called forth as close as possible to a primary speech of today (whose writing recaptures rhythm and deliberately aggravates the syncopations) both with the prosaic everyday and its decomposition, its hiccups, its mildews. Sometimes it does seem quite complacently regressive – but what represent the term complacent here when it is indeed in the writer’s intention to bust language and “shitify” it, according to a tradition started with Jarry. Bang thus suggests some kind of mumbling and bogging down, a strain for nothing, a tautological writing which not only broods but also closes itself onto itself almost as if it were a scratched record…

Here are we extremely close to the “trash” tendency of some French poetry today which is resolutely anti-lyrical. But it not only deflates or oblates lyricism: it grasps the real in its lowest, in its ground level, in its coarseness and incoherence. Rather than resting on the side of writing, it now turns towards an enacting of texts found amid raw documents, cuttings and patchworks, ready-made, or literary workshops, nay mere sonorous performances, close to installation in painting. At this stage, contemporary poetry is close to plastic arts and quite late seems to reach a close encounter with attempts that had been long ago inaugurated on the side of art.

 

 

 

[1] Pierre Alferi, quatrième de couverture des Allures naturelles, POL, 1991.