Photographic Memories of French Poetry: Denis Roche, Jean-Marie Gleize

During the late 1960s, French poetry experienced a crisis. The emergence of transgendered critical concepts such as texte and ecriture was explicitly presented by prosators and poets alike as the end of the distinction between prose and poetry. Here, Thomas analyzes how two of the most important contemporary writers--Denis Roche and Jean-Marie Gleize--have engaged the more encompassing visual culture by exploring photography--a medium they both liken to a kind of writing--from within their poetic practice. Since his 1972 assertion that poetry was inadmissible, Roche has been interested in the development of fictions that pursue the search for the unknown. For him, photography and literature today constitute an inseparable ensemble. Dans la maison du Sphinx, published in 1992, exemplifies this intermixture. Moreover, Thomas presents how Gleize's post-poetry generates textual forms that explore plasticity while rejecting the notion of form as a set of formal prescriptions and principles at the core of the traditional formalist or neo-rhetorical canon of intra-textual poetry.