Posters in the metro, radio shows, stage, social networks… If poetry doesn’t seem to reach its audience in bookstores, the genre seems on the contrary flourishing through the fields it explores. France Culture has indeed invited 10 young poets to make this liveliness heard in the show “Poetry Moment”. Far from the potentially traumatic memories of reciting poems at school, how to awaken the general public to poetry? Nathan Devers debates – without judgment – with poet Pauline Picot, writer Thomas Schlesser, and actor Philippe Torreton.
From school to the stage, “standing in our shoes” After “Les Yeux de Mona,” an initiatory novel about art history, Thomas Schlesser tells a new story of transmission, this time dedicated to poetry, with “Le Chat du jardinier.” Why poetry? The writer talks about his past as a bad student, even a dunce: “poetry saved me during my young years,” he explains. Philippe Torreton also talks about his first encounter with poetry on the school benches in the preface of his “Anthology of French Poetry”. This genre is above all an “impulse, a cry, a vigilance, a desire to testify, to say something to someone”. He calls for caution when it becomes an object of study. “Let’s focus first on what it says,” he asserts.
Beyond the school benches, Pauline Picot brings poetry to the stage. She embodies it in her body and explains its importance: “We are now in a generation of poets who are very attached to the oral performance of their texts.” The difference with Baudelaire is that “we are alive, and we want to make it known… we want to stand in our shoes, facing someone who listens to us.”
Populist and elitist at the same time? Is French poetry going through a crisis as Michel Houellebecq asserted at the beginning of the 2000s? “Poetry in France holds a somewhat paradoxical place,” according to Thomas Schlesser. Although France was once an “immense poetry country,” today there seems to be a decline in this art compared to some countries in Central or Eastern Europe, or with the United States. “It’s not,” asserts Thomas Schlesser, “because there is a very active poetic scene.” What is missing then? Undoubtedly an audience, according to the writer.
