The blossoming of meaning itself: Jean-Michel Maulpoix

Everyone knows the winners of the Prix Goncourt? That may be true for the novel prizes, which are more economically effective than any publisher's advertising. But the secondary prizes, such as those for first novels, short stories, and others, are almost completely overlooked, at least in Germany. Prix ​​Goncourt de la poésieThe Goncourt Prize, awarded annually since 1985 with four interruptions, has been bestowed upon poets such as Jacques Roubaud and Michel Deguy in the last two years, and Jean-Michel Maulpoix in 2022. One might criticize the fact that almost exclusively male poets have received the prize – such as Yves Bonnefoy (1987), Jacques Réda (1999), and Philippe Jaccottet (2003) – but this could also be due to a certain temporal shift, as these poets are ultimately honored for their life's work and not just for a single book, as is the case with the main Goncourt Prize. Among the few female poets honored are Anise Koltz (2018), Vénus Khoury-Ghata (2011), and Liliane Wouters (2000). The poetry prize has since been given the name "Robert Sabatier," the writer honored with it and long-time member of the Académie Goncourt jury, who himself was never a prize winner. We owe him, who taught poetry at the University of Paris X Nanterre, a multi-volume history of French lyric poetry from the 70s and 80s; he also published volumes of poetry himself.

In the program “Boomerang" from Radio France Inter Regarding his Goncourt Prize, Maulpoix affirms: “Poetry is first and foremost an act of presence in the world.” Even though the poet, in a footnote, refers to his latest book Flower Street (Mercure, 2022) seemingly concludes lightly with a remark about the poems as flowers, yet the book is also marked by melancholy, loss, and worry. Perhaps that is why he writes, in an affirmative way:

"Poems are flowers," it is sometimes said. Isn't that what we call a florilegium? This word makes us smile. It's about something other than the art of arranging bouquets. Every poem is a blossoming of meaning. Poetry allows pain, love, fear, and beauty to bloom in language… it brings them to light, gives them a voice, unveils them… And the closer the poem remains to the feeling, the impression, and then the blossoming that brought it forth, the more it affirms its own necessity. Perhaps writing a poem is ultimately nothing other than witnessing the moment of creation, the blossoming of meaning itself, syllable by syllable. Isn't that the opposite of speech? A poem is a living organism. It grows on the page. It animates language and awakens curiosity. It pulls words from their slumber, it awakens them, it celebrates them. ²

Jean-Michel Maulpoix is ​​also – unnoticed in Germany – this year's prize winner; he will turn 70 in November; he has held various institutional positions over the years, including as editor-in-chief of the magazine Le Nouveau Recueil, as head of the Maison des écrivains or as head of a commission at the Centre national du livre. Remarkable for a poet of this generation is his own prolific output. HomepageThe German National Library lists just five German publications in this small, but commendable collection. Leipziger Literaturverlag, in translations by Margret Millischer and Jürgen Strasser: The red swallow (2019) Footsteps in the snow (2012), a comment on Briefe an einen jungen Dichter by Rainer Maria Rilke (2010), The Ghost Writer (2009) and A story of blue (2009). The far more comprehensive Work by Maulpoix It remains to be discovered in this country. In a discussion about recent trends in poetry, the poet clearly professes his commitment to an art limited to working with language and rejects more performative, multimedia forms: “Jean-Michel Maulpoix, do you believe that expanding poetry through other art forms such as music or images carries the risk of diluting its essence? – Absolutely. I believe that poetry is all the more powerful the more it focuses on its particular medium, namely verbal language. Turning it into a play or a performance distances it from the literary work. One has to choose between striving for the dimension of performance and the goal of dissemination, and the dimension of work and poetic experience. For me, poetry presupposes silence, reading, learning, and a library to lean on. ³

