Au-delà des avant-gardes. Lettre au jeune poète que je me sens redevenir au retour d’un voyage en Europe centrale

• Main Author: Jacques Darras
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut des Amériques 2017-07-01
• Series: IdeAs : Idées d’Amériques
• Subjects: Poetry; publishing; Rainer Maria Rilke; poetic formalism; poetic avant-garde
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/1938

This paper is simultaneously reflexive, polemic and poetic as it raises the central issues of poetry’s status in today’s world. The author expresses his discomfort with the devaluation of the poetic text in times of the merchandization of culture and of the transformation of presses into business ventures. He also worries about the increasing isolation of an elitist poetry based on hermeticism and confidentiality. He takes the reader back to a European tradition, found in Rilke notably, that assigns other missions to the poem. Committed to its present times and its political and economic conditions, poetry must battle on the same grounds as all the arts to address an audience beyond the narrow circles of poetry specialists. Through the invention of new forms that coincide with today’s world, such as slam poetry, the poem can find (again) the channels of its widest distribution, whereby the poet opens new ways and discovers new orders.