Point d’Appui: How did you become a storyteller and poet?
Fred Pougeard : I have always been a storyteller. My father had 8 brothers and sisters and during large family gatherings, under the large lattice trees of the Saint-Yrieix Les Bois pond, I was always asked to tell little stories and I loved that. Much later, one summer night, in the Creuse, I was in the audience of a festival, lying on a potato sack, in a meadow; an astronomer showed the constellations and two storytellers continued on this part of Greek mythology which draws the sky. It was the most beautiful theater in the world. I decided that’s what I wanted to do: tell stories. On January 17, there will be one of those creation myths that the two artists probably told that night, long ago. How, at the same time, could a taste for poetry not arise? Especially since I live with music and there can be no poetry without musical thought.
P.dA: What will your event consist of on January 17?
F. P. : It will be a stroll with stories. There will be two stories outside, time to make the public want to warm up, then we will finish at the Espace Andrée Chedid. I will tell, depending on the external places, a few stories which will discreetly echo them and in the cultural center which bears the name of a great lady of poetry, I will tell in particular a story which we have from another giant: a storyteller certainly , but above all a poet and then an ethnologist and memoirist, Marcelle Delpastre. Whose centenary will be celebrated in 2025.
P.dA: What messages do you convey when you tell stories?
F. P. : Tales, myths, if they have reached us, beyond the miracle of oral or written transmission, it is probably by the force of their inexhaustible polysemy: they deliver not one but messages which sometimes were so well hidden that they only reveal themselves to us long after we have discovered the stories. They re-enchant the world, also tell us about its constant cruelty, but often with this dose of humor that allows us to breathe, to continue moving forward.
