Talking about poetry in these turbulent times may seem out of place. Yet it is simply to change your outlook, to turn your back on the commodification of the world and beings, to celebrate the living and the beauty that surrounds us.
A few years ago, in 2012 to be precise, the magazine canopy proposed an issue entitled “Living poetically in the world”, in which appeared a magnificent text by Christian Bobin: “The contemplatives are the most resistant warriors. » In this manifesto1, he posed the figure of the poet as that of a resister to dehumanization, to the derealization of the world. “Basically, living poetically is opposed to living technically,” he wrote.
Eugène Guillevic, the poet, said the same thing: “That’s what I would call living in poetry: extending reality not by the fantastic, the marvelous, heavenly images, but by trying to live the concrete in its real dimension, living everyday life in what we can call – perhaps – the epic of reality2. A reality that can be horror, as Guillevic testifies in his poem The Charniers. “Yes, even horror can be experienced in poetry. This does not mean that poetry attenuates or weakens the horror, it perhaps means that it takes the horror to this level which means that, lived in poetry, it does not degrade”, he explained.
Make no mistake, living your life as a poet does not mean formally becoming a poet. “The poetic goes far beyond the limits of what is called ‘poetry’. […] Almost all the fiery experiences of life, the perceptions of things and beings, conceal a poetic dimension. When one takes the trouble to listen to the exuberant reverberations of reality within oneself, life seems to be transformed because it approaches a plenitude, a kind of accomplishment”, writes Jean Onimus in What is the poetic? (Poesis). To the poetic, Onimus opposes the “prosaic”, which he sees as the opposite of the real and which is synonymous with the automatic, the mechanical. The glances that sweep instead of resting, the uninhabited gestures, the worn-out words, the meaningless formulas, the mind invested in strategies and calculations. Onimus also quotes René Char, who saw the poet as “the part of man refractory to calculated projects”.
The subject is not new: “The world must be romanticized”, wrote the poet and philosopher Novalis in his eponymous work (Allia). Novalis, like Bobin or Guillevic after him, thought that “poetry is the truly absolute reality. This is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic it is, the more true it is”.
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Live your life as a poet
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