Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry by Jeff Barda (review)

Jeff Barda’s first book offers a study of the experimental techniques and lyric projects of Emmanuel Hocquard, Denis Roche, Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Anne Portugal, and Franck Leibovici. Constellating their works through an emphasis on the material production of language, Barda argues that the contemporary writers represented here, despite occupying three discrete generations, all eschew the traditional process of writing in favour of found materials. If, among American poets of the same period, a rejection of the lyric and of so-called lyric subjectivity was consensus, their French contemporaries sought to challenge the lyric ‘without abandoning it’ (p. 16). The poets analysed here practise ‘a lyric released from the idea of a subject, a lyric of the mechanics of language’ (p. 20). Barda’s book proceeds by way of a broad ‘cognitive poetics approach’, which he integrates with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and abundant references to the poststructuralist and deconstructive projects of Derrida, Barthes, and Deleuze. Careful ‘to avoid the trap of presence and narcissism’, Barda’s chosen poets ‘emancipate writing from the tyranny of its practical-semantic “purposive” state’ through approaches that ‘frustrate the crystallization of meaning’ (pp. 50, 116, 261). The study is organized not by chapters devoted to particular authors or works, but in terms of shared tools, materials, and techniques. Part One, ‘A Poetic Tool Box’, historicizes the concerns of contemporary poets, effectively contrasting, among other examples, Oulipian constraints to the bricoleur’s tools of contemporary writers. The structure of Part Two, ‘Language outside its Customary Furrows’, seems inspired by one of Barda’s major objects of study, the Revue de littérature générale, whose introductory essay ‘La Mécanique lyrique’ also organizes sections by material techniques. Part Three, ‘Mechanics of the Lyric’, analyses the effect of reading as a performance on the reader’s cognitive processes: ‘personal emotion is replaced with a constructivism that lets language work and surface’, but only as a means to ‘restructure one’s beliefs and level of attention’ (pp. 309, 313). Barda’s erudite study is of great interest to scholars working on the problematic of form in contemporary poetics. For poets active today, attentive to generational inheritances, the position taken by Barda in this study raises a number of questions: How is the role of the technician of a readymade poetics different from the role of the traditional lyric poet? Are both ultimately the privileged conveyers of the secrets of thought in language? Moreover, can the demands of poetry concern something besides language’s game of cognitive ramifications? Heralded as the epitome of present style since the 1980s, a pure approach to the ‘sheer materiality of writing’ has only ever interested a fringe of high conceptualists (p. 111); for the majority of writers working on the margins of the mainstream, mixing subject-centred and appropriative methods is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Today, the exploration of new forms in poetry, beyond the confines of either a re-invented lyric or a re-invented rejection of it, remains the general aspiration upon which experimental poets endeavour to ‘capture a form of life’ (p. 49).