2023-09-18 11:29:30
In his latest collection, “Black-out”, the poet takes a break, between two episodes of the American series “Prison Break”, to better understand the digital or ecological horrors of the world around him.
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Black-out is a matter of in-between, of suspended time and of being put on pause. In short, from temporal interstices from which emerges the meditative poetry of this latest collection signed Paul de Brancion. To design the work, published by Plaine Page and illustrated with collages by Thomas Beulaguet, the poet, also a novelist, radio producer and founder of the Sarrazine magazine, undertook an exercise: either write a poem about his laptop after each episode of the American series Prison Break – “sometimes two” – based on the emotions and thoughts aroused by the series. “Black-out is the awakening, the post-series pre-post-apocalypse, writes as a preface the writer, also an organic farmer, knowing that these serials are used to compensate us for our anguish, for us to make people forget the final catastrophe through organized and suspended televisual tensions.”
This writing experience, which gives nervous verses on the state of the world fed by information and entertainment technologies (like: “the agenda certainly /becomes/expressly morbid” or “would nothingness have /put his hand on the world”), is in fact an attempt to free oneself from enslavement to screens. A “takeover” guided by exergues from classic authors of the 17th and 18th centuries (Molière, Boileau, Bossuet, La Fontaine or Rousseau) which serve as beacons in the general blackout of thought. We would forget, and this is an avenue of interpretation, that this is a fight against an imposed temporality, to which the poet responds by the search for a much more human tempo, which we feels in the anxious rhythm of his prose. We identify a world of horrors (political, technological, ecological, etc.) that poetry allows us to thwart.
Blackout by Paul de Brancion. Ed. Plain page, 84 pp., €15.
The extract
EVERYTHING GOES FAST
very quickly
accumulates, chases and fades
to the point that the brain races
«stress» «breakdown» «burn-out»
the heart beats in the cage
thoracic
screen fatigue
eyes blur
even in tears
but sweaty on the keyboard
phone
SMS
vibrate/alarm/buzz
Tweet WhatsApp
communicate
power to order
where are you ?
eh
Hey
leave a message
eh
let’s talk quickly
don’t hang up
we are in a world
errant
between the banks
unreal
let’s not talk about console-to-tion games
who are in-continent(s) apart
fou ?
#Paul #Brancion #press #prose #Libération