La Poésie du lieu: Segalen, Thoreau, Guillevic, Ponge (review)

For Steven Winspur, the notion of the ‘lieu’ does not correspond to topographical descriptions of clearly defined places. Instead, in La Poésie du lieu, he explores the relationship between certain forms of poetic writing and the particular feeling of place and space they create. To this end he focuses his attention on four writers: Victor Segalen, Francis Ponge, Eugène Guillevic, and Henry David Thoreau. What distinguishes these writers, he argues, is a desire to inspire the formation of a different relationship with place, one that is more unified and that represents an integral part of real, accessible locations in the natural world. This contrasts with a more traditional role for place (and the natural world in particular) in poetry, where its function is often to represent a dramatic site of epiphanic and subjective revelations. For this reason Winspur pays particular attention to ‘endroits ignorés, ou éloignés de la plupart des chemins’ (p. 28) in order to illustrate how the reader may reconnect through poetry with those places of transition and movement that may initially appear devoid of meaning but are in fact reminders of how all places have their own lives. Much poetic writing of place traditionally imitated the rhythms of walking. The reader was thereby invited to become an ambulatory partner through text and place. The authors examined may at first appear to continue in this tradition, but it is more accurate to speak of ‘errance’, or a poetic writing that itself replicates impulsive wandering. In the case of Segalen’s Stèles, for instance, Winspur explains how this possibility to perceive things differently is pushed to extremes when we are asked to see the poems as models of ‘une existence substantielle, en dehors de tout système symbolique’ (p. 32) that calls out to the reader across the landscape described, but also across the page. All four writers also force us to confront the ‘materiality’ of nature, and the humble yet infinitely complex role it plays in daily life. To this end the volume’s middle section, ‘Les notations d’un corps spacieux’, deals primarily with the issue of language, and in particular its role in conveying ‘silence’. Segalen’s Thibet in particular demonstrates the ways in which auditory experience is privileged over verbal comprehension. Reading poetry becomes ‘une écoute patiente des bruissements divers de la matière qui entoure un promeneur en pleine campagne’ (p. 98). The volume’s final section, ‘Ici vu d’ailleurs’, examines new ways of seeing and relating to places near and far. Returning to the notion of the echoes and reverberations of the natural world that call out to us in a way that makes us realize our own integral connection with place, Winspur underlines the transformative effect this writing has on the reader. ‘La poésie du lieu’ is said to function like a compass, the use of which readers discover after a period of initial confusion. Winspur’s close textual analysis of these writers’ individual texts is informed and penetrating, and he illustrates compellingly the ways in which the works discussed allow readers to (re)discover, in an active process encouraged by the text, the natural world and their place in it.