If we take up again the titles of two books of a writer
close to Olivier Cadiot, i.e. Pierre Alferi (they both
founded together the “Revue de literature générale”),
the aim becomes to “Look for a phrase” with “natural
looks”. Poetry insists in being made of the stuff of
“the moist daily movements of the body, of looking and
thinking again and again”[ « des
mouvements les plus quotidiens du corps, du regard et
de la pensée, refaits et repensés [1] »]. Poetry is
meant to be “made”. Poetry appears pierced but where its
previous voids were indicating zones of unsaid and were
producing a dramatized rhythm of reading, now they are
rather similar to note taking: i.e. a minimal elaboration, a
lacunar discourse deliberately ripped of its rhetorical
binder, thus producing its effects in a diametrically
opposed way to the lyrical tradition. Drawings,
typographical games, musical quotations (Olivier Cadiot
worked with Pascal Dusapin, the composer) and quotations in
foreign languages, strengthen such an editing montage
both heterogeneous and recreational. The last section of
Olivier Cadiot’s “L’art poetic’” is called
“Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid will for ever be
courageaous”. The latter are both heroes familiar to
children’s books and serve as a starting point of some
kind of novel-poem, unable to be reduced to a simplified genre,
composed of a summary, eight short chapters half a page long
and an epilogue. Now the only story hereby told is truly a
grammatical one [ “Cependant la mère pleurer
(Imparfait.Ind) de joie en voir (Part. prés.) la politesse
de l’étranger. Comme nous faire (Imparf.
Ind.) ceci, un jeune homme approcher (Passé simple)
».] : « Yet, the mother to cry (Indicative
perfect) with joy to see (Present participle) the politeness
of the foreigner. As we to do (Indicative perfect) this, a
young man to approach (Past simple).” Hence the reader
must obey the offered exercises which attract his attention
on to the stereotypes of the adventure stories.
Strangely enough, such a falsely childish relationship to
language and fiction made a fortune in poetry in the last
few years. It is to be found with authors as different as
Nathalie Quintane, Christophe Tarkos, Eric Sautou, Sandra
Moussampès, Vincent Tholomé or Ariane Dreyfus, to quote
only a few names. I could take here a short example with
Vincent Tholomé’s book published by “Carte Blanche”
publishers in the “Prodromes” Collection directed
by Christian Prigent whose major intention is to maintain
“the energy of the beginnings that previously enabled a
new debate to enter language” (Prigent). Thus an
energy of the beginnings is here signified through the title
as much as it is diffracted thematically and reiterated
formally in the work. It is thus a writing all in impulses
and interpellations
called forth as close as possible to a primary speech of
today (whose writing recaptures rhythm and deliberately
aggravates the syncopations) both with the prosaic everyday
and its decomposition, its hiccups, its mildews. Sometimes
it does seem quite complacently regressive – but what
represent the term complacent here when it is indeed in the
writer’s intention to bust language and “shitify”
it, according to a tradition started with Jarry. Bang thus
suggests some kind of mumbling and bogging down, a strain
for nothing, a tautological writing which not only broods
but also closes itself onto itself almost as if it were a
scratched record…
Here are we extremely close to the “trash” tendency
of some French poetry today which is resolutely anti-lyrical.
But it not only deflates or oblates lyricism: it grasps the
real in its lowest, in its ground level, in its coarseness
and incoherence. Rather than resting on the side of writing,
it now turns towards an enacting of texts found amid raw
documents, cuttings and patchworks, ready-made, or
literary workshops, nay mere sonorous performances, close to
installation in painting. At this stage, contemporary poetry
is close to plastic arts and quite late seems to reach a
close encounter with attempts that had been long ago
inaugurated on the side of art.
