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Is the poem an act of resistance? The question shakes heads as the multiple crises (economic, environmental, geopolitical, migratory reception, etc.) trouble our times. But what resistance are we talking about? To dominant forms of discourse? To dominations in the broad sense? To imperialism? Social or linguistic conventions? Is it a patient expression or a surging volcanism, as defended by the new director of the Spring of Poets Linda Maria Baros, who chose this theme for the upcoming 2025 edition? So many avenues explored by the authors brought together by Jean-Yves Reuzeau, “without partisan orientation or partisan quarrel” and all generations combined, in Spirit of resistance, at Seghers.
The poet and “editor of poets”co-founder of the Astral Castor, brings together in this work to be published at the end of January “118 poets of today” (also lyricists and novelists) French or from the Francophonie (from Belgium to Haiti, from Quebec to Lebanon). The object, published in partnership with the national demonstration disrupted last year by a controversy surrounding its sponsor, is also the comeback of a publication “remained legendary”, affirms its director, “the Poetic Year”, published each year by Seghers in the 70s and 2000s, an overview of a year of contemporary poetic creation. We also find in the 2025 vintage certain authors (William Cliff, Annie Le Brun and Jacques Réda, etc.) already in the summary fifty years ago.
This annual anthology – “unpublished texts and written for the occasion” – thus undertakes to continue to report on the proliferation of contemporary poetry, attested over the past ten years, made possible by the stubbornness of independent publishing, manifestations of poetry – against which poets sometimes enter into resistance – and to booksellers. She attempts to show the reader its formal diversity, media (from books to social networks) and its concerns (ecological, feminist, on exile, war, intolerance, etc.); but without claiming to be exhaustive.
“The authors present live among us, with their sorrows and their joys, their doubts, their worries, their anger. They speak of love and death, but also of illusions and hope.lists Jean-Yves Reuzeau in this regard. Illustrations with these few verses from the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun on Gaza (“In the crash of bodies / Which fall / Those of children / Make / Less noise”), by Hortense Raynal (“Second day of organized crime. She says again: / I have a uterus in my heart it can give birth to things / like / fireworks / a neck seen from three quarters / love with a girl”) or Séverine Daucourt (“Often you wonder how – how to do how to alert how to branch off and where to start – you are among the first to suffer and among the last to be able to act, you find that the costume is too big you are floating in it”). And “all beauty resists”as Olivier Barbarant asserts, then this «esprit» is particularly alive among those who bring poetry to life.
Spirit of resistance. The poetic year: 118 poets todayunder the direction. by Jean-Yves Reuzeau, ed. Seghers, 400 pp., 20 euros.
The extract
Maud Thiria
Twisted tongue (excerpt)
tongue that cuts
breaking of the blades
never again lukewarm soft tongue
never again torn out prevented tongue
fire-rated tongue cutter
-fire cutter and incendiary tongue
dorsal paradoxical abyss
never say it again, repeat it never again
one that's enough at night whispered to the ear stuck to the feathers
refrain language turned into revolt
mantra chant where a thousand and one lives are born against the night against
firefly tongue awake field animal on land pollution
language that no longer pairs
the shore but the inhabitant sculpts it
bareback without ties untied tongue
sewn up unfolded
