One of France’s most important post-1968 poets, Claude Royet-Journoud developed a spare style that explores the implications of the page as a stage for a poetics of immanence. His tetralogy, published by Gallimard from 1972 to 1997, is already a classic in the long tradition of French poetic innovation that goes back to Villon.
Michael Palmer once said that “Chief inspector Royet-Journoud’s famously elemental drama of the page – the word, the body, the book – is like no other. At the site of a language shorn of metaphor and conventional poetic device arises a multi-dimensional narrative, one not imposed but gradually disclosing itself. The tale resides as much in the silences as in the signs.”
Selected Bibliography
In English
The Crowded Circle, tr. Keith Waldrop, Le Collet de Buffle, 1973
Reversal, tr. K. Waldrop, Hellcoal Press / Brown University, 1973
Até, tr. K. Waldrop, Blue Guitar Books / Imprint Edition, 1981
“The Maternal Drape” or the Restitution, tr. Ch. Bernstein, Awede, 1985
The Notion of Obstacle, tr. K. Waldrop, Awede, 1985
Objects Contain the Infinite, tr. K. Waldrop, Awede, 1995
A Descriptive Method, tr. K. Waldrop, The Post Apollo Press, 1995
i.e., tr. K. Waldrop, Burning Deck, 1995
The Right Wall of the Heart Effaced, tr. K. Waldrop, Duration Press, 1999
Theory of Prepositions, tr. K. Waldrop, La Presse, 2006
The Whole of Poetry is Preposition, tr. K. Waldrop, La Presse, 2011
Four Elemental Bodies, tr. K. Waldrop, Burning Deck, 2013
His work has also appeared in Acts, Conjunctions, Temblor, o-blek, New Directions, Moving Letters, Lingo, Towards a New Poetics (ed. Serge Gavronsky, University of California Press), & Code of Signals (ed. Michael Palmer, North Point Press).
Links
Claude Royet-Journoud’s French Bibliography
