Contemporary French Poetics

Treasury of poems and prose extracts by Max Jacob, Saint-John Perse, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, five more. Excellent English translations on facing pages.

A quiet revolution is taking place in avant-garde French poetry and prose. In this collection of twelve interviews with some of France's most important poets and writers, Serge Gavronsky introduces American readers to these exciting new developments. As Gavronsky explains, a neolyricism is now replacing the formalism of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In his substantial introduction, Gavronsky notes how the ideological definition of writing (écriture) has given way to more open forms of writing. Human experiences of the most ordinary kinds are finding a place in the text. These interviews offer a view of the poets' and writers' creative processes and range over such topics as current literary theory, the impact of American poetry in France, and the place of feminism in contemporary French writing. Each interview is accompanied by samples of the writer's work in French and in Gavronsky's English translations. Toward a New Poetics provides a highly informative cultural and critical perspective on contemporary writing in France, introducing us to works which are now transforming the idea of literature itself.

Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry offers a new theoretical approach and historical perspective on the remarkable upsurge in creative poetic practices in France that have challenged traditional definitions of poetry and of the lyric. Focusing on the work of Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Emmanuel Hocquard, Franck Leibovici, Anne Portugal and Denis Roche, this book provides an analysis of the most influential poets in French poetry of the last few decades. It contextualizes the theoretical models that inform their investigations, analyzing them alongside the history of the avant-garde and the heated theoretical debates that have taken place over whether to continue or bring an end to the lyric. Systematically addressing the various strategies employed by these poets and drawing on reception theory and cognitive studies, Jeff Barda argues that French radical poetics re-evaluates the lyric in cognitive terms beyond the personal. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first-century forms of experimental writing and the connections between literature and the arts today.

Contemporary French poetry is unique in that it places a great emphasis on language itself. In this book, Jean-Jacques Thomas and Steven Winspur focus on the linguistic aspects of recent poems written in French. From Apollinaire and Eluard to the Oulipians, from the spacialists to Yves Bonnefoy and Andrée Chedid, from Max Jacob and Saint-John Perse to Edouard Glissant and Denis Roche, this book analyzes the innovations crafted by more than fifty writers. With its eleven chapters and extensive bibliography, this is the most comprehensive English-language introduction to French poetry of the twentieth century.

A beautifully jacketed hardcover collection of verse by French-speaking poets from cultures across the globe, spanning the ages from medieval to modern. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS. From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today’s rising stars mingling with the great writers of past centuries: La Fontaine, François Villon, Christine de Pizan, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and many more. Here, too, are representatives of the modern francophone world, encompassing Lebanese, Tunisian, Senegalese, and Belgian poets, including such notable writers as Léopold Senghor, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, and Hédi Kaddour. Finally, this anthology showcases a wide range of the English language’s finest translators—including such renowned poet-translators as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, and Derek Mahon—in a dazzling tribute to the splendors of French poetry.

In this bilingual anthology, editor and translator Simpson selects those masterpieces of French poetry that formed the taste of generations of readers throughout the world. Here are the moderns of 1848, the Symbolist poets of the turn of the century, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists who flourished in the 1930's. Also included are biographies of the poets and descriptions of main literary movements. --Story Line Press.

Over the last forty years, contemporary French poetry has been living in a state of crisis. Pronounced dead - or worse, irrelevant - it has sought to reassert its value, define its current specificity, and delineate its difference from the poetic practices of the past. But what are the defining contours of poetry today, given the sheer variety of practices that make up the contemporary field? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's discussion of minor literature, which explores the relationship between literature, language and power, Daisy Sainsbury argues that one unifying feature is the presence of a 'minor poetics'. Through close readings of three important poets - Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Christophe Tarkos - she examines how these three successive generations of linguistically experimental poets disrupt both literary and non-literary discourses, making the major minor, and redefining the political potential of poetic language in the process. Daisy Sainsbury is an independent scholar based in Paris.

This anthology is the companion volume to The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry, the aim of which was to give detailed preliminary help with the problems of poetic appreciation. The fourteen poets represented here provide a varied and exciting introduction to what is probably the richest century of French poetry, from 1850 to 1950. Hugo, the colossus of the nineteenth century, whose work gives new resonance and vitality to imaginative vision, opens the anthology, and Michaux, the most individual and 'modern' of twentieth-century poets in that he bridges the gap between poetry and contemporary science, closes it. Almost all the major poets of the period are included: Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue from the second half of the nineteenth century; Valéry, Apollinaire, Supervielle and Eluard in the twentieth. The lesser known Cros and Desnos, fresh and spontaneous poets with an immediate appeal, invite a new look at the lyric traditions of french verse and offer an attractive new avenue for study. The choice of poems, dictated above all by their individual poetic value, reflects also the trends of recent criticism and the tastes of present-day readers. The texts are all accompanied by full notes, which not only explain local difficulties of vocabulary, syntax and expression, but lead the reader directly into the heart of the richness of theme, style and interpretation. These will prove of value not only to the student who is grappling with the basics of french verse, or is anxious to give depth to his familiarity, but to the general reader seeking to rekindle his enjoyment of French poetry. In addition, there are introductions to each poet summarizing the essence of his art, useful suggestions for further reading, and groups of dicussion topics to stimulate comparative insights and a wider responsiveness.