The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

Jacques Garelli 1931–

belgrade, yugoslavia

A

poet and philosopher, Garelli has been a professor at Yale University,

New York University, and the University of Amiens. He has frequently

lectured and written on the work of the French phenomenologist

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His poetry, dense and suggestive, is often illustrated by

painters and sculptors. Garelli currently lives in Paris and Corsica. Principal

works: Brêche, 1966; Les Dépossessions, 1968; Prendre appui, 1968; Lieux précaires,

1972, L’Ubiquité d’être, 1986; Archives du silence, 1989.

Excess of Poetry

The poem is what has neither name, nor rest, nor place, nor home: fissure
moving towards the work. Useless to circumscribe it beyond landscapes un-
known in some zone forbidden to thoughts, horizon of antinature or then
finished when it has gone past. It haunts our space for it is our time. Ungraspable
in each of its figures, only surging forth to link its emerging tendency to unpre-
dictable successions, the poem secretes its own history as the airplane traces
irreducible spirals in their linear reading to what was in the azure this white
point. Leaning against the starry explosion of language, masticating the emerging
bait of the event, pulling the gesture out of its practical uses, cutting it o√ from its
thematic intentions, the poem makes the one it has astonished ask for shelter in
its pages and the repose of a story, the perfect model, just glimpsed, of the blue
stone on a face, the impossible key. Without remission.
—mary ann caws