A two-part poem in Maulpoix's collection Flower Street bears the title Comedies de la soif, and it is a clear, but free, intertextual reference to Rimbaud's poem of the same name from the Last version from 1872. ⁴ Hugo Friedrich wrote in Structure of modern poetry“‘Hunger’ and ‘thirst’ are frequent words in Rimbaud’s language. They are the same words that mystics and Dante once used, following biblical examples, to describe sacred longing. In Rimbaud’s work, however, the corresponding passages point towards the unquenchable.” ⁵ Thus Rimbaud's Comédie de la soif Images of the absent subterranean, of unreachable groundwater, and of unquenched thirst in a world of aridity:

Rimbaud's five-part poem ends with a longing for relief from thirst, expressed in the form of a question:

While Maulpoix uses the plural in the title, the text itself is considerably shorter and not structured as a role-playing poem. It is a reflection on the crisis of the aging poet, a perspective that would have been impossible given Rimbaud's youth. Just like the volume Flower Street Although the work includes his own rewritten, revised, and reconsidered texts, it signals a continuation of Rimbaud's work, personalizing poetry or embodying it in a (red!) cloud, and definitively stating the unquenchability of thirst:

The confident reference at the beginning of the volume also immediately raises eyebrows. Flower Street, on Guillaume Apollinaire's Areas:

I'm looking forward to a jolie street and I don't know the name
Neuve and propre du soleil elle était le clairon

I saw a pretty street this morning, but I forgot its name.
New and clean, it was the sun's horn signal

Guillaume Apollinaire, Areas, Ü: J. Hübner

In an amazing, glossary-like introduction by Maulpoix, Les 100 mots de la poésieAlongside expected terms like voice, metaphor, and verse, more surprising concepts were chosen (arranged alphabetically in French), which, upon reading, already trigger entire chains of associations with one's own understanding of poetry: "Act · Confrontation · Alexandrine · Soul · Love · Aphasia · Beauty · Mouth-to-ear · Heavenly · Flesh · Song · Ragpicker · Opportunity · Heart · Beginning · Consolation · Cut · Twilight · Criticism · Inside, Outside · Definition · Desire · Distance · Gentleness · Elegy · Enjambment · Hope, Expectation · Excess · Experience · Expression · Make · Window · Figure · Fountain · Form · Fragment · Rage · Genre · Heights · Horror · Ideal · Identity · Not-knowing · Image · Inspiration · Intensity · I · Language · Reading · Connection · Literality · Lyric · Memory · Metaphor · Meter · Death · Muse · Music · Nature · Longing · Night · Darkness · Ode · Man · Orpheus · Landscape · Achievement · Poem · Poet · Poetic Prose, Prose Poem · Reality · Gaze · Resistance · Dream · Reverie · Rhyme · Rhythm · Blood · Meaning · Sensation · Silence · Thirst · Loneliness · Sonnet · Breath · Stanza · Subjective · Sublime · Time · Tension · Touch · Translation · You · Vague · Plant · Verse · Free Verse · Bible Verse · Life · Voice”. ⁶ Here, the author regularly referred to Apollinaire, but also to other great modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Michaux. This motto now points to the epochal threshold of 1912, a time of simultaneous urbanity in Paris, of aesthetic rupture; in Maulpoix's work, this is... Flower Street This reference is continued in four parts:

• Poor suburbs
• En automne au fond du jardin
• Dans le silence de la chambre
• Flower Street

Like Apollinaire, Maulpoix alternates between free verse, prose poem, and alexandrines. In the poem Anthology The lyrical I explains in the book that it imagines this flower street in all the cities that don't exist; it is the street of dreamers, of deserters, where it never rains, where birds chatter, children sing, where promises are kept, peaceful gestures are made, and words of love are spoken: Flower StreetMaulpoix thus christens Apollinaire's unnamed street, and indeed the flower permeates his own work, also as a reference to Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, as a living form of a questionable, empty beauty:

Thus, Maulpoix leads to the keyword beauty in its constellation of one hundred words about poetry, it shows how ambivalent the poetic relationship to beauty must be for modernity:

