Wefts, tables, chessboards… To be interested in poetry literally is to meet, from the IVe century to the present day, a set of squares of signs that are spectacular to say the least. Eulogies of the emperor, dreams on the cross, fantasized nomenclatures… Everything happens as if this squared writing revealed an ideal: the advent of an order, bringing together in a perfect, eternal form, the poem and its graphic inscription.
In the test, the perfection in all directions of the square nevertheless favors a strange propensity: to widen the directions of reading, of writing. We are quite familiar with the magic squares whose numbers add up in all ways. The square of letters, from this point of view, can also be situated at the culmination of a panic of meaning and of a poetry of words, of signs constantly recomposing themselves. The square ? And yet it spins.
Because it is indeed a question of finding the great regulating figures of cosmology, of the calendars; but to reread them, redistribute them or rather: put them back in motion and in play. Poetry, if it throws marvelous inhabitable constellations on the sheet, never ceases to give back to the starry sky its infinite possibilities of reading. Perhaps also because it begins in the formal notice of the very medium in which it is engaged. That it fundamentally questions the cutting of words, and at the same time, of the world, suspends it for a moment, makes it lose all evidence.
From Trithème to Tristan Tzara, from Maurice Scève to Jacques Roubaud, from Jean-Edouard Du Monin to Ghérasim Luca, from Raban Maur to Michèle Métail, run threads which, from century to century, draw a real continuity. To read these authors, to compare them with the philosophers, kabbalists or linguists of their time, is to rediscover the long time of poetry as one of its impregnable horizons: the dream of a language that would move so quickly, so constantly, that she would continue to speak but without freezing the slightest cut. An infinitely labile language, in perpetual restructuring; a dream of language, perhaps, on the reverse of what any language does – but capable of returning us to the indefinite relaunch of the sharing of the world.