The word végétal (“vegetable” or “plant”) seems to signifiy an idea that is very important to you. Could you speak about this signification as it manifests itself in your collection of this title, perhaps in your poem, “Liturgical”?

Yes, it is true that the word “végétal” is very important to me. It is for me a word which is very close to us, for reasons I’ve already explained. The cell tissue in plants is the same as the cell tissue in our skin, and “vegetable” refers to how this shared cell tissue is an example of our beginnings. It is a word that is silent and therefore signifies something which needs my voice to express itself. I am only an interpreter of the futile words we have in order to express ourselves. I am an interpreter of the world of what’s thrown away which cannot interpret itself.

One of my poems gives the reason I write about plants, which is that plants do not “make blood of ink.” In French we say “to make blood of ink,” which means to worry a lot. But this figurative sense might at the same time be the ink with which one writes. Plants don’t know how to “make blood of ink” (in the senses of “to worry a lot” and “to write with ink”), and it was for me a word problem. The word can say one part of this figure of speech but cannot replace this figure of speech. It is the only way we have to express important ideas, but it is an imperfect way compared to the world we would like to express. This is why I call this writing “the Braille of the living.”

Marie-Claire Bancquart
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

This reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s notion of “anaphora,” which refers to that which is silent but can only be expressed with words.

Yes, can only be expressed with words, certainly, but it must be added that words are imperfect. They are also mortal: written texts, quite a few written texts, have disappeared, such as the Etruscan writings. Perhaps our present-day language will amount to the same thing, and our written words will eventually die, too. Therefore we must not create the illusion such as the one held at the end of the 19th century which was that written texts were immortal. Above all, they thought that texts were the way man achieved immortality. All we can hope is that our writing will last for some generations after us, but not forever.

Didn’t the ancient poets believe this, too? That one could be immortalized in literature, in the retelling of stories about one’s feats, for example, a soldier’s bravery in battle? That the words of the telling would render them immortal?

Well, that depends on what you mean by ancient poets. Certainly, the Romantic poets, such as Theophile Gautier, especially the poets in the age of Mallarmé at the end of the nineteenth century, they believed art to be permanent. There have certainly been others who’ve portrayed French or English poetry this way, who’ve had the idea that writing is something inviolable and solemn, but this is impossible to believe, I think, since the catastrophes of the first and second world wars, which have shown us that our world is very fragile.

Speaking about poetic traditions, what poets influence you most?

I first started writing poetry seriously when I was about eighteen or twenty, and of the generation of poets who were writing at the time, there are three who influenced my writing the most. Yves Bonnefoy, because he told me to have confidence in my poetry and made me aware of the fact that I could pursue my poetry like the pursuit of hope. He also influenced my interest in painting, and in speaking about painting. I’m more interested in music than painting, but painting interests me all the same.

The poet who has had perhaps the greatest influence on me, in terms of my sensibilities, is Henri Michaux, the Belgian poet. He is a poet of the heart, of the unhappiness of the heart, and even died of a heart attack. He withstood much in his life and always lived with great burdens. He therefore felt the need to release his burdens in his writing, and this really struck me.

The third poet who has greatly influenced me is a French poet, André Frenaud. He is, well, violence. “Le vaincre” is an expression of his which has always struck me. He is a poet who writes in a scathing language of liberty, and is the third poet who has strongly influenced me. These poets are part of the generation that directly preceded me.

I can also speak of older poets who influenced me, poets from the beginning of the seventeenth century. And I can speak of poets from the far past, ancient poets such as Virgil and Ovid, Ovid because he had an idea of the continual metamorphosis of the universe. He came up with this idea and he showed how it could be depicted extremely well in literature: for example, in the story of Daphne who was changed into a laurel tree because she didn’t want to be violated by Apollo, who was pursuing her. After she had changed into a laurel tree, Apollo touched the trunk of the tree and found that her heart was still beating beneath the bark. This story touches me with particular strength because it shows the intimate closeness we have to the world.