Just as one can trace a history of hope in the pages of a poetry anthology, so too can one follow the events of a history of beauty. For a long time, beauty was confused with goodness, so that in the classical age, moral and aesthetic value were very closely intertwined. Poetry belonged to belles-lettres, that part of intellectual work concerned specifically with the expression of beauty, while the fine arts have its representation as their subject. It seems that this alliance broke radically with Charles Baudelaire: poetry plucks the poisonous flowers of evil, while beauty stands alone, cold, hard, marbled like a "dream of stone." She is insensitive and remains a goddess to whom the poet dedicates an "eternal and silent" love. This is different with Arthur Rimbaud, where in "Venus Anadyomena" she appears as on the first page of... A time in hell She is insulted, raped, and transformed into a wretched whore. Through this insult to beauty, the poet learns to welcome her again: it is not so much about rejecting her, but about subjecting her to harsh treatment. The poet will no longer torment himself against her callousness, but will appropriate it by treating her brutally. ⁷

And regarding that ideal Maulpoix leads his relationship to the Flowers of Evil From Charles Baudelaire's perspective, as a kind of parabolic movement upwards into the empty sky, the unattained ideal in this upward movement is presupposed in order to achieve beauty in the poetic revolt of the return to the world:

When the poet “writes for the emptiness of the sky” (Pierre Jean Jouve), he turns to it, driven by a powerful “instinct for the sky” (Stéphane Mallarmé), which he knows he can never satisfy. Aware that only reality exists and only “nature takes place,” Mallarmé continues to mimic in his verses the movement of an ascent for nothing and to no one. Writing, therefore, consists of projecting “the consciousness that is lacking within us, from what explodes up there” onto the page, as if into a sky. He calls this “solitary feasts at will,” a kind of rocket that, upon falling back, illuminates “the forces of life that are blind to its brilliance.” This means that, in Mallarmé’s perspective, poetry requires undergoing this movement toward the ideal, recognized as unattainable, in order to arrive at the true beauty of the world. In Charles Baudelaire's work, this is linked to violence and a force of revolt, as in the poem "L'Idéal" from the... Flowers of Evil shows. ⁸

In other poetics texts, Maulpoix also develops this poetry of reversal, which cannot provide answers or interpret meaning, but which keeps existence open:

Less singing than questioning, less inspired than inquiring, modern poetry is a weaving of words into bewilderment. Through the precision of its artistic devices, it opens language a little to our ignorance. A poet can be someone who, in the vibrancy of language, reminds us that this world is not under our control. Someone who reopens to us (in its depths) the space we thought closed off. Someone who calls upon us to set out on our journey again. He calls upon us simply to exist. […] It is thus a kind of radical reversal that we are privileged to witness in modernity: the inspired being, once protected by the gods, has become the bewildered being that protects the question. ⁹

From this perspective, Maulpoix himself comments on the incomprehensible, yet perhaps understandable to him, absence of contemporary poetry at current universities:

It must be noted that contemporary poetry is only very slowly gaining access to universities, which approach current works with caution. The weight of tradition, competitions, and essays holds sway: even in the realm of "research," there is rarely any venturing beyond the 1960s. For example, it wasn't until 1994 that the first colloquium on the work of Jacques Dupin was held at the University of Lille, at the initiative of Dominique Viart. Only Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet received earlier recognition, with some of their works being included in the programs of the Concours d'entrée aux grandes Écoles. Of the authors born in the 1930s, only Michel Deguy and Jacques Réda were the subject of major colloquia. Recognition is thus progressing slowly; penetration occurs sporadically, through this or that particular course, but one cannot say that a genuine dialogue between contemporary poetry and the university has developed. ¹⁰

Maulpoix laments that the importation of scientific models into humanities degree programs has eliminated the literary, the disruptive, the slow, and consequently, the possibility of major dissertation topics. And it is in this context that Maulpoix envisions the role of the poet in the study of literary studies:

The role of contemporary literature at the university, its vibrant presence, and the concrete integration of authors should be reconsidered so that literary activity can truly take shape there. For this to happen, the instructor would have to accept that the poet in their class will disrupt the discourse of knowledge and authority. They must welcome them as someone who brings the question of language and knowledge into sharper focus. Isn't poetry writing that pushes against the limits of language? ¹¹

