The poet’s new collection takes the form of a series of comparisons gleaned from a very large French-speaking corpus.
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It is not an enumeration or a compilation or a headless review and even less a listing. No, Johan Grzelczyk’s latest collection, It’s just like, published this spring by Ni fait ni à faire, goes beyond the simple addition of analogies gleaned from a very large French-speaking poetic corpus to establish itself as a meta-analogical sum. Understand by this: an analogy itself of analogy, a sort of “library of Babel” of poetic comparison, which, failing to contain them all, retains those which are valid for the others.
To compose this long meta-poem of nearly 3,500 free verses, the writer, author of several works on art and literature, among other collections of poetry, collected several thousand comparisons in “like”, which he then assembled according to a tangled alphabetical order and relational coherence. This gives, for example: “as if the walls were saying we hold / as if the walls had gotten closer and they kept getting closer and they were going to touch and absorb all the emptiness and everything that had happened and that would become the past and be forgotten, erased, killed / as if the ground was hollowing / as if he were real / as if he were his own reflection / as if he were still there / as if time had only been a decoration. »
The most discerning experts will perhaps be able to recognize a verse by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Isidore Ducasse, Jean Tardieu, Perrine Le Querrec, Liliane Giraudon or Maude Veilleux. But that is not the reason for It’s just like. The work, which borrows analogies from hundreds of poets, dead or contemporary, symbolic or surreal, affirms in some way their universality, ultimately belonging to no one except poetry itself.
Johan Grzelczyk, It’s just like, ed. Neither done nor to be done, 350 pp., 15 euros.
The extract
like flames
like flowers of blood
like flowers in the mirror
like withered flowers
like flowers that God makes rain
on his cut
like flowers that are too huge
like crazy
like life forms
like scarves tied one by one
like ants
like elongated fruits or candy
like ripe fruit
like overripe fruit
like rockets
like rubber gloves
