Ashes and Seed, Transformation of Poetry: Yves Di Manno

Final assessment of a forty-year study

Our preview of Pruning Yves Di Manno presents what is presumably the final volume of a four-decade-long poetics study, following in the footsteps of its predecessors. end quote (1999) Objets d'Amérique (2009) and Terre ni ciel (2014) examines the aims and practices of poetry in France at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. The volume gathers occasional texts—reviews, prefaces, testimonies, an interview, a feuilleton—which, through careful montage, are assembled into a deliberately fragmentary assessment: not a panorama, but, as the author says, a photo album of a life of reading that paints a different, hidden landscape of poetry.

The title says it all. “Élagage” (tree pruning, thinning) describes a twofold movement: the uncovering of little-explored paths and the cutting away of the superfluous – the rigid rhetoric, the fads, the rampant narcissism in which poetry threatens to degenerate into mere “spectacle” and a stage for displayed emotional states. The branches of the past and the dominance of established discourses are pruned so that the ground may be cleared for future generations.

At the same time, the book marks an institutional endpoint. With it, the series comes to an end. Poésie/FlammarionThe series, which Di Manno directed from 1994 to 2026, comprised 205 titles by 69 authors. The concluding note, "Dernier rappel" (Last Reawakening), interprets this farewell as a summing up of a "long awakened dream" and lends the entire volume its elegiac key. Di Manno sees the series' end as a symptom of profound societal change: in a climate shaped by screens, war, and pandemic, society is losing its appreciation for literature in the traditional sense; the novel itself is increasingly giving way to biopics, autofiction, and pre-packaged romances. Against this backdrop, the publisher saw no further basis for a poetry series—a bitter "laying down of arms," ​​which, however, does not lead Di Manno to despair.

Yves di Manno, born in 1954, is one of the most influential voices in contemporary French poetry, whose development he has helped shape since the 1970s from the perspectives of author, translator, and editor. Following early activities in the circles of literary and cultural criticism journals, as well as a formative trip to Asia, he began to develop a body of work characterized by formal openness, intercultural sensitivity, and a reflexivity informed by modernism. His poetry collections—from Les Célébrations (1980) about the long-term project Champs up to more recent works such as Lavis – explore spaces of perception between landscape, memory, and the movement of language. In parallel, di Manno developed a narrative and essayistic oeuvre in which questions of poetics, dream logics, and shifting boundaries between reality and imagination are central. His work comprises approximately thirty publications in the fields of poetry, prose, and essays.

Di Manno's role as a mediator is of particular importance: as the long-time editor of the "Poésie/Flammarion" series, he significantly shaped the canon of contemporary French poetry for decades, while his translations—especially of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and George Oppen—contributed decisively to the reception of North American modernism in France. His editorial and translation work is inseparable from his own writing, forming its poetics and resonance. Projects such as the anthology he co-edited with Isabelle Garron exemplify this. A new world: poems in France 1960-2010 (2017) underscore his ambition to remap poetic traditions and make transatlantic connections visible. Di Manno's work thus appears as a continuous attempt to redefine the possibilities of poetry within the tension between historical avant-garde, contemporary poetics, and cultural transfer.

This monumental work, spanning over 1.500 pages, offers a comprehensive overview of the development of French poetry in the second half of the 20th century. The volume brings together representative texts from over one hundred different poets, reflecting the rich diversity of the era. A chronological narrative guides the reader through the decades, illuminating the currents and upheavals in French poetry.

Architecture of a fragmentary volume

The preface “Devant les pages” sets the defensive yet combative tone: Pruning as a possible endpoint, without abandoning the impulse of resistance. The first group of works, “Quelques portraits (d'ouvrages)”, with “Choses qui gagnent à être lues” and the “Vingt notices pour le Ministère”, outlines a poetics of the periphery: literature as an ensemble of singular voices whose place lies outside institutional visibility.

The second section, “Supplément aux objets d’Amérique”, unfolds a transatlantic genealogy of modernity, in which translation and poetic origins become central – from the “XIII façons de considérer la traduction” to the studies on HD and Olson, up to the “Reverdy/Williams axis”.

