Laure Gauthier is a poet and transdisciplinary author who conceives her texts as spaces for watchfulness–both poetic and political. In a hyper-rationalized world, Gauthier questions the place of the senses and sensitivity, notably voice and touch, and of the document and the archive. She recently published kaspar de pierre (La lettre volée, 2017) and je neige (entre les mots de villon) (LansKine, 2018). In February 2021, her transpoetic album Eclectiques Cités was released by the collective Acédie58. Gauthier’s texts have a polyphonic dimension that allows for the creation of a vigilant distance between objective and subjective poetry; and she often investigates the materiality of text and sound with musicians as well as visual and sound artists. She publishes frequently in international journals such as Po&sie, Phoenix, Sarrazine, l’Etrangère, as well as manuskripte (Austria) and Insula Europae (Italy). https://www.laure-gauthier.com/
Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert is an artist, poet and researcher. S he works in collective investigations and experiments different forms of textual materiality – how narrative and poetics weave into territory and form our habitats. Heir current work centers around ecopoetic practices and is rooted in a poétique de la relation. S he is currently at work weaving links between periurban, natural, urban, and agricultural milieux in and around Marseille. This field work grew out of a collective investigation/speculative fiction, Les Visitaïres du futur, s he co-piloted with Alexia Antuofermo, centered around urban transformations in Paris’s 18th and 19th arrondissements. Together, they co-founded the collective Tramages. Prior to these investigations into place-making, s he questioned contemporary reading practices through performative interviews with readers and a cycle of open forums that sparked conversations between writers, artists, academics, and readers. Through heir work, s he engages in particular social contexts, employing artistic and literary methodologies to effect change - in a practice of field poetics - weaving threads among individuals, communities, and their environments. https://www.christopheragellert.com/ https://tramages.com/
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Below are excerpts from the first chapter of Lauré's latest book, Les corps caverneux (Corpora Cavernosa).
Les corps caverneux (Corpora Cavernosa) is a poetic narrative in eight sequences. The title sequences make a clear reference to sexual desire whose insurrectional power manifests itself in the book, notably in the sequence “desire for clouds”. However, the “corpora cavernosa” designated here are first and foremost caves and by analogy, prehistoric caves: the corpora cavernosa are these empty spaces, these holes, or fissures that we all share in our consumer society, and which we try to fill by any means possible. In each one of these sequences a new attack is evoked against these intimate spaces where we can breathe, and in reaction, a music emerges, a music of our caves, that allows us to rise up and remain vigilant.
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RODEZ BLUES
It’s still raining in rodez
a rain already seen
a rain almost hot
off-season
It’s always raining in rodez
a rain without spring
drops that fall
and rebound
like the blues
inevitably
You remember doubtless
the bounds and rebounds
of water
near the rose granite
that falls
singing
that falls exactly
like the blue
notes
seeing
It doesn’t get dark in rodez
half-dog, half-wolf
in stark daylight, it’s raining
a useless rain
a rain without season
let’s talk about it!
A rain without storms,
fittingly,
without clouds,
A rain of weariness, a landscape
that no longer tries,
of a nature that has nothing but humidity to oppose
derailed
It’s like a poem, soft and sweet,
A salon poem, it’s the off-season rain
a soaking tourist rain
Not even the anti-monsoon
a flapping rain
that battens down the tourists behind shop windows
a shopping basket rain
Catch the unsold items, impromptu window shopping
sometimes it works
Hoard, collect, and what if we stopped?
It’s raining in rodez
while everywhere else is on fire
the world burns well while it’s raining
the proof is that there is rain and rain
counterfeiting
And that it doesn’t smell like the earth
with neither storms nor clouds
it doesn’t smell like the earth,
yet
I would like to scratch it like dogs
scratch it to unearth
to see a sign of afterwards,
green
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I’M THIRSTY IN THE RAIN
I cobble together a music that disregards neither the earth
nor the mist of which we speak
nor even less the impossible bark,
the indifferent embankment
Those that grind in black
saw them rise up from the depths of the mountain in rodez, over there by the hole of bozouls,
The blood of the distraught rite
Of the rite almost forgotten
The tramp of the world
Humpbacked,
With darting eyes
Injected
with the poverty you no longer control,
from the mountain R, overlooking the rose sandstone, appeared to me –
Seen the poor hunchback moan
crossing the averyonnais
lands that you no longer know how to name, a countryside neither prepared nor visited,
where you didn’t plan on going,
the plateau on the segala, the comtal steppe, the stony lands,
You have 6 flavors of taffy in your pocket, but you don’t know the name of the rocks,
Suddenly you saw the tramp of world and she was screaming at you
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“I SAW THE MUSEUMS DIE”
“I saw the museums die, behind the mountain”, she repeated
We remake faces, dead, we remodel them,
We remake the voices of dead actors, rearticulate them,
We remake the caves in plastok, duplicate them,
And we walk stepping backwards
Atrophied to touch
Accept to look at the punctured men
leaking
the chipped men
by thousands
by which we can perceive the whitebeam, the honeysuckle, and the chestnut trees
And the skin the height of the cloud, there are no more numbers nor circles in the soil,
Everything is covered, and you can no longer rummage through the past, that’s enough
Better to danse staggering without knowing,
A path will be found
On the stony plateaux
The poor of the world appear
Proclaiming words that I do not understand
The widespread ellipsis of the senses dancing
In the forests, thick, with old men in costume, talk about themselves and say they write
forest poems and argue over form, and there are others
that settle in trees with
photos and films, thinking they win the draw and scratch,
You can see the cart before the horse, disappearing from sight
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