“That poetry enters the battlefield of ideologies is not bad”

2024-01-27 05:30:05

So poetry is not dead in France! A literary controversy over the appointment of Sylvain Tesson as godfather of the Spring of Poets allowed a minister of the economy, politicians, all of whom perhaps have not opened a collection of poetry for a long time, newspapers, who do not all open their pages to the criticism of poetic collections, in short, for many French people to express themselves on poetry.

The author of these lines, who writes poetry, many of whose friends have signed the column in question and who hates being called “cockroaches” his friends, who even finds it sinisterly dangerous that such words reappear in public debate, who therefore finds particularly unfair the torrent of insults which have been poured out on poets who only gave their opinion, has nevertheless not signed the forum in question.

He found it weak in form and worrying in substance. Without any other justification than the feeling of indignation, without any other attention to the precision of the text than the fact that it is written in a midpoint, in pompous sentences that no editor signing the column would have edited for his own purposes. house, a man was denounced by two thousand poets, publishers, booksellers.

Stunning caricature

Even if it means attacking someone, you might as well do it with finesse, precision and detachment. The art of the war of ideas. Sylvain Tesson is obviously attackable. He is neither “prince of poets” (I think I heard this nonsense), nor a wise old man. He makes comments that can be disputed. It is ambiguous and plays on this ambiguity. For example, I would like to ask him a simple question which for me sums up his own contradiction: do you think that “it was better before”, or do you think that “it is better elsewhere”? From this response, for example, a political map emerges…

Also read the column | Article reserved for our subscribers “In the Sylvain Tesson affair, today’s censor could become tomorrow’s victim, and the far right is just waiting for that”

There was controversy, therefore, and it was fortunate. Nothing is worse than insignificance for literature. That poetry enters the battlefield of ideologies is not bad. And if poets play their role as poets, that is to say if they speak and write trembling, paying attention to the effect of a word, to the weight of a comma, if they are in political, these artisans of the word that they are in their text, this can only enrich the public debate, which has today fallen into an astonishing caricature. When they are like everyone else, shouting slogans, reinforcing the violence, crying for the resignation of the director of the Spring of Poets, and obtaining it, in reality, they become trivialized, and poetry has nothing to say in as such, in his worried and attentive lucidity.

You have 45% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.