Pierre Vinclair, Torn Ideas. Tests & interviews

The Snatched ideas collect forty essays published between 2015 and 2020. Of varying length, method and tone (from scientific articles to more ‘pataphysical ramblings), they concern the politics of literature; the translation ; questions of image and rhythm; the art of the sonnet; modern revivals of ancient epics; the figure of the wolf; grammatical poetry; the face to face of the poem with the catastrophe; the why and how of the address; the prose poem; the new poetry of the USA; the art of correspondence in the Renaissance; the novel and the epic; the nature of literary genres; Chinese poetry in France; the poetics of contingency; the ecological action of the poem; the way Islam is seen in the West; as well as the works of Nathalie Quintane; George Perros; Denis Roche and Pierre Guyotat; Gary Snyder and Romain Bertrand; Guillaume Metayer; Eliot Weinberger; Francois Bégaudeau; Sophia Martin; Emmanuel Hocquard; Laurent Albarracin; Ben Lerner and Claudia Rankine; Jean-Christophe Bailly; Alice Oswald, Matthew Francis & Dajlit Nagra; Roland Barthes ; Emmanuel Carrere; Raymond Roussel; Jean-Paul de Dadelsen; Joseph Conrad; Jean-Claude Pinson; Eugene Savitzkaya; Armelle Leclercq; Jean Racine; Ezra Pound; Ernest Seton, Sophie Loizeau and Nikolai Zabolotski; as well as interviews with Guillaume Artous-Bouvet and Jean-Claude Pinson; Thierry Guichard; Guillaume Lecaplain; Christian Rosset; and even a tutorial explaining to the apprentice-poet how to add poems to the Shijing.

528 pages of hand-to-hand combat with the thousand-headed hydra of literature.

Most of these trials have been the subject of a first publication, in the journals Acta Fabula, Catastrophes, Diacritik, Europe, Fabula LhT, Fixxion, Liberation, Le Matricule des anges, Poezibao, Le Philosophoire, Semiotic research, Open collection, Revu (the snob and elitist review) Where Sitauds.

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Since 2015, Pierre Vinclair has embarked on an impressive cycle, finding its most visible springs in “addressed” poetry on the one hand, and in the work of form on the other. Geographic Education, published by Flammarion in 2022, is the most successful result to date. The singularity of this poetic enterprise is the reverse of an ambitious theoretical project redefining writing, its role and its modes of action on the world. The formulation of this project was played out in readings, critical essays and interviews: the ideas are always the product of a hand-to-hand fight with other works – they are only won by the snatch .

Value of poetry, politics of prose, questioning of the category of work, philosophy of literary genres, definition of strategies in the face of the destruction of ecosystems, meditation on translation and on the role of criticism: the seven chapters that the Torn Ideas form are so many dimensions of this effort, inseparably practical and theoretical, to understand what the strange activity called literature can do for us today.