The Belgian chapters, “Des extrémistes discrets,” reconstruct a tradition of clandestine subversion with Nougé, Colinet, the Piqueray brothers, and Daniel Fano. “D’autres complices” gathers portraits and reminiscences (Venaille, Albiach, Tellermann, Savitzkaya, Messagier, and others) in which poetry appears as an existential practice. The “feuilleton catastrophique” and the concluding “Codicille / Pénombres du surréalisme” further explore the reflections on authorship, political form, and the persistence of avant-garde energies.

Throughout the individual texts, tendencies emerge which Di Manno documents and defends.

Defending the art of language against spectacle

Against the "dehumanization" that doesn't even stop at literature, Di Manno defends poetry as a rigorous art of language and radically rejects the rhetoric in which many of his contemporaries have become entrenched. His counter-model is Denis Roche, whose Le Mécrit This marks the point at which poetry becomes "unacceptable" because it shatters old conventions. Here, the poem is no longer a vessel for feelings, but a linguistic object that exerts its influence through montage and harshness.

The page as a field of visual prosody

A central pillar is the shift from the auditory to the visual: the page becomes a space in which typography, spacing, and the arrangement of word blocks constitute meaning. Di Manno summarizes this in the "Reverdy/Williams axis"—in "La Lucarne ovale" and "Spring and All," he recognizes a prosodic invention without precedent in the French tradition. This line leads further to Olson's "composition by field" and understands "breath" as the unity of the verse, for which the visual form becomes the score.

Belgian savagery as subversion and refusal of the author

Belgian Surrealism serves to document a poetry that resists appropriation by the establishment and radically rejects the status of "writer." Paul Nougés L'Expérience continue It is considered one of the most unsettling books of the century; Nougé practiced a "revolution in the night" through "détournement" and appears as an overlooked precursor to Guy Debord. Christian Dotremont's logograms dissolve the boundary between writing and drawing, the Piqueray brothers combine the trivial and the grotesque with unexpected grace. Paul Colinet's journal, distributed in only a single copy. Friday This represents the thesis that the most effective intervention is often the one that happens in the shadows.

Hybridization as an intrusion of the narrative

Di Manno documents a strong tendency toward hybridization in contrast to the separation of poetry and narrative. In Daniel Fano's work (“Chocolat bleu pâle,” the “long prose texts”), a method of cutting and assembling is evident, which records contemporary disaster with objectivist coldness. Franck Venaille—through the shadows of sex and war, in “Jack-to-Jack” and the trilogy of the 1970s—penetrates the deepest layers of the self, blurring the boundary between verse and prose.

The Theatre of Writing as Female Modernity

An important corrective is the highlighting of female voices. Anne-Marie Albiach's "Mezza Voce" transforms the page into the stage of a physical, ritualistic drama; Esther Tellermann's "Guerre extrême," through the clash of ancient myths with the barbarity of the present, creates a polyphonic language beyond the isolated self. Di Manno draws a line here to HD and her "Hélène en Égypte," which allows autobiography to disappear into myth—poetry as palimpsest, as constant overwriting.

Ethnopoetics as a search for origins

Significantly influenced by Jerome Rothenberg's "Technicians of the Sacred," another approach seeks to connect with oral and non-European traditions in order to liberate poetry from its Western "prison." Armand Schwerner's "Tablets" simulate the translation of ancient clay tablets, whose gaps and damage become the actual poetic space. Serge Pey shifts the poem from paper to performance, painted sticks, and ritual acts, reclaiming it as a physical embodiment of the vision.

Levels of discrete intervention

Di Manno himself uses the term "intervention discrète à la mutation du réel" (discrete intervention in the mutation of reality). The book documents this collaboration on three interconnected levels.

As reader and critic. The texts are not neutral reviews, but acts of making visible – “portraits d’ouvrages” in the service of an “active poetics.” The gesture is always the same: a forgotten, “invisible” work is pulled from silence (Sainte-Croix-Loyseau, Champroux, Colinet, Viarre, Messagier, Grandmont). The review becomes an act of rescue and a correction of literary history against its official custodians, especially the university.

