Poetry at the Margins: Jacques Darras’s Neo-Epic La Maye

Abstract

Jacques Darras’s La Maye, an opus in eight cantos composed between 1988 and 2012 constitutes a singular attempt in the field of contemporary French poetry to reinvest the topos of the region (his native Picardy) and interrogate key elements of the Long Poem tradition. Rather than reverse the power differential in the center/margin dichotomy, Darras deploys a series of geographic and literary drifts to map out a trans-local vision of the North that complicates a notion of regional identity construed as immediate and solvable. Whether by delving into records of site-specific history that were glossed over in the grand récit of the nation or by appealing to the poetic traditions of the North for specific meters and multilingual borrowings—drawing inspiration from frontier territories such as Quebec or the Orkney Islands and their vexed historical and linguistic relationships with the center—Darras’s project participates in a form of critical memory. Following a brief discussion of the major characteristics of his oeuvre, I turn to its formal elements—the frequent use of toponyms and allusions to Anglo-American modernists, in particular—as crucial markers for Darras’s visionary poetics of place and for defining its fraught relation with the Long Poem.

Keywords:

• regionalism
• toponyms
• local history
• literary allusion
• Long Poem
• Modernism

Notes

1 The original exchange between the two poets, which took place on Alain Veinstein’s radio show, Nuit magnetique evokes Pound’s injunction from “A Retrospect”: “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”

2 In History, Memory and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry 1935-1968, John Lowney underscores the importance of the documentarist poetics of the 1930s and 1940s for engaging in projects of counter-memory that call into question hegemonic narratives the past.

3 In her 1949 collection of essays arguing for poetry’s ability to amend collective memory by unveiling episodes and channeling voices that have long been sidelined or forgotten, Rukeyser refers to Whitman as an exemplary poet together with Melville and Crane: “many of our poems are such monuments; they offer the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility” (67). Darras’s own poetic turn to Europe after the Maastricht Treaty in the 1990s reprises Whitman’s internationalist ethos, without, in so doing, taking for granted the coherence of the continent’s composite cultural makeup or arguing for its exceptionalism as Whitman did when positing his faith in multicultural synthesis as in American nationalism.

4 In La fôret invisible (1985), an anthology of Picard texts from the Middle Ages (contemporary with Roubaud’s investigation of troubadour canso in La fleur inverse), Darras pursues a similar analysis in relation to the Puy d’Arras and its courtly poetic tradition, pointing to a multiplicity of forms (the fatraisie, or the lyric of nonsense, the congé among them) which seek to amend the author-centric account of literary history tributary to Villon.

5 In Picardie, verdeur dans l’âme, Darras recalls Boucher de Perthes’ crucial discovery of hand axes in the Somme Valley – now understood to originate with Neanderthal populations – which was marred, at the time, by the fabricated “antiquity” of human remains excavated from the site.

6 As stated in an interview with Sophie Nauleau on France Culture shortly after the publication of Maye VIII in 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raluca Manea

Raluca Manea teaches French language and literature at Collegiate School in New York. Following studies in Comparative Literature at Harvard, she completed her doctorate in French at New York University. Her articles on Emmanuel Hocquard and Anne Tardos have appeared in Formes poétiques contemporaines; her studies of Michelle Grangaud have appeared in French Forum and Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: Sites. She is currently investigating multilingual practices in works by contemporary women poets and the recent flourishing of non-fiction in France.