La poésie entière est préposition

by Claude Royet-Journoud

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Genres: Poetry

56 pages

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Claude Royet-Journoud was born in 1941 in Lyon, France. His publications in French include, from Gallimard, Le Renversement, La Notion d'Obstacle, Les Objects contiennent l'infini, & Les Natures indivisibles (1972, 1978, 1983, 1997). He was also co-founder & co-editor, along with Anne-Marie Albiach & Michel Couturier, of the journal Siècle à mains. With Emmanuel Hocquard, he has edited two anthologies of American poetry, 21+1: Poètes améicains d'aujourd'hui, & 49+1: nouveaux poètes américains.

Publication in English include: The Crowded Circle (tr. Keith Waldrop; Le Collet de Buffle, Edinburgh, G.B., 1973), Reversal (tr. Keith Waldrop; Hellcoal Press / Brown University, Providence, 1973); Até (tr. Keith Waldrop; Blue Guitar Books (Plymouth) & Imprint Edition (Hong Kong), 1981); "The Maternal Drape" or the Resititution (tr. Charles Bernstein; Awede, 1985), The Notion of Obstacle (tr. Keith Waldrop; Awede, 1985), Objects Contain the Infinite (tr. Keith Waldrop; Awede, 1995), A Descriptive Method (tr. Keith Waldrop; The Post Apollo Press, 1995), i.e. (tr. Keith Waldrop; Burning Deck, Providence, 1995), The Right Wall of the Heart Effaced (tr. Keith Waldrop; Duration Press, 1999.

His work has also appeared in Acts, Conjunctions, Temblor, o-blek, New Directions, Moving Letters, Lingo, with interviews appearing in Lingo # 4, Towards a New Poetics (ed. Serge Gavronsky, University of California Press), & Code of Signals (ed. Michael Palmer, North Point Press).

His work been translated into Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Romanian.

He currently lives in Paris.

Reviews

[SuperNova]

Hur stor del av min förståelse av den här boken (och poesi överlag) kommer från min egen erfarenhet och tankar, kontra texten i sig? Kan man läsa poesi utan att känna den?

[Rowan]

A few years ago in the AWP catalog I saw a call for submissions of aphorisms. It intrigued me, in part because I’d just come across a book by a poet I was translating that was entirely aphorisms, and had just written a review of a book that worked with aphorisms (though not exclusively) that I thought was wonderfully done. And though I didn’t submit anything, and don’t remember which journal it was (though I wish I did – would love to find and read the issue – anyone?) it stayed in the back of my mind.

Aphorisms as a poetic form raises interesting questions about poignancy, insight, length, originality and explanation. The sound-bite quality they have seem incredibly useful for a lot of different applications, and of course appealing to a short-attention-span more-is-better mentality (culturally speaking). Aphorisms are the tweets and status updates of poetic thinking.

The risk they run is balancing on that line between poignancy and cliché, between insight and grandiosity and pretension. Their success at first glance seems to hinge on the originality of the idea, rather than the language used to express it, something that tends more towards philosophy than poetry in my mind. But then aphorisms work best at the intersection between philosophy and poetry – the idea drawing from the philosophical reflection, but the lack of explanation, the insistence on absorption rather than proof draws from poetry.

[Read the rest: http://alluringlyshort.com/2012/11/28...]

[Tom]

Elliptical, aphoristic, poetic discussion of poetry, sweetly translated by Keith Waldrop.