Poem-Walking: The Survival of Paris in Jacques Roubaud's La forme d'une ville

Jacques Roubaud's collection La forme d 'uine ville change plus vile, helas, que le caeur des humains (The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart) (1999) places itself squarely in this Parisian poetic tradition. The book contains 152 poems on Paris written between 1991 and l998. The title, borrowed from Baudelaire's poem "Le cygne" (The swan), takes up the familiar topos of elegiac lament for the loss of "old Paris." Roubaud makes a slight modification to Baudelaire's verses: Baudelaire's "le caeur d'un mortel" (the heart of a mortal) becomes in Roubaud's version "le caeur des humains" (the heart of human beings). Here, James talks about the specter of poetic sterility, of the exhaustion of forms and representations.