As a publisher. For over thirty-three years and 205 titles, Di Manno has acted "par l'exemple"—through the concrete book rather than through theory. The Poésie/Flammarion series itself was the thesis: that multiple writing paths are possible simultaneously and that the margins can be shifted to the center. Publishing here appears as a poetics-related act, not a business transaction.

Biographical. The codicil ends with Breton's "Lâchez tout," which literally drove the fifteen-year-old Di Manno into the streets. Thus, the earliest intervention appears at the end of the book: poetry as something that intervenes in life, not just in writing. The reversal—life's rupture first, work afterward—is the true point of his poetics.

The documented counter-canon as a rebellious enclave

The selection of texts is not arbitrary; it forms a "rebellious enclave within general literature." Three constellations support this document: The North American lineage demonstrates that the crisis of verse was solvable—form is invention, not decoration. Belgian Surrealism documents the other half, the exploration of the "inner sanctum" and an attitude of refusal, secrecy, and "joyful subversion." Finally, the contemporary "accomplices" demonstrate that this resistance lives on as a "silent confraternity," away from the stage.

Methodologically, four operations recur. Thinning as a title method: removing rhetorical deadwood to reveal the rare living shoots. Shifting the axis: not establishing a new center, but tilting the geography of reading. Montage: patiently piecing together autonomous fragments until an unexpected light emerges—a process equally applicable to poems, narratives, and criticism, and to which the book itself owes its form. And resistance through form as an ethical act: a work is worthwhile if it marks a rupture and unveils a hidden dimension of reality; formal work is never an end in itself, but a means of breaking through the screen erected by the order of discourse between world and self.

Powerlessness and efficacy

The book carries a tension that Di Manno deliberately leaves open. He doubts any direct impact of literature on the world and rejects slogans and categorization—while simultaneously believing in another, discreet efficacy of writing "with its own weapons." This is precisely why the documented interventions are so quiet: no public stage (Breton's "place publique" is inadequate), but rather patient, subterranean work whose goal is not recognition, but "altération du réel"—the alteration of perception.

So is Pruning Not merely a swan song, but a plea to continue language's unfinished adventure. The final, melancholic twist: the work ends with the closing of the series, but the rebellious corpus remains "available." With the double ending of a personal founding myth and a farewell to Flammarion, Di Manno explicitly entrusts this corpus to the readers of tomorrow, so that they, in turn, may reinvent it.

The inventory of methods preserved in the volume reveals just how concrete this “rebellious enclave” is—an arsenal from which future readers can draw. Lucien Suel, for example, writes in “Canal Mémoire” in “vers justifiés,” each line of which consists of exactly the same number of typographic characters, and even translates Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” according to this standard; Christian Gabrielle Guez Ricord pours his visionary “Cantique” entirely into verses of twenty-one syllables; Christian Dotremont, with his “logogrammes,” dissolves the boundary between writing and drawing by painting the text in one go—visible before it becomes legible—and placing the decipherable version in miniature below. Eugène Savitzkaya’s “Nouba” allows several columns of text to run in parallel and overlap; Frédéric Forte composes an entire book in inaudible alexandrines that avoid any classical caesura, and constructs an earlier one from the program booklet of a sumo tournament; Finally, Serge Pey engraves his poems on painted sticks and performs them in rituals involving broken glass and scattering of ash.

In addition, the volume documents entire publishing and outreach projects intended to serve as models for future endeavors: Juliette Valéry's series "Format américain" (1993–2006), some fifty handcrafted "chapbooks" produced on a laser printer by subscription, outside of traditional bookstores—available for the first time in 2021 as an 1120-page complete edition; the facsimile of Paul Colinet's handwritten "newspaper" "Vendredi," one hundred issues sent in a single copy to a nephew in the Congo, combining columns, collages, and colored gouaches into a book of hours; Franck Venaille's photo-novel "Deux," created in collaboration with Jacques Monory; and the Piqueray brothers' "Non Inhibited Poems," an anthology of freely invented, impossible poets. Precisely one corpus of such texts—methods, formats, forgotten works—remains "available" after the series' closure: a toolbox for the readers of tomorrow.