In and Out: How Poetry leaves the Book and is better for it - Project MUSE

In and Out: How Poetry leaves the Book and is better for it
   Jérôme Game

   French Forum, Volume 37, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2012, pp. 7-18 (Article)

   Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2012.0012

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/488710

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Jérôme Game

In and Out
How Poetry leaves the Book and is better for it1

How does art operate today? No longer reproducing the status quo
according to an equivalence between form and idea (naturalised in the
“good human” equipped with taste and magnanimity, as opposed to
the other bestial and inept sort of person), but by making known the
flux, which never ceases to reallocate things from the core of a conten-
tious sensible perpetually frayed and redefined on its margins.2 Such is
the theory of rupture introduced by Jacques Rancière with his concept
of the aesthetic regime of art.3 Art works on sensibility as free play or
natura naturans, rather than on abstract categories which would struc-
ture that sensibility a priori, as emanating from a natura naturata.4 It
can do so either directly (being primarily concerned with modes of
perception and their physical, material and concrete dimensions) or
indirectly (focusing more on symbolism and code, such as the con-
ventions of the story or fable). Affects and precepts are, according to
Gilles Deleuze, the two products (as well as the two criteria) of this
new aesthetic grammar, radically open and connected to life, rather
than meaning.
    Meanwhile, in literature this programme is complicated by the reso-
lutely iconoclastic nature of the medium.5 Obliged to exist as a purely
abstract sign, lacking any intrinsic relationship to what it denotes,6
literature cannot rely, a priori, on the many resources of the sensory
apparatus. Its language exists in the absence of any necessary associa-
tion with real things. But in fact, this negative is a positive because
what it sanctions, through the tenuous relations that it creates between
objects and language, is the intuition that the meaning of the real is
as elusive as that of the sign.7 Ushering in negative association8 and
syntax as a combinatorial game,9 the absence of any necessary link

8 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

between words and things thus establishes an order founded on a gap
(Lacan’s signifying chain, Derrida’s différance, Barthes’ signifiance,
Deleuze’s early concept of the empty square). This is a performativity
of an unusual kind: it is a dysfunctional machine. But, for precisely
this reason, it is capable of figuring what flows and passes between,
against or in spite of the consistency of systems and their weightiness,
and is likely to offer the new and unforeseen at any given moment. We
can try to outbid the halting structurality of language (Oulipo), attack
it with chisel (Antonin Artaud) or file (Ghérasim Luca), or stress the
polysemy of self and world that it reveals (realist or dialogic novel),
but at its core, this is a question of dialectic; it takes the rule to make
the exception.
   Rancière sees the ultimate paradox of this game in Flaubert’s nov-
els. Liberated from all external standards predetermining the sensible
and ways of accounting for it, literary art is defined by its heterogene-
ity (of genre, theme and style), and its identification is brought about
through the very negation of identification. Once the sensorium is dis-
turbed, to represent, grasp or tell in literary terms (or to attribute a
sensation to a signifier via a sign) supposes a passage—more or less
asymptotic and deliberate—across other arts, as locations of the plu-
rality and heterogeneity of the sensible. Commenting on the famous
assertion, “le style étant à lui tout seul une manière absolue de voir les
choses,”10 Rancière analyses the visionary power which the sentence
must have to distinguish order from disorder as essentially musical:
“la musique des affections et des perceptions déliées, brassées ensem-
ble dans le grand fleuve indifférent de l’Infini.”11 He continues:

  En faisant basculer l’économie du système expressif, le style-manière de voir pen-
  sait supprimer la contradiction, accorder la subjectivité de l’écriture romanesque
  à l’objectivité de la vision. Seulement, cet accord se risque à chaque phrase dans
  l’équivalence de la syntaxe narrative et de l’anti-syntaxe contemplative. La ligne
  droite du récit n’est pas coupée de moments de contemplation, elle est composée
  de ces moments mêmes: le récit représentatif est constitué d’atomes d’antirepré-
  sentation. Mais l’art de l’antireprésentation a un nom: il s’appelle musique.12

