Poethical Force: Muriel Pic, Claudia Rankine, Rosa Alcalá

Abstract

It might seem like the focus on poetic documents in Chap. 6 neglects an important part of poetic production, and possibly the part that Henri Meschonnic is thinking of when he argues that any poem is the mutual transformation of forms of language and forms of life, namely the lyrical. How does the ‘objective’ dimension of documents relate to the ‘subjective’ lyric experience? As I will argue in this chapter, the opposition between documentary and lyric poetry is an artificial one that has been reinforced, in France, by the so-called war between the literalist and the lyric poets that Olivier Cadiot describes. Poetic documents reveal a documentary nature of poetry in which the account of a personal, subjective experience becomes intersubjective—shared and sharable. This documentary poetry therefore becomes a space for the lyrical and I will explore how it combines the ethical (as transformation of a form of life) and the poetic (as transformation of a form of language) in a common task.