For Robin Aubert, poetry is the art form that speaks the most truth. Conversation around his 36 poems from series B.
One day, Robin Aubert attends an evening meeting at Armand Vaillancourt’s with the psychomagical Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. “At one point,” says Aubert, “I found myself face to face with Jodorowsky, to whom I said: ‘I feel blocked. Am I an actor, director, poet?” He answers me: “You are in front of a marble wall. What are you going to do to get out of this?” Well I’m going to hit, hit. He answers me: “You just have to do that.” »
That ? Robin gets up from the table and mimes a sort of little ballet step, reverence. Understand: there is no better attitude to adopt when facing the marble wall than to ignore it. The marble wall is perhaps, in any case, only a figment of the mind.
It is only during the creation ofAt the origin of a cry (2010), in which his character Hugo (Patrick Hivon) dabbles in poetry, which Robin Aubert gives himself permission to write more about and, above all, to have it read. “But the poetry has always been there,” says the man who, as a young adult, at the Cascades factory in Kingsey Falls, read The evil flowers during his breaks.
Despite two collections (Between the city and the bark in 2011 and The need of love in 2014), poetry nevertheless remains an intimate affair for him, about which he thinks a little all the time, but which he does not necessarily talk about over a drink with his boyfriends.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, THE PRESS
Robin Aubert
“A poem lessens the heaviness of gray clouds/A poem bows out in the face of imbecility//A poem charges its peaks on hatred/A poem weakens death//A poem makes nostalgia seem like a dream,” writes- he in 36 poems from series Ba title full of self-deprecation, testifying to his desire to clear his customs in the face of established poets and to point out that it is from the apparently-not-poetic-at-all that he draws his poems.
In all humility
In 36 poems from series BRobin Aubert investigates a disappearance with Jack Nicholson, observes her daughter hugging a tree, weighs the beauty of the word obsoleteremembers a slice of pizza eaten in Texas, apologizes to his friends whom he doesn’t see often enough and thinks of the foghorn which, as a child, brought him so much joy.
Between Ibiza and Ham-Nord, Lafayette and Verdun, the 51-year-old also takes the time to greet the poets Maude Veilleux and Patrice Desbiens.
“When I met my girlfriend, we read Desbiens to each other in bed,” he confides, which sounds like a poem in itself. “There is something carnal about Desbiens. »
Desbiens also remains the most significant influence on his work, if only in the humility with which he climbs on the horse of writing. “I don’t write poems/I describe places […]/I place images that entangle themselves/Without much effort/They are big girls,” he swears.
Which is both true and false. Because if his poems indeed flow by themselves, our man does more than simply describe places or memories. In the manner of his favorite author, Blaise Cendrars, Aubert pretends to name the surroundings, while he always speaks a little about his inner life and manages in one verse, like the surrealists, to “open into the spirit of the reader a drawer that he doesn’t open often, time to see if there are any stars in there.
At the big Robert’s
In 1995, Robin Aubert played in the play Eddie by Jean-Marc Dalpé, a boxer from Sudbury. A good disciple of the Actors Studio methods, the young theater graduate drove to Sudbury, where he was welcomed by the late poet and professor Robert Dickson (one of the three Ds of Franco-Ontarian poetry with Dalpé and Desbiens). , who speaks to him about the truth of poetry.
Poetry, apart from all other forms of art, is the one that speaks the most truth. In the cinema, in the novel, you speak in the form of evocations, of symbols. When you feel like telling the truth, you write the truth. That’s it.
Robin Aubert
Robin Aubert was born in Ham-Nord, in Center-du-Québec, but has something of a Franco-Ontarian poet, to the extent that, as he says, “Franco-Ontarian poetry is earth down to earth and at the same time, it’s jazzy. You hear the drums and the cymbals in the back.”
Who does Robin Aubert write for? For him, first and foremost, because poetry fades his pains, big or small. Robin Aubert also writes for her aunt Marcelle, even if she is no longer with us. “My aunt Marcelle had put my collection on her toilet bowl and that’s where she read to me, one poem at a time. There is always a part of me that writes for those who put poetry on their toilet bowl. »
36 poems from series B
The Cravan Goose
88 pages