5

1967–1980:

The Explosion of the Next Generation

Anne-Marie Albiach, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Silvia Baron Supervielle,

Martine Broda, Nicole Brossard, Danielle Collobert, Claude Esteban,

Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, Michelle Grangaud, Emmanuel

Hocquard, Hédi Kaddour, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Abdellatif Laâbi,

Annie Le Brun, Marcelin Pleynet, Jacqueline Risset, Jacques Roubaud,

Paul de Roux, Claude Royet-Journoud, Habib Tengour, Franck

Venaille

Y

ounger poets have always gathered around established po-
ets they respect and emulate: René Char, as we have seen,
influenced an earlier generation of poets in these years,
and Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Bernard Noël, and Michel Deguy
formed, as they do now, the center of French poetic activity, serving
as inspirations for future generations. For the most part, the poetry in
France during this period reflected neither nostalgia nor prophecy but a
celebration of everydayness.
The deliberate minimalism of language in much poetry of this time
stands in contrast to the lush verbiage of Saint-John Perse in books like
Éloges, Amers, and Exil. There developed in this period a sensible un-
certainty, not about where poetry was going but about where to locate
the enthusiasm that had infused previous works. As Danielle Collobert
phrased it, a kind of ‘‘not knowing on what to open energy’’ emerged.∞
The endless and frequently joyous experiments of the most forward-
looking of these poets—Jacques Roubaud (translated here by Rosmarie
Waldrop), Michelle Grangaud (translated here by Rosemary Lloyd and
Paul Lloyd), Emmanuel Hocquard, Olivier Cadiot, Pierre Alféri, Anne-
Marie Albiach, and Claude Royet-Journoud—are frequently cited in
North America. They are the pillars of the ongoing transatlantic exchange.