It was February 21, on the occasion of Missak Manouchian’s entry into the Pantheon: with his usual emphasis, curling his mustache, Arthur Teboul performed The Red Poster of Aragon. Increasingly visible in recent years, could the thirty-year-old now be our official bard? For the uninitiated, let’s remember who this contemporary Assurancetourix is. Born in 1987, Teboul is the leader of Feu! Chatterton (name found in Alfred de Vigny), undoubtedly the worst French rock group since Noir Désir. Having all the talents, he is also a successful poet. He had thus released a collection, The Weir, in March 2023: by trying automatic writing a hundred years late, Teboul had managed to fool 25,000 buyers. Hats off to the artist! At the same time, he opened a “minute poetry cabinet” on rue de Turenne in Paris. The idea? You came and sat down for a few minutes, and Teboul would give you an original text. 236 bobos paraded through this pop-up boutique. As commercialism does not spare these sensitive souls that are poets, this gives rise to a second collection, The Address. The spillway meetings, sold for 26 euros. Business is going strong for Teboul.
In the poetry section, the other big news of the month is the publication in France of a book by Maggie Nelson, Something shiny with holesreleased in the United States in 2007. Maggie Nelson is the star author of Argonautes and Blueberries, an essay where she cited a whole bunch of intellectuals (including Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida) to give the illusion that she thinks herself. With Something shiny with holes (what a nice title!), she surpasses herself. To be honest, we understood absolutely nothing from these 100 pages of pure gibberish. To believe that it is a hoax by the translator (a certain Céline Leroy) to see how many simpletons she will manage to fool. A Dadaist performance? Respect if that’s the case.
These two amusing impostures remind us of an essential text, Against the poetspublished by Witold Gombrowicz in 1951 (and later included in his Newspaper). The Polish genius mocked the world of poets, this “sublime mass of aesthetes” hiding in truth “the most desolate of the backyards known to humanity, where only bluff, lies, snobbery, stupidity and mystification reign”. Among these authors of “sophisticated charades”, in addition to Teboul and Nelson, we could include in January the obscure signatories of the petition of indignant trouvères that Sylvain Tesson sponsors the Spring of Poets. Since Gombrowicz, an update is still necessary. Let’s talk about business: between 2019 and 2023, the turnover of poetry increased in France from 10.4 million to 17.4 million euros. How to explain this craze? Here, the State supports pseudo-poets – the CNL pays them 1.2 million euros in aid each year. Added to this are various demagogic events, such as the RATP Poetry Grand Prize which invites metro users to become bards – the competition is still open and you have until April 1 (this is not a joke) to participate. More than subsidies and public transport, it is above all social networks which explain the revival of this ancient artistic form.
General poetic slump
Do you know Rupi Kaur? This Canadian “Instapoet” of Indian origin is the queen of childhood haikus. After a while, his Instagram posts (his account is followed by 5 million fans) end up forming books. After Milk and Honey, The Sun and its flowers And Home Bodyshe published Write to heal, a “poetic exercise book” sold nearly 15,000 copies in France. Baudelaire never claimed to be a coach; Rupi Kaur and others, including Pauline Bilisari, engage in personal development more or less disguisedly. Pauline Bilisari is thus the author of My House in Bloom. With the professional conscience that characterizes us, we have read this collection carefully. The word “resilience” appears ten times – it was more discreet in the works of Villon or Rimbaud. Is it really by reading so-called hypersensitive nonsense that we can get better?
Do not believe that the purpose of this article is declinist. In the general poetic slump, there remain some reasons to rejoice. We are not thinking of Rim Battal, another false institutional poet, or of the uneven collection “L’Iconopop” directed by Cécile Coulon at L’Iconoclaste, but of The Light Option by Victor Pouchet, who returns to bring wit to an editorial sector dominated by poverty. Author of two excellent novels (Why do birds die And Self-portrait as a deer), as well as children’s books, Pouchet took to the “novel-poem” in 2021 with The Great Adventure. The Light Option is in a way the continuation: between doubt and humor, a solitary thirty-year-old speaks to the absent woman, strolling between Paris and Corsica where he has his roots. Pessoa is cited in the headlines and Pouchet, never heavy or trivial, knows how to speak with emotion, finesse and fantasy about existential anguish. At the beginning of The Light Optionhe evokes “the era of very self-confident poets who believed themselves to be prophets”. Who is he thinking of? “I could go back to the figure of Orpheus,” he replies, “and go all the way to Ronsard and Hugo. I still read them and their exaltation transports me: we wouldn’t dare write that anymore today, and I like this form of assumed ridicule. But my great affection goes towards my fellow human beings, the hesitant, those who dig into their worries and their joys to find how to sing (and exist) despite everything. I would give all of Hugo for a verse by Du Bellay or by Verlaine – but such a choice would seem absurd to me. Poetry, for me, is made up of both lyrical flights and stuttering.”
On page 150 of The Light OptionPouchet pays homage to Georges Perros, the master of a certain low profile poetry, whose books have more meaning than those of Maggie Nelson: “Perros said he wrote ‘chatter with lyrical support’, he showed me the way of a poetry which tells of inner and outer life in octosyllables, a very clear and very profound poetry at the same time. ‘Living is quite overwhelming’ he wrote, and he succeeded in making the variety of these upheavals heard. His uncompromising intelligence and gentle, her deep and light despair, her sense of formula and escapes can serve as a model not only of writing but of existence. I advise everyone to read An ordinary life, his ‘poem-novel’, a generic designation that I also owe to him.” Among the living, if he excludes Rupi Kaur and Pauline Bilisari, Pouchet is not stingy with recommendations: “The last voices that moved me are those of Guillaume Decourt (who publishes at La Table Ronde), Camille Readman Prud’homme (L’Oie de Cravan), Hugo Pernet (editions Vanloo), Sophie Martin (Flammarion) and Antoine Mouton (La Contre-allée). Each mixes up the chaos of ordinary life and reconfigures it in its own way.” These names are for the most part unknown, proof that poetry remains underground. As for the too modest Victor Pouchet, if he continues to write as good books, he will end up in the Pantheon alongside the other Victor (Hugo) – and we hope for his sake that, on the day of his induction, Arthur Teboul will not come and shout.
The Address. The spillway meetingsby Arthur Teboul, Seghers, 384 p., €26. Something shiny with holes, by Maggie Nelson. Trans. from English (United States) by Céline Leroy. Editions du sous-sol, 100 p., €17. My House in Bloom, by Pauline Bilisari. Robert Laffont, 208 p., €15. The Light Option, by Victor Pouchet. Gallimard, 206 p., €20.
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