Programming / Poetry
If you want, I can make an effort to be sorry – no face no, to be genuinely sorry.
But it will be a real effort.
Because in reality, I am delighted.
So here I am tonight breaking everything down in the precious china store that some people call poetry.
I have clearly seen that, the more time passes, the more poetry has soared to the highest peaks of beauty, sweetness, deep thought, wisdom – sometimes it lays its graceful wing over pain and the pain becomes less painful.
It is not my intention to deny this poetry its place, it is a perfume of the soul.
But not all perfumes smell good, you can’t tell me otherwise. Some are even infections on invisible legs and come to attack you directly in the nose.
In the same way, some poems are not at all beautiful, and even less graceful, certainly not wise – as for soothing pain, it is totally out of their reach. I could even say that they know how to create pain.
There is Martial – the ancestor of punch lines: the one who will explain to you, in a few well-written lines, that ah well? this guy pleases you? that’s good, you have good taste – you don’t please him? that doesn’t surprise me, he has good taste too.
Any comments ? – me ??? no.
There are all those damned Frenchmen – you know, the ones who made all the other girls in the world believe that they were perfect lovers? – who have spent centuries inventing crests on the body parts of these ladies – so the Ugly Nipple one, it’s …. just atrocious.
You don’t believe me ? So… do you want an idea ? Here it is :
Nipple that has nothing but skin,
Flac nipple, flag nipple,
Big nipple, long nipple,
Nipple, do I have to say: bag?
Nipple with a big black tip
Like that of a funnel, (…)
Nipple for famous tripe,
Nipple, I thought, borrowed
Or stolen in some way
From some old dead goat. (…)
When one sees you, it comes to many
A desire in the hands
To take you with double gloves,
To give five or six couples
Of bellows on the nose of the one
Who hides you under her armpit. (…) Clement Marot
Or, maybe… this one ?
You show bones when you laugh, Heleine,
Some of which are whole and not quite white;
The others, fragments as black as ebony
And all, whole or not, decayed and trembling (…) Paul Scarron
I spare you The Carrion, of our famous Baudelaire – I avoid, all the same, the Sonnet of the Asshole, but the real one, yes yes, no image nor metaphor here – and yet, this one, it is Arthur Rimbaud the author, the one that all the young girls love and would have so much dreamed to save.
If you’re wondering which fly bit me tonight – but no, you’re not wondering that? – I answer that everything is fine
It’s just that sometimes, getting poetry out of its beautiful white carriage, all pure and full of? magnificent feelings, it feels good.
Okay, that breaks the dream a little bit.
But just a little bit.
Because these poems are totally outrageous and nasty and whatever, they are pretty much unread, unstudied, and off the shelves.
But really? for one night? just one night? the night of silly, nasty poetry?
& we finish the night with these famous battles where it is a question, in rhythm please, of improvising the best punch line – it could be an unforgettable evening.
With an audience that normally doesn’t come to listen to poetry.
That night, they would come.
As you can see, I haven’t lost sight of the goal: to reach out to the audience that says it doesn’t like literature, live performance, the arts, and all the rest. Of course they like it.
It’s just a matter of catching them.
ALTAIR - Concepts 