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Poetic Profile
Rémi Bouthonnier (Jennifer K. Dick, translator)
Email Interview with Rémi Bouthonnier:
Translated by Jennifer K. Dick
1) What is poetry (and its role) to you in the context of the world today?
Does poetry define itself in terms of its role or time period? If by world one means the socially utilitarian and commercial whole, then poetry has no hold over it, it isn’t even a critical expression of that. Poetry is with forceful indifference the exact opposite of the mundane and productive assembly line—it’s the opportunity for encounter. The anti-jellyfish (which can stupefy itself, paralyze). But what is poetry? An impure art which is difficult to qualify because it’s mixed up in words. It’s always about leaving a deserted connection, going from oneself towards the other, in one’s own becoming and in/towards that of the world. My attachment is less to poetry than to all forms of thought and art which invest and displace our connections to the point of violent redemption. Poetry which desires to rip jurisdictions violently apart, if it is true that poetry is searching for absolute liberty, is also polarized by a law, unwritten, secret contraction to the world as it goes on with its barbarianism. The human instant escapes all written law. It is out of that, in my opinion, that writing is born: the contradictory desire for law and for going beyond it.
2) What is the significance of the fragment for you in poetry?
The fragment is not specific to our time, but has become a form in and of itself. Liberty seeking constraint? Is there a link between line/verse and fragment? Which fragment are we speaking of? Of the aesthetic of the exploded page (where words shatter over its surface)? Of prose fragments? Of aphoristic ticks? I see in all of this a contemporary sensibility, a conception of discontinuity (of subject, of the thing, of time, etc.), it’s too obvious to even take note of. Or it’s simply that the exploded page gives the eye and ear a special organization of timbre, color and rhythm.
3) How do you feel your own work is exploring new territory?
Poetry does not progress. Leave that to political philosophies. However, poets do come from a different time. It is evidently sad to repeat what has been said before, and from this comes the desire to push the language to certain limits, but newness sought at any price leads us astray. Originality is born from slow, selfless work; the goal of all art is never beauty or newness, but to resolve aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual problems, to follow through on the task one has given oneself, there is in that an obscure motor. I explore no new territory other than the world and language, which are always new. In the narrowness of this connection, one finds occasions for freshness, our only horizon.
4) What are some of your influences as a writer? Have international poets and writers been important to you, or primarily ones writing in and from the French tradition? (In short, is international exchange between poets important, in your opinion, and how or why (not)?)
Reading others is important, from all countries and of all times, and, if possible, in the language of the other writer.
5) Where does a poem come from for you- what gets you started and moving into a poem?
I write without an outline. Yet it’s as if I were putting together a geographical map which only half-belonged to me. I follow a reflection which writing carries along, rather than an end-goal. The texts that I’ve published to date were born from a first way of writing, where matter/subject was something I strove to go beyond, thus to escape being smothered. Today, I’m operating a conversation, I try to construct based on connection (where everything happens), my only way to be saved (for the moment).
6) Many interviews in France discuss the nature of poetry versus prose. Do you see these two as separate? Do you feel that you use elements of prose or fiction in your poetry? If so, how and why?
Whenever one pits poetry and prose against one another, I respond with writing : an operation where one tends to elucidate, if one continues to make the effort, the broken, moving connection that one tries to touch with words. Fiction displaces the terrain, comforts us as it articulates frivolous and tragic moments. Or myth. Birth of archetypes. Prehistory. The question for me is not prose or poetry, but writing, that’s to say how, through words, one can get a little clarity or marvel.
7) What advice might you give to a young writer coming to you about how to keep working on their poems in a world which increasingly values only economically gainful activities?
What advice? None. Human words. What helped me, helps me to hold on, is recognition like the criticism of my elders and contemporaries; in short, a dialogue, the possibility of dialogue. Certainly I’ve noticed that there is almost no place nowadays for anything that is not productivity, efficiency. It’s a war (within oneself and outside). We carry on also because we have this last fervor, which is hope, because we know history too well to declare so easily our defeat!