In Adieux au poème (2005) Maulpoix explains the fact that neither a literary-scientific study of poetry nor a literary history of lyric poetry really exists by the fact that this development of the genre, characterized by ruptures, most precisely and relentlessly questions and criticizes itself in the poetic realm:

To my knowledge, there is no serious study on critical discourses on poetry. Nor has any been conducted. Our history Written in the truest sense. Such an analysis, however, would hold some strange surprises. One would discover how much the commentaries fluctuate between subjectivism, mysticism, spontaneity, and formalism, but also that poetry evokes both vague discourses and sharp partisanships. In the course of modernity, the gap between the rigor of the analyses undertaken by the poets themselves and the imprecision of the pronouncements made by academic tradition or professional critics seems to have widened ever further. Vague on the outside, harsh on the inside—is there any art whose history is so marked by disputes, ruptures, and manifestos as this one, and which has turned so much against itself? In an intense process of self-examination, poetry must constantly account for itself, justify itself, and answer the question of its purpose. ¹²

Reading his poetry collections, one encounters a struggle between poetry itself, time, language, existence, and even emptiness and the absence of God. Maulpoix's prose poetry stands in the tradition of an open-ended, enigmatic modernity, as exemplified by the collection Une histoire de bleu makes up:

After two books on grief, L'hirondelle rouge and Le jour venuJean-Michel Maulpoix has reclaimed a brighter overall mood here. In a conversation with Gérard Noiret, the poet explained the background of the book's title:Flower Street It can thus be understood in various ways: It is the name of the street where I live in a suburb of Strasbourg, it is a metaphor for the collection, it is a bouquet of the texts offered, it is also the flowering avenues of the cemetery on All Saints' Day. Incidentally, the book revolves around an earlier text to which I am still very attached, "Cimetière" (Cemetery), which for a long time was called "Toussaint" (All Saints' Day). In my mind, this book marks a lyrical pause, but it is also an act of remembrance. ¹³

The poem by Maulpoix, which may initially seem inconspicuous and is part of the latest poetry collection Flower Street who gave his name to our 2022 Goncourt Prize winner leaves behind the academic erudition of stacks of books and seeks, beyond the schmaltzy apology, how the avant-garde finds art in life:

