Guest Editors' Preface

The field of modern and contemporary poetic practice in the French language is a critical, diverse and evolving locus of artistic and theoretical creativity and interaction. Building on a key modern tradition with its exemplary figures in the latter half of the nineteenth century, nourished on the individual and collective experimentations of the inter-war years, and cognizant of poetry's affinity with an ethos of resistance from the recent disasters of generalised conflict, poetic practice in French since 1945 has been unerringly focused on the implications of its role as critical creative signifying action within an increasingly complicated and problematic symbolic order and cultural landscape. In the transitional period between twentieth and twenty-first centuries that practice—across its increasingly varied forms— has engaged consistently with the multi-layered problem of its self-understanding, in which the resources of philosophy, linguistics and the social sciences are both creatively engaged with and, indeed, renewed. But it has also been bound up in a process of opening out to other forms of artistic and cultural practice in the constant reconfigurations of the contemporary scene. In this, poetic practice embraces the implications of its basis in poiesis, its mutability and openness as a manifestation of poiein—in short, its critical role as the linguistic horizon of the creative act, given the resources of the present moment. Poetic practice understood thus emerges as a cultural and conceptual laboratory of real importance in a world where "reality" itself appears increasingly and unavoidably experimental. It is somewhat paradoxical, then, that modern and contemporary poetry can be argued to have undergone something of a traversée du désert as an object of sustained critical attention in the field of 'French Studies' in more recent decades.

This issue of French Forum seeks to contribute to a now growing renewal of academic engagement with the significance of that poetic practice for critical cultural thought and debate. To this end it presents a selection of new studies engaging diverse aspects of poetic practice in French since the Second World War, albeit with a particular emphasis on relatively recent and contemporary developments. The ordering of the studies contained in the present issue is informed, in the first instance, by an identification of points of convergence, governing preoccupations and indeed communities of practice—of differing levels of virtuality—which implicitly problematize the figure of the individual poetic subject as the focus of critical concern. Thus, the first group of articles (presented below under the title "Synthèse et relais: Mapping Confluences and Migrations of Poetic Practice") groups together transversal studies relating what are often quite different poetic œuvres. This is counterbalanced in the second half of the issue by a refocusing on individual poetic practice(s) as an abiding framework for meaningful readerly engagement with poetic work. Hence, this second group of articles (presented under the title "Gros plans: Contemporary Individual Poetic Practices") discusses a range of individual poetic practices with a view to understanding poetic practice as a particularly open-ended and non-prescriptive form of artistic self-creation and engagement with the world.

The origins of the present issue lie in a conference of the same title held at the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies of the University of London and at Magdalene College, Cambridge in July 2010. A primary objective of that conference was to assert the renewed value and importance of the question of poetry and the poetic to modern and contemporary French-language literary and cultural studies as they are pursued in the Anglophone world. We are therefore particularly glad that French Forum—an important space, in its own right, for the cultivation of the kind of critical inter-cultural awareness to which this project seeks to contribute—should have agreed to disseminate some of the ideas and associations first developed there.

The sixteen articles which follow reveal rich textures and resonances in the works they study and develop new interrogations of and insights into the 'beauty' of language and in language, as well as challenging ways of representing the real and of questioning identity, whether personal...