4

1946–1966:

The Death of André Breton, the

Beginning of L’Éphémère

Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Bernard Collin, Jacques Dupin,

Jacques Garelli, Lorand Gaspar, Édouard Glissant, Philippe Jaccottet,

Claire Lejeune, Claire Malroux, Robert Marteau, Abdelwahab Meddeb,

Gaston Miron, Bernard Noël, Anne Perrier, Anne Portugal, Jacques

Réda, Jude Stéfan, Salah Stétié

T

he postwar years of French poetry were marked by a new
openness. Raymond Queneau’s experimental works of
this period: his Exercices de style (1947), Bâtons, chi√res et
lettres (1950), and Un conte à votre façon (1967) follow the tradition of
Mallarmé’s unique book Le Livre, whose individual sheets could be rear-
ranged at will. In this open work, the reader becomes an active partici-
pant—playing an authorial role in the rearrangement of description and
narrative. Americans such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert
Duncan, and George Oppen stress the major theme of openness—a long-
ing for a dogma-free order—and emphasize the crucial tempos of human
breathing. In France, a poetics based on breath had had a brief run with
the theoretician André Spire (in America its influence remains strong
with Charles Olson’s ‘‘Projectivism’’ and its descendants). Of course, the
heavy shadow of World War II hangs over all the work of this period,
French and American: it is frequently tinged with despair, the intricate
play of matter and open form notwithstanding.
Founded in 1960 by Queneau and François Le Lionnais, OULIPO (an
acronym for OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, or Workshop of Poten-
tial Literature) was the serious/playful working/playing ground of the