1. JMM, “Qu'est-ce que la poésie ? ou que dire de la poésie ?”, in: ibid., Adieux au poème (Paris: Corti, 2005).>>>
2. "« Les poèmes sont des fleurs », dit-on parfois. Ne parle-t-on de florilège? Ce mot fait sourire. Il y va d'autre chose que d'un art des bouquets. Chaque poème est une éclosion de sens. La poésie fait éclore dans la langue la douleur, l'amour, l'angoisse, la beauté…, elle les fait apparaître, leur prête voix, les révèle… Et plus the poem reste proche de la sensation, de l'impression, puis de l'éclosion quii ont donné naissance, plus il affirme sa nécessité propre n'est-ce en definitely que cela, thunder à assister au moment de la naissance, à l'éclosion même du sens, syllabe après syllabe. N'est-ce pas tout le contraire du discours? A poem is a living organism. The pousse on the paper. The anime has a language and a curiosity. Il sort les mots de leur torpeur, il les réveille, il les fête.” YMM, note, in other words, Flower Street (Paris: Mercure de France, 2022.) >>>
3. "Jean-Michel Maulpoix, estimez-vous qu'augmenter the poem of other forms of art comme la music or the image present a risk of diluer son essence? – Tout à fait. Je pense que la poésie est d'autant plus forte qu'elle est concentrate sur son médium particulier, autrement dit le langage verbal. La transformer en spectacle ou performance l'éloigne de l'œuvre littéraire. The choice is between the research of the dimension of spectacle and the object of diffusion and the dimension of work and experience of poetry. Pour moi, the poetry suppose du silence, de la lecture, un apprentissage et une bibliothèque à laquelle s'adosser.” The poetry profits from the poem for its renewal? Radio France Culture, "Le Temps du débat“, August 19, 2022.>>>
4. For information on thirst in Rimbaud, see, for example, Hermann H. Wetzel. Rimbaud's poetry: An attempt to "embrace harsh reality" (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 121f. and 131.>>>
5. Hugo Friedrich, Structure of modern poetry, expanded new edition (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1976), 72.>>>
6. “acte affrontement alexandrin âme amour aphasie beauté bouchoreille céleste chair chant chiffonier circonstance cœur commencement consolation coupe crépuscule critique dedans, dehors définition désir distance douceur élégie enjambement espoir, espérance · excès · expérience · expression · faire · fenêtre · figure · fontaine · forme · fragment · fureur · genre · hauteurs · horreur · idéal · identité · ignorance · image · inspiration · intensité · je · langue · lecture · lien · littéralisme · lyrisme · mémoire · métaphore · mètre · mort muse · musique · nature · nostalgie · nuit · obscurité · ode · on · Orphée · paysage · performance · poème · poète · prose poétique, poème en prose · réalité · regard · résistance · rêve · rêverie · rime · rythme · sang · sens · sensibilité · silence · soif · solitude · sonnet · souffle · strophe · subjectif · sublime · temps · tension · toucher · traduction · tu · vague · végétal · verse · vers libre · verset · vie · voix“>>>
7. "De même que l'on peut suivre, au fil des pages d'une anthologie de poèmes, une histoire de l'espoir, on y accompagne les péripéties d'une histoire de la beauté. Longtemps, elle fut confondue avec le Bien, de sorte qu'à l'âge classique valeur morale et valeur Esthétique sont très proches. La poésie appartient alors aux belles-lettres, this partie des ouvrages de l'esprit qui est plus particulièrement l'expression du beau, tout comme les beaux-arts ont pour objet sa représentation. la Poésie cueille les vénéneuses fleurs du mal, cependant que la beauté se dresse seule, froide, dure, marmoréenne comme un “rêve de pierre”. Insensible, she demeure une déesse à laquelle le poet voue un amour « éternel et muet ». It is also known to Arthur Rimbaud that he was injured, violent, transformed into a miserable cat, in the "Venus anadyomène" on the first page of theA season in Hell. C'est en insultant la beauté que the poet apprend à la saluer de nouveau: il ne s'agit pas tant de l'éconduire que de lui infliger un rude traitement. The poet is not more than meurtrir against the son's insensibility, he is appropriated in brutality.” YMM, Les 100 mots de la poésie, “beauté”.>>>
8. "Si le poet « écrit pour le vide des cieux » (Pierre Jean Jouve), il se tourne vers lui, mu par un puissant « instinct de ciel » (Stéphane Mallarmé) dont il sait qu'il ne parviendra jamais à le satisfaire. Conscient que la réalité seule existse et que seule « la nature a lieu », Mallarmé, dans ses verse, continue de mimer le movement d'une élévation pour rien et vers personne. Écrire consiste alors à projeter sur la page comme dans un ciel « le conscient manque chez nous de qui là-haut éclate » C'est là ce qu'il appelle « des fêtes à volonté et solitaires », des Sorts of fusées that retombant viennent éclairer « les forces de la vie aveugles à leur splendeur ». C'est dire qu'en poésie, selon la perspective mallarméenne, il faut passer par ce mouvement vers l'idéal, reconnu as inaccessible, pour accéder à la réelle beauté du monde. Chez Charles Baudelaire, his attache to the violence and a force of revolt, is what the watch of the poem Flowers of Evil Portant ce title, “L’Idéal”.” YMM, Les 100 mots de la poésie, “ideal”.>>>
