and of you in particular ?
J.-M.M. : I belong to a generation that witnessed the birth of TV. I hardly ever go to the movies for lack of time, but whenever I go, I am always very very impressed and struck by the impact of the images. I am a very good audience. Thus this continuous presence of images through TV or the cinema must have entailed, as was surely the case with many people of my generation, some very banal effect of my relationship to images. When one lives in such a negative system, there's no possibility of a choice of icons. That's why I can't think the image or question it in the same way as Yves Bonnefoy does for example. He doesn't trust it since he ponders about it in terms of a surrealist logic. If one wishes to think about an image towards which one is bound to locate oneself, one should immediately think in terms of the posters one sees in the streets, images seen on TV : those images are different from those used by the surrealists. It's a totally different logic. Images surge from prose, through the prosaic, if I may say so. They are part and parcel of our daily experience, of sollicitations in which we live. Hence, it necessarily compels me to « frame » and to « figure » within this contemporary logic, i.e. both seduce with images, tear images, force them to substitute one for the other, very quickly, but never fix myself but in those small threaded metaphors which may seem rather incongruous, never fix myself, nor focus on imaginary objects becoming specific icons all of a sudden in which my representation of the world or my relationship to meaning were to start dwelling.
M.M. : And yet, even if it doesn't look like the ethical and emotional relationship to the iconic, which would remind us of Yves Bonnefoy's with some painters, in so far as whichever may their attitudes in life be, devalued images of our daily life do find their ways into the poem, they thus become scrutinized and criticized …
J.-M.M. : As far as I am concerned, I have less of a museum-like or literary relationship to the image issue than a banal, daily one : My questions are more : « what's my relationship to the stereotype ? how can I use it ? » Such is for me the true question today.
M.M. : … further beyond that of the image, such is the very problem which Flaubert tried to tackle for himself, i.e. the true question of the modern world, of a civilzation of the mass media…
J.-M.M. : Absolutely. I am interested in the cultural stereotypes all the more as I am an image consumer myself as all my contemporaries are too. Whether we want it or not, we are image-consumers. When I write « photographies of naked women are fighters stopped at the red lights », this is exactly what I mean. One has only to drive one's car to be compelled to face a pair of Lou bras. Images are here. They come and fetch us whether we like it or not. Hence, how will they be found in writing. They can force their way in so long as you open the door to them. They are ready to rush in and be inscribed on paper, such is the task of finding a meaning, such os the task of reflexivity. As I said before, there's a dialectics of the pane and of the mirror : through the window things, sounds, colours, objects, come in and then ther's the task of writing which is the task of reflexivity on it. It's also the subject's as he locates himself in front of all that substance he has to tackle with. Such is writing, but it also becomes poetry when it takes shape with brutality and speed. This is where I make the link…
M.M. : To conclude, let me ask a slightly impertinent question : You've put Michaux's famous quotation as an epigraph of Prunings : « With your defects, don't be hasty, don't you ever chastise them and correct them too quickly. What would you pu in their place ? » What were or what are, according to you, if not your defects, at least your propensities, easinesses, tendencies which you fight or believe you should fight ?
J.-M.M. : When, on the one hand, I think of works like Yves Bonnefoy's, Philippe Jaccottet's, René Char's, Saint-John Perse's which refer haughty images of the poet and of his mission, of his duties, of his ethics, when, on the other hand, I consider my work (more and more) so much caught in the contemporary, trying to echo it rather than differentiating from it, when I ponder over all that, I would say : a lack of seriousness. I belong to a generation (i.e. that of the media) quite different, and by far, from that of the poets I've just quoted. And that's the true difficulty. I must do something that should be both truly inscribed in our times, that should have some meaning for me (i.e. help me to locate myself in this time and then to be able to dialogue with others through the books I write) and yet, at the same time, wish to endeavour some kind of critical work. Indeed here is the true difficulty.
© Jean-Michel Maulpoix et Michel Méresse, 1996, all rights reserved. |
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