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I went a last week to the big Marché de la poésie (Poetry Fair) being held in the square outside St Sulpice, an enormous church poised somewhere on the boundary between very beautiful and actually sort of awful — but the square outside it is undeniably lovely, and I’ve grown very fond of the church too, with the sort of affection we sometimes feel more for the not-quite-perfect.

Anyway, the poetry fair is an amazing annual event, with dozens of stalls run by more small poetry presses and journals than you’d have thought could exist, as well as readings and performances and so on. Last year my youngest was only about a month old and in fact the fair was the first thing I “went” to after his birth (if you can call it that — needless to say, you can’t actually get a pram into most of the stalls and every time I tried to stop to look at something he started to squawk). This time round I was able to visit luxuriously with adult company only (& many thanks to a new friend A. who introduced me to several of the stall holders).

I am trying to get to grips a bit with the modern and contemporary French poetry scene — find out what I like, how it compares to the Anglophone poetry world I know, and also, longer term, think about what I might be interested in translating. I know older French poetry (especially early modern) fairly well: my favourite French poet is Malherbe, a historical contemporary of Shakespeare and Jonson, and the poetic opposite of St Sulpice (certainly no dubious mixture of styles here). He seems very much out of fashion, but the best of his odes are — in my opinion, he leaves some people cold — unbearably and unbelievably beautiful in a way that is so hard to define (and I suspect truly impossible to translate) that I return to them again and again.

But there’s been a lot of French poetry since Malherbe or even Baudelaire. In my attempts to get a sense of what’s going on, I’ve been reading Guy Goffette (very high profile, in all the bookshops), Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre Chappuis and (looking back a bit) some older poets I hadn’t read before like Pierre Reverdy and Jules Supervielle. I’ve also bought a few recent anthologies of contemporary poetry like this one and the occasional one-off recent collection such as Karine Tuil’s beguiling Kaddish pour un amour. (You can see a TV clip of a reading from this collection here.) I’m still working through my haul from the poetry fair, where I bought books by several poets completely new to me.

So, with the understanding that these are more or less first impressions, and I’ll no doubt come to be embarrassed by them, here are my observations about contemporary French poetry so far:

• I see more collections composed entirely of prose poetry or lyric essays than I’m used to in the UK, where you more often find just a few prose poems in a given collection or magazine issue. This was particularly obvious at the poetry fair, with several of the smaller presses publishing mainly collections of this kind. This exists in Anglophone poetry too, of course (Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a high-profile recent example) but seems more prominent and mainstream here, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the importance of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé to the development of the modern form.

• Conversely, a good proportion of the mainstream new poetry displayed most prominently in non-specialist shops is written recognisably in verse: metrical, often rhyming poetry of an accessible and essentially traditional kind. Guy Goffette’s most recent collection, for instance, Paris á ma porte, currently in all the shops, is mostly very readable verse of this sort, wearing its considerable skill very lightly. It begins in conversational alexandrines:

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  Pardonnez, mes amis, cet aveu désarmant,

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  Mais je n’ai pas choisi la place de portier:

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  Ce que je sais du premier arrondissement

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  Couvrirait à peine deux pages d’écolier.

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  Je connais mon quartier comme hier mon village,

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  Chacune de ses rues, ses bistrots, ses boutiques,

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  Et la voix des voisins dans le noir, leurs visages,

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  Ce que disent leurs yeux, ce que chacun fabrique.

  If you - friends - will likewise forgive a very rough and ready translation, without the proper rhyme that a real translation would certainly want to put back in, this is something like:

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  Forgive me, friends, a faux-naïf admission,

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  But I’m not here to be your concierge:

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  All I know about the first arrondissement

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  Would scarcely cover two school notebook pages.

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  I know my own part of it, though, as once I knew my village,

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  Each of its streets, its bistrots and boutiques,

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  Neighbours’ voices in the dark, in the light their faces:

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  What their eyes tell; and, for each of them, what he makes.

• Presumably related to these first two points, standard ‘free verse’, by a huge margin the default form now for poetry in English, seems less dominant. There’s plenty of it of course — an interesting recent anthology of contemporary poetry, Ces mots traversent les frontières. 111 poètes d’aujourdh’ui, is mostly as you’d expect various kinds of free verse — but it feels more buttressed and balanced than in the UK by lyrical prose on the one hand and metrical verse on the other.

• There is noticeably more writing about poetry written in an approachable way, available in ordinary mainstream bookshops and published in affordable paperbacks. Jean-Pierre Siméon’s 80 page essay, Petit éloge de la poésie (‘A little eulogy for poetry’) cost me €2 last summer, less than a coffee in a café. His slightly thicker collection, La poésie à vivre. Paroles de poètes (‘Poetry for living: in poets’ own words’), prints brief essays on poetry by poets from Rimbaud to today (several in translation) and costs only €3 (you might get an espresso for this, but you’ll still be paying more for anything fancier). Even the fat little paperback of Jaccottet’s collected poetry journalism from the 60s (L’Entretien des Muses), running to over 400 pages, was only €8.60 (a café crème, croissant and an orange juice).

• Poetry is still covered more, and more reverentially here in the general press and the media. (That French TV clip I linked to above, of a very respectful discussion and reading of Karine Tuil’s recent collection, is a good example.) And the French education system retains an old-fashioned attachment to making young children memorise poems then stand at the front of the class and recite them. As a parent of primary age children, I see (and suffer!) the drawbacks of this practice, and most adults seem to recall it with varying degrees of horror, but perhaps it does have some advantages. When Goffette was interviewed for a special issue of the poetry magazine Nunc in 2016, and asked how he came to writing, he replied: ‘Like everyone else: at school. By the poems memorised at primary school, then by the “morceaux choisis” [selected pieces studied] at collège [the first part of secondary school]’. Goffette is elderly now (he was born in 1947), but it’s striking that he still takes it for granted that school is how ‘everyone’ encounters serious poetry.

I hope to update my impressions as I read more but if anyone has any recommendations for recent or contemporary French poets do let me know.

Thank you for reading Horace & friends. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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