The novel, as a work to be read, is polished, orderly. Its narration is
structured. By contrast, the faculty of sight is not, while contemplation
is even more fluid. Free indirect discourse, seeking to generate sensa-
tions, is therefore contaminated writing, though not where it thinks:

Game: In and Out / 9

in wanting to make visible, it becomes abstract music. Le gueuloir de
Croisset—a kind of Siamese half-brother of Proust’s bedroom, pad-
ded with cork and full of dirty glasses through which light refracts—
acts as a clearing house. Flaubert, in Rancière’s words, “doit [. . .]
remettre au son de la phrase le soin de vérifier cette vérité de la vision
qui ne se laisse pas voir. [. . .] La ‘manière absolue de voir’ ne se laisse
pas voir. Elle se laisse seulement entendre, comme musique de ces
atomes d’antireprésentation qui composent l’‘histoire’ romanesque.”13
It is this bifurcation, or redoubling, in the relationship between the
arts, of which Flaubert’s work is paradigmatic, that seems to be taken
up again, objectified and reworked as a full-service literary style in
contemporary French poetry. This is what I would like to discuss in
the following pages.
   If today, as in the past, to write means to operate within the free
play of aesthetic sensation (as with Rimbaud and the surrealists,
examples among many others) the fluidity of the relationship between
modes seems more immediate and more determined in our time, just
as it seems more firmly resolved to play the game in the absence of
rules. Therefore, the question of the displacement of poetry towards
or by way of other sensorial regimes is a question of the foreignness of
poetry to itself: its indecision about genre (notably around the ques-
tion of prose / verse), and its formal permeability (intense interlacing
of styles, registers, and modes). Antoine Compagnon writes that “la
transgression générique est ainsi élevée en principe de modernité. La
valorisation de l’originalité et de la singularité depuis le romantisme,
de l’esthétique contre la rhétorique, a trouvé son accomplissement à
la fin du XXe siècle.”14 In their own pragmatic and direct way, Oliv-
ier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi already expressed this movement in the
middle of the 1990s in their influential Revue de Littérature Générale:
“L’opposition entre le langage unique, autarcique et linéaire de la
poésie et le dialogisme relativisant et discontinu du roman n’a plus
cours.”15
   This position recalls that developed by Jean-Marie Gleize a few
years earlier:

  [. . .] la poésie que nous disons “contemporaine” est [. . .] désormais sans défini-
  tion, ou si l’on préfère, ouverte à une infinité de définitions possibles, ce qui rend
  évidemment difficiles d’en parler, d’en parler généralement, en tant que “la” poé-

10 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

  sie. “La poésie” n’existe plus, ce qui ne signifie pas, bien sûr, le tarissement de la
  pratique poétique, mais simplement que la poésie vit son état de crise, sans doute
  de son état de crise, un état critique et autocritique permanent qui est certainement
  sa seule définition possible aujourd’hui, qu’on s’en réjouisse et qu’on la veuille
  porter à son maximum d’intensité dévastatrice (comme l’a fait en son temps Rim-
  baud, comme l’ont fait de nos jours Francis Ponge et Denis Roche), ou qu’on le
  déplore en tentant de restituer à la poésie quelque chose de son intégrité ancienne,
  de ses anciens pouvoirs.16

Finally, Jean-Michel Espitallier recently radicalised this theory in
proposing an extra-literary extension:

  [. . .] la poésie contemporaine paraît [. . .] être sortie de l’espace strictement litté-
  raire et, corollairement, du “graphocentrisme” pluriséculaire du livre comme éta-
  lon de l’espace d’écriture, lequel, depuis prés d’un siècle, se dilate vers d’autres
  supports. Elle travaille aux frontières.17

