ekleksographia

The present issue of Ekleksographia is also dedicated to Anglophone poets living and writing in France, or to French poets in translation, or to Franco-American writers, or to writers in dialogue with the French tradition, or to mediators of French literature in the Anglophone world, or to some combination, complication or confusion of these categories.

This pleasant confusion demands a word.

A) I will not indicate here which of these writers is “French”, which Anglophones living in France, Francophones living in England or the United States, and which of another nationality writing in either, or both, or several languages, sometimes at the same time. Some of these individuals might object to such categories.

B) The present issue might appear peculiarly parti-colored to a French contemporary poetry reader. Among the Francophone writers included, some of them would be unlikely to appear together in the pages of the same journal.

I invite the uninitiated to discover secret affinities, and I will not situate these poets in the French literary landscape (“neo-lyrical” i.e. School of Quietude; “post-poetic” i.e. what Bill Knott calls the “School of Noise” and occasionally non-verbal performance art, etc.). Some of these individuals might object to such categories.

C) The number of translations due in part or in whole to my own efforts results essentially from constraints beyond my control, mostly in finding the necessary (wo)manpower. Although by way of these translations I hope to seduce the reader, any undue self-promotion is regrettable.

Learn French. Read the poets.

D) France, and particularly Paris, remains, rather in spite of itself, cosmopolitan. Herman Melville’s Cosmopolitan naturally dresses like Harlequin, in many colors, and takes us for a lovely ride.

E)

I’d like to be the fifth wheel

The storm

Noon at two o’clock

Nothing and everywhere

-- Blaise Cendrars