The 2024 Rimbaud Prize was awarded to a native of the country, Grégory Rateau, resident of Prayssac, for his collection “The Uncertain Country”, published by Rumeur libre éditions. We have been following him for two years, see the latest publication “A poet at heart with recognized success” published in La Dépêche on 09/08/2024.
Dedicated to young poetic creation, every year, the prize was awarded to a young poet aged 18 to 25, but has now evolved, recognizing the innovative aspect of a work. “An incandescent spray that we have been waiting for since Rimbaud, Vaché, Desnos, Jouffroy and Borer”, according to Sylvestre Clancier, president of the House of poetry. The award ceremony will take place on December 5 at the Maison de Poésie, 11 bis rue Ballu 75009 Paris from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. (at the Hôtel Blémont).
The Preface is by Alain Roussel: “Far from literary gesticulations and salon celebrations, there is still today a poetry which smells of sulfur, which burns the thoughts and the nerves, which throws you, panting and haggard, on unknown paths where we walk with “sacks full of anger” and from which sometimes, mentally or physically, we do not return, such as Nerval, Crevel, Duprey, Bosc, Rodanski, Artaud, Prevel. These “suicides of society” do not write to write, but to open breaches in being and in life, with the knife of despair and revolt. Often, they are rejected like plague victims. We do not hear them. We do not listen to them. It is true that they do not speak for the audience and the honors, but for a few, poets and readers who thus form a “secret society of. writing”, as the late Alain Jouffroy once wrote. If Grégory Rateau refers to and pays homage to Jacques Prevel, a largely unknown poet, it is in the spirit of posthumous companionship. Recognizing affinities, the impression of also being an “outcast by birth”, he intertwines his destiny with his own throughout the texts. There is this same, implacable observation: life is not life, at least it is not what it should be. And there is this powerlessness to be able to change it, Rimbaud understood this so well. What remains for the idle people of existence? Artificial paradises, alcohol, which help you escape for a few hours. And then there is poetry which, while failing to transform the world, has the power to revolutionize the way we see it. It is this path that Grégory Rateau walks. There he can express his compassion for the damned baptized by bad luck, his anger against all these vain kings of culture, sitting without knowing it on thrones of straw, his rage, his revolt and his absolute thirst. Desperate ? Certainly! But a man who cries out his despair in a society on its last legs is a man living among the dead.”