It is precisely this expansion, this sojourn at the outer limits, that
I would like to study. Namely, what are its styles and what are its
effects?
    In Rancière’s aesthetic regime, the outside has always been central
to writing, as an essential quality of the inside. The departure from the
book, in which poets continue to participate through all sorts of other
media (performance, video, theatre, music, dance), is thus an intensi-
fication, or acceleration, of the literary episteme defined by Rancière.
Or at the very least, this is my theory. It is not a question of another,
radically new poetry emerging ex nihilo, but rather the continuation
of an aesthetic paradigm by other means—those of action and hybrid-
ization. The kind of poetry that is to be seen and heard today exhib-
its, above all else, the permeability of its sensible systems through the
redefinition of its stylistic processes.18 It must be studied not only as
contamination (how it bleeds into adjacent fields by associating its
disparate pieces to gain strength), but as rebounds or reflux. To elab-
orate, this is either how—strengthened by this contamination from
other practices, heavy with new sensations and drained perceptions—
it reprocesses these principles in itself and on its own behalf, or how
the outside internalises it, revealing the intense emptiness or the pure
sensibility from which the modern machinery of literature is made.
Neither in one case or the other is it merely a question of adapta-

Game: In and Out / 11

tion or emulation—even if, as will become apparent, the modalities of
interaction are varied—but of harnessing the practices and the affects
which go along with them and of becomings.
    Before detailing these modes of poetic extension towards or by way
of the other arts, it is appropriate to add that if, since the nineteenth
century, the novel has constituted the very scene in which the opera-
tions of “reflux” poetry have played out, poetry itself has been a place
of contamination. But this outline is further complicated by the fact
that throughout the twentieth century, as we have just seen, the generic
qualities of poetry were significantly diluted by continuously borrow-
ing from prose experimentation. It is therefore possible to suggest that
it is poetry which, in a general sense, drives this extension, but at the
cost of an accelerated loss of itself.19 It is a potentially fatal paradox,
but one that poetry accommodates nonetheless.

The Pursuit of Poetry by Other Means
As paradoxical principles of identity, impurity and heterogeneity
refuse one model over others and to reduce the diversity of writing
to an artificial homogeneity made of abstract classifications. From
a pragmatic perspective, these positions have the advantage of not
pre-defining areas of poetic possibility, and insisting on its state of
perpetual re-definition. Prepared by almost two centuries of the
dislocation of its norms (whether these are thematic, genre-based or
stylistic), poetry, now more than ever, is keen to explore its outside
and to confront its others. Moreover, my generation is expanding the
field in all directions. Music, performance, images, theatre, dance;
all of these practices result in multiple intersections where writing
tries to factor into what it is not. Do these connections, however
brief or prolonged, bring poetry to perpetuate sameness in (re)pre-
senting itself in a more or less flattering self-reflection? Or, in the
logic of hybridization, do they alter literature by contaminating
it with other objects, operations, and processes, which then push it
to become something else, something other? In other words, could
such heterogeneity be able to intensify poetry by recontextualizing
its modes, marginalising its usual territory, and destabilising its own
terms (i.e. to know signs and their functions or arrangements), in order
to improve its potential today, even in a world deemed to be made by,
and for, images, in which text (and particularly the book) will be less

