part 5. 1967–1980: the explosion of the next generation
Important di√erences notwithstanding, these French poets might be con-
sidered the equivalent of the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets
(Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Susan
Howe, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, and
others). In L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the emphasis falls, heavily,
on the word itself, its constituent parts made salient and not permitted to
retreat before meaning, hence the dramatic and eye-catching separation of
letters in the movement’s original title. We remember, too, the short-lived,
vital French-language Lettrist movement of the 1960s, led by the Roma-
nian Isidore Isou, which emphasized the drama of the individual letter.≤ In
their consideration of the material of the word as all-important, and in
their insistence upon the relation of the stu√ of words to other words, the
French and American poets mentioned here represent a completely dif-
ferent way of looking at poetry and prose.
The poet Anne-Marie Albiach, for example, is quite outspoken in her
distrust of the lyric mode. She requires of poetry a ‘‘propelling gesture’’ or
projective force that permits both breathing in the poem (hence space)
and an upward spiraling movement, as if the poem were the constrained
and limited equivalent of what we used to think of as the sublime. It is not
about knowing, as she says in an interview with Jean Daive, but about
something else entirely: ‘‘I hate knowledge. Passion is what I have.’’≥ Of
the multitude of living facts, only the essentials are present in the poet’s
work, lest these facts stand in the way of the poem itself.
Albiach’s often di≈cult writing is influenced by Pierre-Jean Jouve’s
blasphemous verses in ‘‘Lamentations au cerf,’’ by Georges Bataille’s no-
tions of cruelty, and by Antonin Artaud’s claims for his Theater of Cru-
elty. She advocates a ‘‘theatre that divides, at once lyric, ornamental and
cruel in the development of its discourse.’’∂ Her refusal to write ‘‘after’’
anyone’s work and her insistence on writing only ‘‘ ‘after’ the mark they
have left in me’’ can be read in an interesting relation with the recent
poetry journal entitled L’Instant après. What is inscribed by such a mark is
not a school or an ism but rather some trace—again visible or audible,
suggestive but not controlling.
The writing of Emmanuel Hocquard is of special interest to the con-
temporary reader. The poet’s questioning of language and representation
is central in all his work. In Hocquard’s collection Les Élégies (1990), the
fragmentary had come to dominate in what has been called his ‘‘archae-
ological mode.’’∑ And by 1994, his work would become linked with Jean
Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum or simulation—the creation of the
real through conceptual or ‘‘mythological’’ models having little connec-
tion to or origin in reality. In 1989, Hocquard founded his Bureau sur
l’Atlantique, an association that serves to further relationships between