Abigail Lang | The Ongoing French Reception of the Objectivists

  The ties between French and American poetry are ancient and profound. In the introduction to his 1984 The Random House Book of XXth Century French Poetry, Paul Auster reminds his anglophone reader of the perennial contribution of the French language in general and French literature and poetry in particular to its British and later American counterparts, going back to John Gower and Chaucer. Focusing on the modern period, he claims that “American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French.” From the time of Baudelaire “modern British and American poets have continued to look to France…

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers | What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

FIRST PUBLISHED: DIAPHANES How could Dante be avant-garde? Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: Mr. Sollers, for 23 years you were the editor of Tel Quel, doubtless the very last important literary review that can be considered “avant-garde.” It published some of the biggest “avant-garde” writers of its time, like Pierre Guyotat, Maurice Roche, Jean-Jacques Schuhl and yourself, as well as still-unknown academics like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. You also published Pierre Boulez and Jean-Luc Godard, who, like the writers and thinkers I just mentioned, were the leading avant-garde figures in their respective fields. In 1983 you left Les Éditions du Seuil,…

riots and/or poetics [6/2018]

“[…] But here: distillation, composition, narrow-mindedness; and the oppressive summers: the heat isn’t without respite, but given that good weather is in everyone’s interests, and that everyone is a pig, I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly. […] The worst is that all of this will bother you as much as it will. It seems for the best that you read and walk as much as possible. Reason enough not to remain confined to offices and homes. Mindlessnesses must be given free reign, far from confinement. I am not about to be selling balm, but I imagine…

Jean-Marie Gleize | “Where do the dogs go?”

  ‘Où vont les chiens ? ’, ‘Where do the dogs go?’,1 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…