Pierre et Ilse Garnier: la poésie au carrefour des langues (review)

Pierre Garnier’s eightieth birthday in 2008 led the Université de Picardie Jules Verne to organize a colloquium honouring him and his wife and collaborator Ilse Garnier. This volume collects twenty-one presentations from that event, covering Pierre’s biography and influences, the works he and Ilse did together, his writings in Picard, his linear poetry, and especially his central role in the movement he created and called Spatialism. The opening section, ‘Langue poétique, langue maternelle’, contains six essays relating to Pierre Garnier’s poetic apprenticeship and his role in promoting literature in Picard, a language he helped save from extinction. Garnier was literature editor for Eklitra, a new journal devoted to the Picard language; from the 1960s to the twenty-first century he wrote about the Picard language, and wrote poetry, including Spatialist poetry, in Picard. In the section ‘Pierre et Ilse Garnier: œuvres croisées’, four articles discuss the international blend of Ilse’s Germany and Pierre’s France. An important element is Pierre Garnier’s rejection of language as a national political construct, and the marriage of the two writers and their bilingual texts become statements of supranational reconciliation. Rare explications of this work, as in Gaby Gappmayr’s essay on the space around the physical word on the page, and Alfons Knauth’s discussion of Spatialism as supranationalism with a French-German interlect, illuminate this volume. Today’s graphic design studios have made page design seem easy, but in Garnier’s day anything but straight lines was a printing challenge. Thus the published version of the poem ‘Adam et Éve im Paradies’ (p. 86) is drawn and lettered in a clumsy hand, while the typewriter becomes the instrument of composition in the book of Poèmes mécaniques. In this instance the machine’s role is integral to the poetry, while in others it seems simply the means of text creation. ‘Langue des mots, langue des signes’ describes Pierre promoting the Picard language, loving birds, and enjoying connections with writers of the École de Rochefort and in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. But for most readers the significance of Pierre Garnier and Ilse for literature is through Spatialism. Contributors Francis Edeline, Claude Debon, and Philippe Buschinger delve into critical aspects of the work, such as the text–image relationship, the use of colour as an additional visual element, and the Spatialist use of the white space on the page. Each of these three writers engages in a satisfying close analysis of one work, and they underscore Garnier’s statement ‘typographie est poésie | poésie est typographie’ (p. 143), acknowledging the particular nature of visual poetry, which privileges the ‘reader-viewer’. This volume presents a well-rounded portrait of the long careers of the Garniers, illuminating some lesser-known corners of their work and experience. Most of all, it focuses valuable attention on, and undertakes serious consideration of, their Spatialist poetry. It is an important reference work for study of the avant-garde.