Can you also tell us about your collaborations with your husband?

My husband is a professor emeritus of composition at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris. We have worked on several collaborations together. He generally puts my poetry to music, but one time, I wrote a poem from his music. We recently collaborated on quite a long project. Le Livre du labyrinthe is an oratorio which lasts nearly two hours, for which I wrote the words. It isn’t the same thing as writing poems (that won’t be set to music). It was played at Radio-France, produced by Mode Records.

Le Livre du labyrinthe
BY Alain Bancquart
TEXT BY Marie-Claire Bancquart
(Mode Records, 1995-2000)

It is very difficult to talk about collaborative projects. Even so, I have collaborated with a number of painters on books. From my experience with collaboration, I think that different arts certainly have much in common, as Baudelaire said in his correspondences. It is important to remember that the arts complement each other, and each of us has our own technique. It is possible to run into problems when you collaborate with an artist who practices another art. I think that the painting must not distract from the poem. Neither should the music be just a sort of accompaniment to the poem. My husband said from the beginning that the music must not be only a descriptive accompaniment to the poem. There must therefore be a method of transferring from one technique into the other in such a way that the two works, whether poetic, musical, or pictorial, together create a third work. This is why these discussions are difficult. The reclassification work my husband has done addresses questions that contemporary musicians ask themselves about how to put all the words to music. He writes about this in the first chapter of the book which I gave you (In the Voice of Marie-Claire Bancquart, edited by Aude Preta-Beaufort and Pierre Brunel). His essay is about the musical aspect of our collaborations together.

What literary theorists do you enjoy reading?

I like the books of Entier, the philosophy of Rousseau, but I’m especially interested in criticism regarding the movement away from immortality that’s so fundamental to poetry. Examples, perhaps, would be philosophies that concern themselves with visible life or how poetry reveals the meaning of existence in the temporal world, such as in the works of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Of course, I read the French literary critics who relate closely to poetry, such as Bachelard. I know the linguistic vocabulary that comes out of the critical writing in France that prevailed from the sixties through the eighties because I taught courses about these critics at the Sorbonne. There are those who think linguistic terminology lends itself to the French language, but I think these words are extremely weak in their ability to explain poetry. I don’t find it very interesting. It seems to me more of an additional distraction and quite an ordeal for French poetry. It isn’t productive for creative writing, especially because there are types of writing that are different from one another, and some writing can’t be explained with this vocabulary. You have, then, a closed circle.

Poetry is not a language
of communication. It is a language of another kind
of communication. Poetry is also an exception in language. I think each poet has her own language.

This poetic movement that took place from the sixties through the eighties was a movement which never attracted me in the least because I think it is a philosophy that relates strictly to writing. This holds no interest for me. I am interested in the examination of life as it is today, in Europe, and writing about writing seems to me quite deliberate and quite apart from the sense of the world. When you read linguistic theory, you return to the commonly spoken language, to the need for communication which is fulfilled by this language. Poetry is not a language of communication. It is a language of another kind of communication. Poetry is also an exception in language. I think each poet has her own language. It is easy for me to speak of different kinds of literary criticism because I also write critically about poetry myself. I think it’s necessary to have a range of knowledge about it, but the field proper to linguistics is really the language that is used to communicate with one another, not poetry.

How did you come to see it this way?

Well, this is my habitual response. It’s the way I used to explain it to my students. I would ask them to try to analyze the works of the poets they liked the most, recognizing the poet’s originality and consequently what type of analysis would best explain the uniqueness of their work. I would have them divide types of poets and use different types of analysis to explain why a poet whose work they knew well or whose work they really liked did succeed or did not succeed. There is no set formula. Liking the writing you’re analyzing is the principle rule. But you can no longer say exactly how to teach a critical course on creative writing, or how to be sure that you can definitively analyze the writers. No longer can you be sure that a certain school of criticism, with its own words, can yield the meaning of every writer’s works.