12 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

and less admissible? The answers to these questions must be found
through a study of as many cases as possible because it is only in this
way that there can be a real idea as to what collectively comprises
a poétique des frontières or a poétique du dé-bord. Because such
critical range is not possible here, I will instead provide a sketch of its
distinctive features.
   The “poésie debout” of Bernard Heidsieck; the performative
“déclaractions” of Julien Blaine; Denis Roche opting for photogra-
phy after poetry became impossible; Christophe Fiat slipping from
reading-performance to staged theatre; Anne-James Chaton working
with the bassist from an indie rock band and an electronic musician;
Jean-Michel Espitallier settling down at the drums; Nathalie Quin-
taine singing / reading with the sculptor Stéphane Bérard on gui-
tar; and Olivier Cadiot working as lyricist for a number of bands but
also for the theatre and contemporary music. Or, in another register,
Charles Pennequin and Liliane Giraudon drawing in their texts; Pierre
Alferi composing video-poems; and Manuel Joseph adapting photo-
montages. Through these writers and others,20 real differences emerge
between sound poetry, video-poetry, poetry-performance, and digital
poetry.21 This is not just about illustrating a text or essentially enshrin-
ing it in another artistic work in order to create a dialogue, but rather
to affect their writing, to mobilise its force through a direct or indirect
skewing which enables syntactic connections (in a format, in space-
time) with one or more other practices, and the perceptual universes
that these carry with them.22
   Through the four major topoï of sound, body, image, and stage,
relationships of difference are created between media and literature.
These relationships can be described as extro-jected in the production
of a hybrid work (for example, a performance, a book-CD / DVD, a
poster, a diaporama, a film, or a disc), composing a plurality of rela-
tions between heterogeneous elements thereby evoking a certain type
of contemporary aesthesis—that of combining multiple discourses
and sensations and emphasizing their extreme fluidity. Without re-
enacting the Cabaret Voltaire of 1916, Futurism or the happenings of
the 1960s, it is still, however, a question of virtual machines (whether
abstract or embodied) that try to represent the actual sensorium and its
specific materiality, as well as its dominant thematic content (either to
know the politico-social reality as it is formulated by the mass media

Game: In and Out / 13

or, the opposite, a more idiosyncratic and dehistoricized perception
of things) or indeed other models since no paradigm imposes itself
more than another. Clippings, coagulations, stretches, ellipses, and
loops, redistribute the sounds and images of a hyper-modern condi-
tion and retrace the paradoxical aspects of objective intensity. These
hybrid reorganisations of enunciation and narrative are ready-made to
treat reality with a critical regard. Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard,
Deleuze and co., more or less explicitly, form this epistemological
horizon. Technically, these horizons are most often based on assem-
blages and cut-ups from different cultural registers (media, technol-
ogy, politics, narrative, canons). However, as has been noted, they are
also based on practices in which heterogeneity can claim to overthrow
the generic recoding that is determined by the dominant cultural econ-
omy. The idea is not to mix everything, but rather to arrange a hetero-
geneous stage on which to fictionner contemporary experience. Cho-
reographed on this stage are dynamic relations of screens and video
monitors, microphones and speakers, objects and speaking bodies.
They unfold a meta-syntax, not between semantic or formal positions,
but between different media, and compose the work at different layers
of the sensible (visual, auditory, perceptual, cognitive) through build-
ing a collective sensibility at once literal and abstract. This realisation
of what Jacques Rancière calls the phrase-image,23 frequently attempts
to dissolve meaning, to pass through it and assemble it anew. The con-
crete and sociological conditions of this import / export aesthetic can
be created through collaborations, museum and gallery residencies, or
in performance spaces such as theatres and concert venues. To restore
these co-extensive practices by arranging a continuum in the public
sphere where they can mingle, is precisely the role of these locations
in contemporary poetic practice. This new poetry invents itself in situ,
under the microscope through which it observes (and is observed by)
other art forms. Pure affects and pure percepts can be captured in the
same experiment, whether social or personal, and be rewoven into a
cross-section of unedited reality—made not only by words, but by a
plurality of practices whose diversity obstructs the polished discursive
hum saturating space, both intimate and political.
   Such an iconoclastic energy can often be observed in today’s pro-
ductions, even though occasionally it can turn on itself or envision
yet another post-historic, hyper-theoretical messiah liberating (itself

14 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

from) literature.24 While this acceleration of the sensible in poetry
can be voluntary and affirmative—through an ability to maintain its
tools, specifically technological, in a state of permanent suspension
between control and autonomy, instrumentalization and pure power—
it can also be forced or reactive, thus rendering this same technology
into a simple, if more deceptive, effect of marketing and its prescrip-
tive authoritarian language. As if the fierce generic indetermination
of contemporary poetry was too hard to accept, there is a reintroduc-
tion of the master narrative, variously imposing purposes, meanings
or perspectives such as the historical (the era as present-future, mul-
timedia or otherwise), epistemological (the indestructible compulsion
to subject art to interpretation by theorems of all sorts, for example
a superficial deleuzism, or analytical cognitivism, or again neopla-
tonism, such as Debord’s version), or political (the Resistance camp
with a capital R of course). According to Rancière:

