 |
| French poet and inventor Jean-Jacques Lapierre with one of his poetry devices |
The French are Coming! Building on the avant-garde experimental linguistically unusual other alternative hybrid work of poet-promoters like S.J. Fowler, and Tom Chivers, the pioneering Paris-based poet and inventor Jean-Jacques Lapierre (above) is bringing his Poesie Trois Menagerie series to London this May, in a deliberate attempt to provoke comparisons to the Futurist visits of almost a century ago. Lapierre senses a swing to the Euro-text, as he calls it, in London - already home to nearly a million French speakers - and wants to start a cross-chunnel 21st century poetic revolution.
In a bizarre mixture of revolutionary France, and Alice in Wonderland, Lapierre's first installation-poem will be Robespierre Through The Looking-Guillotine, in which effigies of Larkin, Ted Hughes, and T.S. Eliot will be decapitated by a rowdy bunch of LangPo reciting executioners. "Death To The Verse Ancien Regime!" he exclaims in his exclusive April interview with Eyewear. Lapierre is the latest in a long line of francophone mathematical geniuses to become poets, albeit poets with a penchant for fashioning tiny intricate machines invisible to the naked eye - or, as he calls it, les mouches de mot - playing on the idea of a fly in the ointment of mainstream poetry.
Lapierre, who was trained as an engineer at the Academie Polytechnique Francois Xavier IX in the thirteenth circle of Paris, has long been associated with Les Nulles, poet-technicians who seek to fuse the innovative nature of French science and cuisine, with the French desire for poetry that goes beyond the thinkable, and, especially, the dull Anglo-Saxon way of writing poems that rhyme and mean something. The Poesie Trois Menagerie will therefore see 176 European ultra-modernists descending on a disused hospital in Hackney, where, for three days, they will hold debates, quarrels, jousts, pranks (les pranques), acrobatic displays, invention inventories, and of course the mock beheadings. Each poet will read their work - if reading is a word that makes sense in this context - dressed as either Robespierre or Alice in Wonderland, or, in Tokyo-style, a bizarre mix of both.
At the end of this symposium, Je Suis Superieure Press, based in Cambridge and Neuilly-Sur-Seine, will publish a 1,000 page e-book on the best of the collaborations-inventions. LANGUE EST UN PETIT ROBOT QUI S'APPELE APPOLINAIRE. DADA EST MUM! is the rallying cry. May 1-3, 2012, Hackney Hospital For The Criminally Europhile. Tickets are available from Oxfam Books & Music, call Martin Poisson.
In a bizarre mixture of revolutionary France, and Alice in Wonderland, Lapierre's first installation-poem will be Robespierre Through The Looking-Guillotine, in which effigies of Larkin, Ted Hughes, and T.S. Eliot will be decapitated by a rowdy bunch of LangPo reciting executioners. "Death To The Verse Ancien Regime!" he exclaims in his exclusive April interview with Eyewear. Lapierre is the latest in a long line of francophone mathematical geniuses to become poets, albeit poets with a penchant for fashioning tiny intricate machines invisible to the naked eye - or, as he calls it, les mouches de mot - playing on the idea of a fly in the ointment of mainstream poetry.
Lapierre, who was trained as an engineer at the Academie Polytechnique Francois Xavier IX in the thirteenth circle of Paris, has long been associated with Les Nulles, poet-technicians who seek to fuse the innovative nature of French science and cuisine, with the French desire for poetry that goes beyond the thinkable, and, especially, the dull Anglo-Saxon way of writing poems that rhyme and mean something. The Poesie Trois Menagerie will therefore see 176 European ultra-modernists descending on a disused hospital in Hackney, where, for three days, they will hold debates, quarrels, jousts, pranks (les pranques), acrobatic displays, invention inventories, and of course the mock beheadings. Each poet will read their work - if reading is a word that makes sense in this context - dressed as either Robespierre or Alice in Wonderland, or, in Tokyo-style, a bizarre mix of both.
At the end of this symposium, Je Suis Superieure Press, based in Cambridge and Neuilly-Sur-Seine, will publish a 1,000 page e-book on the best of the collaborations-inventions. LANGUE EST UN PETIT ROBOT QUI S'APPELE APPOLINAIRE. DADA EST MUM! is the rallying cry. May 1-3, 2012, Hackney Hospital For The Criminally Europhile. Tickets are available from Oxfam Books & Music, call Martin Poisson.
Comments
As I understand it, modernism started in France anyway and was susequently hijacked by les rosbifs so perhaps they are simply trying to reclaim it. Bonne chance mes amis!
Best wishes from Simon