Dossier:
Contemporary Poetry in France

by Cole Swensen

It makes no sense to speak of contemporary French poetry—except in the sense that, increasingly, all literature that doesn’t fit into any other category gets called poetry, a trend I highly champion, as it broadens the definition of the art. And that’s also what contemporary French poets are doing: broadening the definition of la poésie to include and encourage an ever-diversifying array of approaches and forms. The one constant is exploration, and much of that is eroding the boundaries of the genre, of genre itself, and even of media.

Much pressure has been put on the line in contemporary French poetry, to such an extent that for many writers it has disappeared altogether as a formal principle, and in many cases that pressure has been transferred to syntax, either underscored through elaborately formal or distorted sentence structures or spotlighted through inventive violations and innovations. Where the line does remain, it is often given a performative stance and at times, in turn, performs an immediate graphic gesture on the page.

The work we read as new today looks more like the European poetry of 100 years ago than that of either 150 or 50 years ago, a fact based in a revitalized sense of poetry’s potential political role, or at least its obligation to try for one. While honoring Mallarmé’s dictum to give “a purer meaning to the language of the tribe,” it more closely parallels a cultural project that began a little later, in the work of the early avant-garde writers at the turn of the previous century who used poetry and performance to register social resistance and to demand a different relationship between art and daily life. While today’s poets indulge less in dramatic antics than the Futurists or Dadaists did, they are equally intent on poetry’s material reality and on the paradoxical desire to release that materiality from as many limitations as possible. Much of what’s being written today also maintains the inclination toward the off-kilter, the precariously balanced, and the generally asymmetrical that marked the early 20th century avant-gardes. As with those earlier movements, this asymmetry both manifests a general incongruence with the wider society, an “ajar” that refuses complicity, and enacts an inherent restlessness that insists upon the constant restabilization that the asymmetrical guarantees.

In 1917, Victor Shklovsky, of the Russian Formalist circle Opayaz, articulated the notion of ostrananie, or of “making strange.” His discussion of ostrananie presented the disjunction increasingly prevalent in the poetry of his day in light of its social function, that of enabling its readers to see things in their unique particularity rather than as relative members of a category, but the phenomenon also, more subtly, speaks to poetry’s most ancient and constant feature, the distortion of daily language. Alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm, the mnemonic standards that separate poetry from daily language, do so by distorting that daily language, creating patterns and regularities entirely unnatural to the evolution of verbal communication. So, though radical distortion had been the rule in poetry for centuries, in Shklovsky’s day, it suddenly shifted poles, from distorting toward regularity to distorting toward irregularity, making the very principle of distortion stand out brazenly, demanding new critical treatment and inciting ever more dramatic creative experiments. The latest of these appear in the following pages.

The causes of that sudden shift have been the subject of modernist and post-modernist critiques from Benjamin and Adorno to Derrida and Deleuze; one of its results has been a relentless deconstruction and reconstruction of language in order to reveal its working parts, to highlight its mechanics to better examine its often-veiled social and political assumptions and ramifications. Much of the work presented here ‘distorts the distortions,’ playing ever deeper into the machine. This isn’t a matter of going one step further into strangeness because we’ve become habituated to the milder distortions of poetic usage; it’s a matter of choosing to distort away from predictability, or even the precedented, in order to strike at a deeper cognitive level, one that might best be called ‘intuition’ because, unlike counting syllables and stresses, we cannot objectively account for the pleasures that asymmetry and surprise afford us, though one of the pleasures of surprise is the sensation of invention and direct participation experienced by the reading mind faced with novel work. Much contemporary poetry in France capitalizes on this, using uniqueness of form to transform reading into its own creative act.

Poetry in France is continually and increasingly overflowing its borders. Though they may be unannounced or not overtly framed as such, the reader is aware of the filmic gaze, the performative body, and installation’s multi-dimensional space operating in these works to augment their life on the page. The seamless authenticity of the resulting blends comes in part from the fact that many of the writers here are also directly involved in other arts, including dance, filmmaking, performance, and photography, while others have backgrounds in art history or teach in art schools. This wide artistic engagement keeps French poetry involved in a larger conversation about the role of art, about the ways in which the production of such an essential excess can keep a society conscious of the real value of its materials as well as spotlight the actual work that aesthetics does in individual and communal life.

Communal life is important to many of the writers presented here; many are directly involved in the production of literature, running their own small presses, editing journals, working for literary centers, organizing reading series, and translating from other languages. Thus for many of them, their appearance in translation is a reciprocal, though not precisely mirroring, gesture. And with that in mind, in assembling this dossier, I was as deliberate in my choice of translators as I was in the choice of poets, for these translators constitute not only another community, but one that allows the French writing world to overflow and enter into an implicit discussion with American poetics. The history of French-American artistic friendship is long and well-detailed in a number of places, so I won’t elaborate it again here, but these translators, all of them poets themselves, are not only keeping that bi-cultural friendship alive, but also making it an operative element in American poetry, both through its influence on their own writing and through the approaches and values they transmit through their translations from the French.

A note on the arrangement of this dossier: the choice of alphabetical order is a deliberate decision not to group these writers by style, poetic concerns, geography, generation, or any other criteria, any of which would be inevitably inaccurate and reductive and would distract from the act of individual exploration that determines each body of work. I also tried, as much as possible given the nature of the poetic series, important uses of white space, and other considerations of length and shape, to give all writers the same amount of space. Feeling that the selection of the writers in itself constitutes a positive value judgment, I would like to leave it up to readers to make their own judgments from there on. I also chose writers who are not yet at all or not yet very well known in the United States. This leaves out many, many excellent, active poets whose work is crucial to the development of poetics in France, but they are left out only because their work is already available in English translations in book form through presses such as Dalkey Archive, Free Verse, Counterpath, Green Integer, Litmus Press, Ugly Duckling, Seeing Eye Books, Omnidawn, La Presse, and others.

© Cole Swensen. All rights reserved.