  Le paradoxe aujourd’hui est que la politique de l’art doit peut-être renoncer à la
  fausse opportunité que lui offre la vacance de la scène politique. Sa politique passe
  sans doute plutôt aujourd’hui par la modestie quant à ses pouvoirs, par le sens des
  limites mêmes de cette politique. L’art est peut-être plus politique quand il explore
  ces limites que lorsqu’il se déclare hors de lui-même sur la scène même du réel.25

It is therefore a question of finding the right dose to stave off the
futurist unconscious specific to all experimentation and the polemical
puritanism clinging to the avant-garde. And more importantly, it is a
question of preventing the scope of poetic experimentation from being
covered over, as soon as it has been opened up, by the sad affects
and signs of lack or of judgment, such as “too few concepts, poor
equipment, obsolete horizons, more effort needed!” As if only the
sensible was always suspected of insufficiency or weakness.26

Writing Under the Influence
How do certain poetic works import techniques from other practices
to improve their mode of expression or representation? In the previous
section of this article, I discussed the modes of connection to other
media internal to poetry, as these are assimilated by it, and to this end
I would like to discuss the writing of my work, Flip-Book.27
   “What does poetry owe to cinema?” or else “It is only by watch-

Game: In and Out / 15

ing films that one becomes a writer. . .” In writing Flip-Book, I could
feel the paradoxical relevance of these two statements. I had to retran-
scribe the fluid aesthetics of film (specifically framing and editing)
with only the prose poetry that I had invented which used syntactical
ellipses, punctuation, and reading rhythms in speech (as a further tes-
tament to this process, a CD accompanies the text). In turn, this per-
mitted me to grasp what the perception of the moving image does to
literary sensibility. About thirty film sequences were reworked (rather
than simply being described or retranscribed) in as many prose texts
that work through the image, its history, and its power of becoming.
Eventually, writing the properties of the films—their slowness or the
allure of instant gratification, their ability to keep things within the
same frame—itself, provoked innovations in my language. Unlike
adaptation and inspiration, which are classic categories of text / image
relations, it began as writing “under the influence” (to invoke John
Cassavetes) of what literature cannot be—direct sensorial perception
or vision. As abstraction, language signifies by taking the place of the
senses, while also establishing its distance, if only to then generate
recollection retrospectively. By contrast, my book resituates sensa-
tion at the heart of the literary project and writes from or as it: it is
writing as one feels one sees, without considering representation or
passing through a description to what is seen. The sensation produced
by the movement of a camera, as in some types of montage, is use-
ful, but not the representation created by a grafting technique. Rather
than an interconnection between media, there is a mediating relation-
ship between text / image internal to the work, or what can be called
an intra-mediation, that tries to synthesize characteristics of film, for
example, direct perception of a frame which moves or movements
within a frame. Why? Because the profound tension between frame
and movement, between shot, counter-shot, and long-take, is precisely
that which links external changes to internal changes. This tension
connects (and separates) action and passivity, doing something and
being affected by something, having clear limits in its interactions
with the world and escaping them imperceptibly. I was looking for
a literary rendering of the connection between frame and movement
because in it lies the tension between being and becoming.
    Flip-Book deploys its effects through a curious merging. Obviously
the book does not actually have a storyboard or a long lens, nor does it