9. "Moins chantante qu'interrogative, moins inspiration que questionneuse, la poésie moderne est un tissage de mots dans la perplexité. Par la précision de ses tours, elle entrouvre un peu la langue sur notre ignorance. Peut être dit poete, celui qui nous rappelle, dans le vif du langage, que ce monde n'est pas maîtrisé. Celui qui nous rouvre (en sa profondeur) cet espace que nous croyions fermé. Celui qui nous remettre en chemin. Celui qui nous enjoint d'exister, tout simplement […] C'est ainsi à une espèce de retournement radical que la modernity nous donne à assister: l'inspiré naguère protégé des dieux est devenu l'être perplexe qui protège la question." JMM, “Qu'est-ce que la poésie ? ou que dire de la poésie ?”, in: ibid., Adieux au poème (Paris: Corti, 2005).>>>
10. "Force est de constater que la poésie contemporaine n'a que très lentement accès à l'université qui ne constitue qu'avec prudence les oeuvres actuales en objets d'études. Poids de la tradition, des concours et des dissertations: même en matière de “recherche", on s'aventure assezz rarement au-delà des années 1960… Il a par example fallu attendedre 1994 pour voir le premier colloque sur l'œuvre de Jacques Dupin se tenir à l'université de Lille, à l'initiative de Dominique Viart Seuls Yves Bonnefoy et Philippe Jaccottet ont connu une reconnaissance plus precoce, en voyant notamment certaines de leurs œuvres inscrites aux programs des Concours d'entrée aux grandes Ecoles. Parmi les auteurs nés dans les années trente, il n'est guère que Michel Deguy or Jacques Réda for avoir fait l'objet de colloques importants. La reconnaissance est donc lente, l'imprégnation se fait de manière aléatoire, à la faveur de tel ou tel enseignement particulier, mais on ne peut pas dire qu'un véritable dialogue assidu se soit instauré entre la poésie contemporaine et l'université !” JMM, “Université & Poésie”, Other (April 2001), “Zigzag poésie”.>>>
11. “Il conviendrait de penser différemment la part de la littérature contemporaine à l'université, sa présence vivante, la circulation concrète des auteurs, de manière à ce que le fait littéraire y prenne corps. Il faudrait pour cela que l'enseignant accepte de voir le poete arriver dans "Son cours comme celui qui va perturber le discours du savoir et de l'autorité. Qu'il le reçoive comme celui avec qui la question du langage et de la connaissance s'aggrave, n'est-ce pas this écriture qui vient buter les limites du langage?" JMM, “Université & Poésie”, Other (April 2001), “Zigzag poésie”.>>>
12. "Il n'existe pas, à ma connaissance, de sérieuse étude des discours critiques sur la poésie. Nulle history, a proper speaker, not an été écrite. Celle-ci pourtant réserverait d'étranges surprises. On and verifierait combines the comments oscillating between subjectivism, mysticism, spontaneism and formalism; mais on y découvrirait également que la poésie suscite autant de vagues discours que de partis pris transchants. Tout au long de l'époque moderne, the ensemble that the fossé n'ait cessé de se creuser between the rigueur des analyzes conduites par les poetes eux-mêmes et the character approximatif des propos tenus par la tradition universitaire ou par les critiques de profession. Vague au dehors, dur au dedans, est-il un art qui ait vu autant que celui-là son histoire jalonnée de querelles, de ruptures et de manifestes, ni qui se soit autant retourné contre lui-même ? En procès intense avec elle-même, la poésie doit sans cesse rendre des comptes, s'auto justifier et répondre à la question de son pourquoi.” JMM, “Qu'est-ce que la poésie ? ou que dire de la poésie ?”, in: ibid., Adieux au poème (Paris: Corti, 2005).>>>
13. "Flower Street There are also other ways of doing things: this is the name of the street or the habitation in the Banlieue de Strasbourg, this is a metaphor for the recueil, this is a bouquet of texts offered, which also includes all the flowers in the cemetery in Toussaint. D'ailleurs, the livre tourne autour d'un texte de naguère auquel je suis resté très attaché, « Cimetière », qui s'est longtemps intitulé « Toussaint ». Dans mon esprit, ce livre marque une pause lyrique, mais c'est also un travail de mémoire.” Gérard Noiret, “Entretien with Jean-Michel Maulpoix”, Waiting for Nadeau, 29. March 2022.>>>