La Poésie délivrée by Stéphane Hirschi et al. (review)

This exciting, wide-ranging volume of thirty-two essays refutes the commonly held assumption that the nineteenth century, by sacralizing the book of verse as commodity, confined poetry to a silent, private reading as its primary mode of consumption. On the contrary, argue the editors of this ‘histoire radicalement nouvelle de la poésie moderne’ (back cover), poetry has been a vibrant force, omnipresent in the public space, whether declaimed, sung, performed, or inscribed, from the French Revolution to the present. The title’s playful homophony is intended also to be heard as ‘la poésie dé-livrée’, or ‘la poésie hors le livre’, leading us away from a solemn reverence towards the printed artefact, and back to poetry’s roots in oral and musical performance. Beginning with the nineteenth century, the editors highlight the importance of spontaneous or collective events organized by groups such as the Hydropathes at public spaces including the Chat noir where, they argue, modern poetry as performance begins. Exploring the popular, political, and civic contexts for such performances underlines the importance of poetry as cultural and social practice at salon readings, banquets, theatres and cabarets, revolutionary gatherings, and state festivities. The volume features three carefully assembled sections, each with its own editorial team and introductory essay, beginning with ‘La Poésie dans la cité’, which focuses on the political and public domains. Here, poetry is declaimed in a wide variety of contexts, from the street, where it provides an immediate mode of political engagement, to the popular goguettes and cafés-concerts, awash with amateur versifiers, and even the courtroom, where magistrates eventually banned defendants from making their case in verse. Part Two, ‘Voies/Voix de traverse’, explores the aural and visual dimensions which, suggests Serge Linarès, have helped to ‘changer la poésie en amplifiant son champ respirable’ (p. 207). Topics include the re-invention of the printed text as a component of the artist’s book; engagement with contemporary and conceptual art; new approaches to the body and the voice through audio, video, and digital media; poetry slams and rap music — each inviting reflection on the limits, and endless redefinition, of poetry itself. The final section, ‘La Poésie à l’ère médiatique’, explores the last 140 years of multimedia experiments and hybridization, as poetry interacts with music, the press, the cinema of 1910s and 1920s, radio, television, and the internet. Here, practice fluctuates between the conservative use of a new medium simply to re-present the classics, such as televised poetry readings, and avant-garde explorations of the new medium’s potential to inspire innovative forms, as in la poésie sonore. Fascinating existential questions underpin all these essays, which foreground poetry’s ambivalent relationship with evolving technologies of mass diffusion: cultural democratization raises the problem of how, and why, to engage with a broader public, while excitement over new possibilities is tempered by anxiety that poetry might lose something essential in the process. For Stéphane Hirschi and Alexandra Saemmer, ‘[c]ette oscillation n’est autre que la problématique centrale de ce livre, consacré à une poésie “délivrée” mais fatalement “contaminée”: libérée des contraintes du papier mais assujettie aux exigences des médias de masse’ (p. 368).