16 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

have concrete means (in the optical sense) to create depth of field. So,
what is happening in it? Flip-Book represents and expresses with its
own (poetic) methods, after having redetermined them via an oppor-
tunistic lens, which takes what it can from the formal and aesthetic
systems of other media.
   This writing in the “aftermath,” as it were, thereby enables every
chance for the production of new poetic effects—those of a lan-
guage unencumbered by its regular expressions and thus offering
fresh meaning, or at least such is the wager of Flip-Book. It seems
as if to express and represent better, it is occasionally necessary to
set the techniques within those developed by other practices, like the
cuckoo in the nest of another. Suspending language on what is foreign
to it (the composition of a canvas, a panning shot across the screen,
the close-up of an installation) softens this exterior, transforming it
into an abstract machine through which the new can appear. To work
with and through other artists, admiring their actions and their sensi-
bilities (videographers, photographers, painters, sculptors) in order to
redeploy my language, to learn again how to write by watching them
work—my nose glued to the screen, facing the canvas, glances tend-
ing toward the surface of the monitor, bouncing off the corners of the
canvas like pinballs—affected, changed by the power of works which
persist for a long time even after viewing or reading. The idea is not
to imitate or mime, but to be energized by others’ frenzy, et la fumer
dans ma pipe, to strike out in new directions and re-engage al fresco.
And, there, the permanent tension, stylistically speaking, in between
the fable and the vignette, the story and the tableau, the sound-bite and
the slide-show is to be found.

“How do you feel it, perceive it? How is it represented, how is it told?”
In these questions, addressed by poetry to other artistic practices,
one understands the need to operate a displacement of the literary
act outside the commonplace, to display languages in the course of
production, downstream and upstream of themselves, even while it
disengages in order to better reconnect. It is in the different ways of
moving lines, of putting writing under stress, and of complicating
it with something else, that one can see today’s discourse and
storytelling (re)forming (through deforming), and a new (relation
to) reality taking shape. To (re)compose the world (the perceived as

Game: In and Out / 17

the perceiver) with the means of an unedited sensibility, rather than
unfolding it in a structure where everything functions perfectly: that
is the challenge. And to represent; represent what? The tremor of
reality, its intrinsic porosity, not its lack or its absence, but its powers
of becoming. What does this demonstrate? One could argue that
this question is not really the problem. Does it work? There are as
many ways of making as there are sensibilities at work. Microwave
era: it melts, cooks, cools down, solidifies and re-melts. The sampler
era, call it the reset-button era, (re)writing. Meaning is a geographic
matter; it is entirely (in the) movement. It is the fluidity of the latter
and the intensity of its trajectory which is seen in the hybrid art that
is the poetry of today. To catch hold of this momentum, crystallise it
into a tangible feeling, and then send it out again as powerfully into
the world. And to find a strange joy in this process, in this potential
ellipsis, in this desubjectivizing experience of the immanence of life,
of which the work is no more than a glance, a fold. Only effects count.
No rules or criteria ex ante. Everything is ex post in pieces.

American University of Paris (France)

Notes
    Portions of this article were previously published in “In & out, ou comment sortir du livre
pour mieux y retourner—et réciproquement”, Littérature, no 169, 2010, pp. 44–53.
    1. This article was translated by Kathleen Morris (University of Oxford) and Julia Morris-
von Luczenbacher (University of Ottawa).
    2. It should be noted that “sensible” and “sensibility”, wherever they appear in the article,
conform to Jacques Rancière’s understanding of these concepts.
    3. See Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000).
    4. See Jérôme Game and Aliocha Wald Lasowski (eds.), Jacques Rancière: Politique de
l’esthétique (Paris: Éditions Archives Contemporaines, 2009) and Charlotte Nordman, Bourdieu
/ Rancière: La politique entre sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006).
    5. Hence, perhaps, the more or less literal attempts to substantiate it from Rimbaud’s “Voy-
elles” to Lettrisme via Apollinaire’s calligrammes.
    6. An alphabet is not, after all, an ensemble of pictograms.
    7. “Le réel doit être fictionné pour être pensé,” writes Jacques Rancière in Le partage du
sensible, 61.
    8. “Cat” means cat, signifying a small feline etc., because “cat” does not mean “lion” or
“corkscrew” or anything else.
    9. The meaning of a statement is the product of its morphology and its contexts (connota-
tions etc.).

