Jacques Jouet, Metro Poet

Jacques Jouet has invented a unique form of poetry: the "poème de métro," literally a poem exclusively written on the subway. The reader will find in Jouet's own article, "With (and Without) Constraints," details about the genesis of this particular genre along with the so-called self-defining poem, which is itself a metro poem. I would like to examine this new genre in its two complementary aspects: its mode of enunciation, which in effect "kills" the draft version, and the response it imposes upon the reader, making it almost impossible to read a metro poem without, at least in spirit, being in the metro.

Anyone travelling in the metro on a daily basis must feel, consciously or not, the rhythm, the regular beat of the passing stations, until one's trip is completed. I am only concerned here with the Parisian metro; I will explain why not just any metro system is capable of generating metro poetry. Marc Augé, in his beautiful little book, Un Ethnologue dans le métro, asserts that

L'extrême précision de ces gestes machinaux évoque assez l'aisance de l'artisan à modeler l'objet de son travail. L'usager du métro ne manie pour l'essentiel que du temps et de l'espace, habile à prendre sur l'un la mesure de l'autre. (15)

[The extreme precision of these machine-like gestures evokes quite well the artisan's ease in modeling the object of his work. The metro-user essentially only works with time and space, skilled at imposing on the one the mesure of the other.]

But the "usager" he refers to is merely a traveler who, at best, tries to use rather than waste time between point of departure and destination. Further on, Augé mentions the most typical activities of the daily travelers. The first one he cites is, not surprisingly, reading. It echoes what Perec had said earlier about reading in public transport: "Le lieu où l'on lit, c'est le métro. Cela pourrait presque être une définition" (126). [The place where people read is the metro. That could almost be a definition.] Then, in this order, come: knitting, filling in crosswords, marking papers, and listening to music with earphones. But, according to Augé, most travelers do nothing but patiently and silently wait for the termination of their trip (60-62). I find it amusing that, although Augé indeed seems to talk about Jouet's poetry in the above quotation, nowhere in his book does he even hint at a writing traveler. However, our metro ethnologist has an acute sense of the rhythmical measure implied by a routine use of the metro, punctuated by the alternation of the black tunnel and bright stations, reversed metaphors for the black line of writing and the white blank space to be filled, as Jouet himself indicates in his article.

Jacques Jouet definitely belongs to the category of heavy metro users, ready to brandish their "carte orange" at any time of day and night. He explains how it took him about six months to perfect the rules governing the writing of this new form of poetry. It would eventually be concisely expressed in the self-defining metro poem, which ipso facto became the ars poetica of the genre he devised.

In a typically Oulipian fashion, Jouet started by fine-tuning the constraint imposed by the metro poem before using it to the point of exhausting it (cf. Warren Motte's article). A manuscript note related to the Poèmes de métro (perhaps the only surviving one, since Jouet systematically destroys his drafts) points to the initial metro poems that he wrote on a trial basis, some of which can be found in Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux. The first poem mentioned, written on June 9, 1994, is followed by the word "non" on his manuscript note. From the second one on, however, starting October 13, 1994, each of the dozen or so poems is followed by the...