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introduction
Ponge, who emphasized the materiality of the poetic process and its
product. Ponge placed himself and his work, explicitly based on everyday
perception, in a close-up zoom, as he put it in the 1942 title Le Parti-pris
des choses (On the Side of Things), an attitude congenial to that of the
concrete poets.
Also in 1966, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet,
Louis-René des Forêts, and Claude Estéban founded a journal entitled
L’Éphémère, devoted to the notion of passage and marked by an associa-
tion between the verbal and the visual (for example, the collaboration
between Bonnefoy and Alberto Giacometti). The influence of L’Éphémère
was to last far beyond its voluntary demise in 1973. The philosophical and
poetic writings of Edmond Jabès, an Egyptian Jew whose work was first
applauded by Max Jacob and then Jacques Derrida, and the diverse tex-
tual representations of the enormously diverse places for poems of the
heart and the mind, as well as of the living body, are as representative of
the 1970s and 1980s as are the highest flights of French poetry after 1980.
More recently, there have been any number of experimental man-
ifestations that demonstrate new, ever growing and changing ways of
looking at poetry, such as Emmanuel Hocquard’s Une journée dans le
détroit (1980), Jacques Roubaud’s Les Troubadours (1981), Liliane Girau-
don’s Je marche ou je m’endors (1982), Dominique Fourcade’s Le Ciel pas
d’angle (1983), Claude Royet-Journoud’s Les Objets contiennent l’infini
(1983), Anne-Marie Albiach’s Mezza Voce (1984), and Denis Roché’s La
Poésie est inadmissible (1995).
As is the case with poetry worldwide, there is now a tremendous
emphasis on performance, on the oral manifestation essential to the ever
more rapidly moving world with which it has to keep pace. Technology
and creation walk hand in hand: along with rap, slam, and reggae go all
varieties of digital practice and Internet enthusiasm. Just as musical form
and an idealism of abstraction were the touchstones that inspired ty-
pographical experiments in the late nineteenth century, the technological
advances of the late twentieth century have become the model for much
of the poetry we experience in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The interactive nature of the contemporary world, psychological and
political, local and global, gives poetry a new place. As Edouard Glissant
puts it, erstwhile boundaries in this new ‘‘tout-monde’’—the everyone
everywhere world—have become permeable. ‘‘Geographically,’’ say the
editors of Zigzag poésie, ‘‘the local becomes fluid and energized.’’≤∑ In such
a world, poetry has to be a place for increasing exchange.
And it is. As Jacques Derrida notes, translation is generosity. And as
Walter Benjamin would have it—and so would we—languages supple-
ment one another. Bilingual anthologies, with all their translation work,