18 / French Forum / Winter/Spring 2012 / Vol. 37, Nos. 1–2

    10. Letter to Louise Colet, dated January 16, 1852.
    11. Jacques Rancière, La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris:
Hachette, 1998), 115.
    12. Rancière, La parole muette, 115.
    13. Rancière, La parole muette, 116.
    14. Cours de M. Antoine Compagnon, “Treizième leçon: modernité et violation des genres,”
Fabula, http://www.fabula.org/compagnon/genre13.php. (Last accessed 15/03/2012)
    15. Revue de Littérature Générale 2, Digest (Paris: P.O.L, 1996) no pagination.
    16. Jean-Marie Gleize, A noir. Poésie et littéralité (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 102.
    17. Jean-Michel Espitallier, Caisse à outils. Un panorama de la poésie française aujourd’hui,
(Paris: Pocket, 2006), 48.
    18. And notably syntactic. See Jérôme Game (ed.) Le récit aujourd’hui. Art et littérature (St-
Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2011).
    19. Finally, Christophe Wall-Romana writes of “poésie générale”, undoubtedly in reference
to Revue de Littérature Générale by Cadiot and Alferi, and defines it as “la poésie qui remet en
question tous ses paramètres et toutes ses ressemblances pour mieux comprendre et étendre ce
qu’a été la poésie restreinte (par la forme, la tenue, le champ littéraire, les débats théoriques,
la naïveté romantique, etc.” “Dure poésie”, in L’Esprit créateur 49:2, Méconnaissance de la
poésie, Summer 2009, 1–8. See also Jérôme Game, Poetic Becomings. Studies in Contemporary
French Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).
    20. The list is long and open in this regard: Eric Sadin, Frédéric Dumond, Ralbum edited by
Emmanuel Rabu and Laure Limongi, Christophe Hanna, Sylvain Courtoux, Philippe Boisnard,
to name but a few.
    21. For a precise typology, see the works of Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Philippe Castellin or the
website libr-critique.fr. Also see, Nadja Cohen (ed.) Poésie et médias au XXè siècle (Paris: Nou-
veau Monde, November 2010.)
    22. See Jérôme Game (ed), Porous Boundaries. Texts and Images in Twentieth-Century
French Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007).
    23. See Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des Images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003).
    24. This is reflected in the aggressive or ironic jabs around a new definition of poetry. See,
for example, “Rénovation de la VP” by Sébastien Smirou, http://www.pol-editeur.com/index
.php?spec=editions-pol-blog&numpage=5&numrub=4&numcateg=&numsscateg=&lg=fr&num
billet=88&lg=fr (last accessed 15/03/2012); “Vroum-vroum et flip-flap” by Christian Prigent,
http://www.pol-editeur.com/index.php?spec=editions-pol-blog&numpage=5&numrub=4&numc
ateg=&numsscateg=&lg=fr&numbillet=91&lg=fr (last accessed 15/03/2012); “Les humeurs de
M. Roubaud (et autres vrais poètes)” by Jean-Pierre Bobillot, http://www.sitaudis.fr/Excitations/
les-humeurs-de-m-roubaud-et-autres-vrais-poetes.php (last accessed 15/03/2012); and the vol-
ume Disputatio XXI, edited by Samuel Lequette (Aubenas: Hapax, 2010).
    25. “Entretien avec Jean-Baptiste Farkas”, Synesthésie, 2006, http://www.synesthesie.com/
dossier.php?idSub=1858&idFolder=1847&idSection=1724 (last accessed 15/03/2012).
    26. See Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009) and my inter-
view with him, “Critique de la critique du spectacle”, in Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour les
gens fatigués (Paris: Amsterdam, 2009), 619–36.
    27. Jérôme Game, Flip-Book, (Bordeaux: L’Attente, 2007).