Whispered desire
Let’s talk about night, fury and poetry does not stick only to the poetry of the 18 authors approached, but also to their novels, to what feeds their production. Gérald Gaudet gets away with it perfectly, adapting his style of questioning and his approach, both literary and human, to each one. A book of guaranteed discoveries.
To be convinced of this, it is a question of putting the last two interviews of the book opposite each other, one with Pierre Ouellet and the other with Joséphine Bacon. The first maintains a highly intellectual approach where the Greek and Roman roots of words unfold, where introspection irrigates thought: “I am nothing more when I enter a book, come out of myself and penetrate only shadows of darkness. ‘shadows, which carry me away in their weightlessness, their grace, their lightness. “
As for Joséphine Bacon, she makes us enter her condensed universe in all simplicity: “I exist in the words that I write. […] I inhabit what I write. “
The great pleasure of this book is that it develops a kaleidoscope of conceptualizations around writing. Thus this luminous observation in Chloé Savoie-Bernard: “Making a dark and sad book does not prevent there from being something luminous unfolding in it”; this lucidity in Laurence Veilleux: “Poetry is not a method of survival. It is not useful: I can live without it. Writing does not save me. “This thought is similar to that of Jean-Marc Desgent:” To think that once readers have read your text they will feel better is a little naive. “
It would be necessary to quote Élise Turcotte, François Guerrette, and how many others retained by the essayist. This collection of interviews is a tremendous asset, both for monitoring the works cited and for inviting reflection on the meaning of the poetic.
Women and shapes
It is not easy to identify the poetry of Philippe Haeck. Reading this writing from the 1970s today brings us into this first great awareness of what man is in front of woman, of what she is in front of him.
If the daily life and the call for revolution, politics in all the sauces, spread out there as a backdrop, the setting in play is essential starting from the woman. But we do not really know if this poetry, in an underlying way, does not call for the objectification of the female body.
Always ambiguous, the relationship of this poet with the female sex, of the poet with what must be understood by masculinity. We would often think he was guilty of being a man, which skews the love that spreads out between the kitchen tablecloths, the little things of domestic life and the assumed deification of the word “woman”, of its representation, of what it is. ‘he says of her.
This will often make Philippe Haeck say enormities, such as “men always dream of rape”, a phrase retained by the preface Laurance Ouellet Tremblay, from whom we would have liked a less hesitant preface. This male guilt will do so, later, in his later collection, Red ear (2001), retain this terrifying definition: “two sides of each individual: the constructive masculine and the loving feminine”.
Nevertheless, from the strict point of view of the writing, this return, four decades before us, finds to shed light on a density of poetry in prose, a formal research that cannot be denied. “The poet says / we must invent everything / let everything spring up”, without renouncing some old-fashioned and very beautiful elegance: “ten large apple trees / with white flowers loaded / dance in my fatigue”. From his great collection Pigtails (1972-1973) to Everything is fine (1975), the triviality of everyday life – coffee, waking up, the gesture of love – summons the poetic, opening this voice to the vital precariousness of human beings.
“I have corners of my heart that are breaking into blades”, he writes in “The young woman who opens her eyes”. This is the luminous fault by which to access these texts.
Short of breath
Joël Pourbaix is a poet of the break, of the cut, to which the first collections bear witness to it strongly. The rhythm of the verses is constantly undermined, producing a jerky translation of anxiety in the face of hazards, of the vibration of feelings when life withers, elusive in its quest: “I will cross the city / ready to go. ‘autopsy / reality’.
In his introduction entitled “The Thought Machine”, Vincent Lambert underlines the fact that “all of Pourbaix’s books seem struck by this flash of consciousness: the world is there, and they haven’t really come back”.
Often stuffed with axioms and aphorisms, Pourbaix’s books are covered, without weighing down, with an aura of wisdom: “dwells in the enigma of the living”, “calm does not belong to anyone”, “what the ‘we cannot say, we must give it’.
This overview of the collections published over 14 years allows us to grasp to what extent this discreet author deserves to be returned to it, delicately. His poetic expression culminates in Homesickness is an art forget, which won him the Governor General’s Award in 2014. Let us remember, in these grim days, this cruel thought: “a corpse has the brutal gift of piercing a place of its silence”. That says it all.