There is something courageous about publishing an essay on poetry. Nowadays, in fact, this last genus is the most neglected of all. He does find a few friends when he wraps himself in the popular tinsel of slam, but his real readers are extremely rare. “Poetry today is an art in crisis, precarious and threatened”, writes the critic Robert Melançon in For an impure poetry (Boreal, 2015). Carrying out a serious reflection on gender is therefore an enterprise condemned to the shadows.
Retired literature professor, critic and poet, Daniel Guénette does not care about this absence of light. Poetry, for him, gives us “a glimpse of what life is, what we are” and allows us to “raise ourselves to a certain degree of truth”. In all discretion, Guénette has therefore been writing a blog since 2019 whose title of questionable taste – Dédé blanc-bec – hides treasures.
A fine reader of poetry, the writer imposes himself there as a refined, erudite and friendly critic whose style, limpid and elegant, is similar to that of raised conversation. These qualities make him a rarity in the Quebec literary landscape.
Total transparency, as colleague Lisée would say: I don’t know Guénette personally, but I had the privilege of seeing two of my recent works, including a collection of poetry, commented on on his blog. I was deeply moved by it. I had never received such fair, penetrating, and beautiful criticism. Every author carries within him the deep desire to be truly understood. Guénette, without knowing me, I repeat, filled me. It creates links. Many other Quebec poets can surely say the same.
In The Orpheus complex (Nota bene, 2023, 186 pages), the writer is more of an essayist than a critic by offering “a way of walking” in which he tries “to grasp the nature of poetry”. Faithful to his modest and exploratory approach, he strolls in the company of the poets and thinkers he loves in order to delimit his subject, while cultivating the concern not to confine it.
Even if he says he has a simple idea of poetry, he nevertheless admits not being able to define his deep “being” and finally adds that he hopes to get there one day, drawing inspiration in particular from the Ancients, who have so much tell us if we know how to listen to them.
According to Robert Melançon, defining poetry is an impossible task. “It covers such diverse realities,” he writes, “that one cannot propose a definition without it being possible to immediately oppose it with a poem that contradicts it. The audacious minds frequented by Guénette, however, do not shrink from the challenge.
Paul Valéry, in a famous comparison, associates prose with walking, with its trajectory in a straight line, and says that poetry is more a matter of dance. In prose, language is used; in poetry, by notably playing on the links between meaning and sound, we create “a language within language”. Michel Tournier goes somewhat in the same direction by suggesting that prose goes from idea to words, whereas poetry begins with words and brings out ideas.
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, poetry is an “upside-down language”. For the prose writer, language is an instrument, a sign, which leads to ideas, to the world, to things. For the poet, words are things, which explains, according to Sartre, why poetry escapes “definable meaning” and therefore does not lend itself well to commitment, valued by the philosopher. Guénette disputes this thesis. Sartre, he explains, by making the poet a child locked up in language games, is mistaken. Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Michèle Lalonde and Gaston Miron, to name but a few, “testified to the political powers of poetry”.
Guénette also examines nursery rhymes and prayers from childhood, as well as Yves Bonnefoy’s theses according to which poetry, by freeing words from the ideological gangue that covers them, would allow us to approach a “full presence in the world”. However, it was with the classic Fénelon (1651-1715) that he found the ideas that suited him best.
The poet, wrote the latter, must have something to say, which relates to “the most deeply human values”, and he must seek to say it in the natural tone of conversation, in “a sublime so familiar, so sweet and so simple that everyone is at first tempted to believe that he would have found it without difficulty, although few men are able to find it”.
A supporter of “clear poems” that tell “simple truths”, Guénette finds in poetry an antidote “to the drowsiness of [ses] faculties” or, as Valéry writes, a discourse “laden with more meaning, and mingled with more music, than ordinary language carries and can carry”. Fénelon would have liked this admirable book.