Poetry also includes thoughts about unpleasant things, for example, about all the wars. I was a child in the Second World War. I have memories of bombardments. I was also very ill as a child. I was by the sea, immobilized for some years in a town where I was being treated, and then when the bombardments began, we were evacuated. I returned to Paris, but Paris was also being bombarded. I remember the Occupation. Every time I see Place de la Concorde, I remember being there in a crowd of people during the war…

A poet cannot live in a paradise and have any relation to life; there is always illness, always problems, always, and perhaps some problems are not very serious, but what is serious is the violence which exists in death, which is very hard not to think about.

I don’t know why, but my mother wanted to see the destruction two days afterward. So we went. I was eleven years old. It was not far from here, and what I remember above all is the odor of the rotting corpses. I’m giving you some of my memories from the second world war, which are in general very disturbing memories. And then France stayed at war with the colonies, with Indochina and then with Algeria, all the way up until 1962. Later, I grew worried that there would be a third world war. And indeed, the Kosovo war arrived, possibly the third world war, I thought. It didn’t have the same magnitude as the other wars, but it was still a war, and still as upsetting. A poet cannot live in a paradise and have any relation to life; there is always illness, always problems, always, and perhaps some problems are not very serious, but what is serious is the violence which exists in death, which is very hard not to think about. I’ve had an idea about hope that has followed me since just before I prepared Rituel d’emportement (Ritual of Anger) and enters into my most recent collection,Avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents (With Death, an Orange Slice Between the Teeth) The first section of this collection is about war and violence. But the collection always leans toward a form of hope, a form of serenity, and you apprehend this in the first section even though it does not yet appear in that form, but only in the form of pain. This is important because this is something that we cannot forget: the ugliness of reality.

I know that you don’t write a lot about your personal life and experiences, but has this childhood experience entered into your poetry in any way?

Of course, it is an extremely strong presence in my poetry. I almost never talk about myself in my poetry. But it is certainly what has given me the need to write poetry. Because when I was five years old, pain would overcome me whenever I tried to get up, so I had to lay in a plaster body cast for a long, long time. After that, it was always difficult for me, I was always tired. Even now, I am often tired. So I became a student, because I had to stimulate my interior life. I decided to go to a teaching university to prepare to teach literature in a university. I resumed my studies as best I could.

I had an enormous amount of work because although there were things I knew as well as the other students, for example, literature (because I read an enormous amount), there were other things I did not know at all because I didn’t go to elementary school. For example, I didn’t know what a right angle was. As it was the war, and I in the hospital, I had no schooling, none at all. I promised myself never to worry, because I had overcome this experience, I promised myself not to speak of death and life in this depth, this type of hysteria. From the age of fifteen or sixteen, I felt the need to write other things, such as my dissertation, but it was all this, without doubt, that made me feel I needed poetry. It also shapes the manner in which I see life and death.

I read that in the beginning of your writing career, you separated your academic writing from your creative writing.

Yes, in the beginning, we had to lay the foundations of our French studies. You passed one exam and then you passed agrégation. You had to have your agrégation and then you had to choose the subject of your thesis. It was at the moment of deciding the subject for my thesis, when I said to myself, I will not do my research on contemporary poetry.

However, I had already read the poets ten or fifteen years my seniors, such as Yves Bonnefoy and Henri Michaux. I had already started to research on this, but I had second thoughts — because I thought the poetic literature, which was at its beginning, was going to infect my own, and that maybe I would never arrive at writing my own kind of poetry, because the contagion would be too strong. So I chose other things. I chose prose, not contemporary prose, but prose of the 19th century. It is an epoch in French literature that greatly interested me because it was an epoch which had the same problems we have today: racism, war, drugs. And in choosing to focus on nineteenth century prose, I did not risk contagion.