01/04/2024
A beautiful article from DIACRITIK on Virginie Lalucq and "Cutting The Stems" -- what wonderful recognition for our poet and translators! Congratulations!
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Excerpted from Laurent Zimmerman’s Article in DIACRITIK, translated from the French by Celine Bourhis and Claire Mcquerry:
"There are, in contemporary poetry, what we can call classics. That is books published ten or twenty years ago, which are still very relevant and open one of the great possible avenues of poetic writing today. Virginie Lalucq's first book Cutting the Stems is one of these.
What a joy to return to this text which, even though it was the author’s first book, presents itself as poetic – but playful, inventive, very funny and exciting, completely free – and shows in a brilliant way what poetry can do today.
And Virginie Lalucq still has a thousand ways of making words escape, of giving them back their freedom, that is to say, ours. Serious manners, playful manners, because if everything is not serious in Cutting the Stems everything is nevertheless rigorous, and of another seriousness ultimately, which works the words according to the sound, the associations, the ruptures, the reminders, the contrasts, according to the possibilities which they offer and which we usually do not see.[…] Real lures and false lures, we will have understood, since the essential thing is the movement and to establish a poetics of circulation, a happy, cheerful, energetic circulation, the greatest zaniness also being a truth. Truth, and intensity too, found with these flowers of rhythm, imagination, and courage to lead one's life, and first of all with this disconcerting poetics, of invention and invitation to invention."
Il y a, dans la poésie contemporaine, ce qu’on peut appeler des classiques. Des livres publiés il y a dix, vingt ans, encore tout à fait actifs, ouvrant l’une des grandes voies possibles de l’écrit…
