2023-12-11 18:35:25
1. Every week, a look at the latest poetry news. Find all the articles from this meeting here.
2. “Transformation of the human condition in all branches of activity” is an extract from a speech by De Gaulle, pronounced on October 4, 1962 regarding the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage.
3. This is also the title of Frédéric Forte’s latest book.
4. This is a collection of “99 preparatory notes”.
5. The form of the 99 preparatory notes is located “between the poem and the essay”, explains the Oulipo websiteof which Frédéric Forte is one of the members.
6. It is presented as a numbered list of sentences more or less circumscribing the subject announced in its title.
7. For example, in Frédéric Forte’s book, the 99 preparatory notes for Wonderland combine the poet’s notations, quotes from Lewis Carroll and extracts from the Words of Geography dictionary.
8. It is a form that one could say is made of mixtures, sometimes close to that of miscellaneous.
9. (At this point, the reader of this article wonders if the author of this article will go so far as to write 99 notes as well.)
10. (At this point, the author of this article wonders this too.)
11. (Don’t lie: you just scrolled to check if the author of this article succeeded.)
12. Frédéric Forte was born in Toulouse in 1973. He has been a member of Oulipo since 2005.
13. It is to him that we owe this form of the 99 preparatory notes; a fairly flexible shape as a constraint.
14. It is, he says in the book, “what comes closest, in poetry, to thought (mine)”.
15. Flexible, perhaps, but it must nevertheless respond to its title: it must therefore contain 99 notes (my god, the author of this article said to himself: 84 again).
16. Why 99? This is a very Oulipian figure: there are 99 stylistic exercises in Raymond Queneau, 99 chapters in Life Instructions, by Georges Perec, etc.
17. In Transformation of the human condition in all branches of activity, there are fourteen poems divided into two quatrains and two tercets (with an interlude in the middle): the book thus obeys the classic structure of a sonnet.
18. (Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to abandon this absurd attempt to reach the 99 preparatory notes here and write a good old article instead?)
19. (But, come on, come on: if there is a poetic form that lends itself to the subject of journalism, it is the 99 preparatory notes.)
30. The book is not a treatise on each of the subjects it addresses; rather, it follows the path of a thought: it thus shares, in a way, a greater truth, giving an account of things as they appear to us when we look at them.
31. That is to say with the permanent zapping of our brain.
32. Frédéric Forte’s book addresses several “branches of human activity”: “local commerce,” “the idea of the North,” “an object from my office,” “me (in real life)”…
33. Without forgetting a (hilarious) poem dedicated to the German detective series The Fox.
34. “Do the following experiment: watch one episode of The Fox per day for 355 days then take a 10-day vacation in Bavaria.”
35. (Who noticed that we subtly went from 19 to 30? No one.)
36. Frédéric Forte’s book puts forward some great truths: “The world is round and local commerce is parallelepiped.”
38. Or again: “You can always mentally click on a cloud: nothing happens.”
41. One of the poems in the book, 99 preparatory notes for a book of contemporary poetry, is made up, Forte explains, of extracts from reviews of his first book (Discography) written by third grade students.
43. For example: “The author seems to want to reproduce music with words.”
49. Or again: “It is certain that no one will understand this book except the author and other poets.”
53. (Please ignore the numbering. This is a completely outdated convention.)
57. The form of the 99 preparatory notes also very often constitutes the very material of the poem: each one is both an illustration and a redefinition of its potentiality.
60. As in the 99 Preparatory Notes for a Betrayal: “The 99 Preparatory Notes for a Betrayal are easily translatable into one language or another, no problem with that.”
63. But both the book and the form can also be illusions: one could believe that they respond each time to this objective of reporting a truth.
68. The poem of the 99 preparatory notes to me (in real life) would then constitute an autobiographical attempt, in which Forte would admit: “I happened to humiliate someone in front of everyone.”
81. Or: “When I concentrate, the world can collapse around me.”
86. Or even: “When I go out at night, I always wear very sexy underwear.”
89. But the trap into which we could fall is cleared in the notes of the book: far from any confession, the author has taken the sentences of this poem entirely from the questions of a lame psychological test.
91. At least that is what he claims.
95. Note that Frédéric Forte will be this Tuesday, December 12 at 7 p.m. at the Maison de la voix de Paris to present his book.
97. (We’re almost there!)
98. (Cheating? What do you mean cheating?)
99. Frédéric Forte, Transformation of the human condition in all branches of activity, POL editions, 160 pages, €17
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