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  • Visual Poetry, Poetic Visions and the Visionary Poetics of Pierre Alferi
  • Heidi Peeters (bio)

The days of poetry seem to be coming to an end. Many theorists have been predicting the fall of the verbal regime and many theoretical volumes hailing the new visual era have been published.1 The idea of a “visual revolution” is part of a teleological, supersessionist concept of the mediatic evolution, which considers visual media to supersede the old verbal ones, which are considered less transparent, immediate and hypermediate. And obviously, along with the end of the verbal regime comes the end of poetry.

This death-knell, however, is flawed in two ways. On the one hand it overlooks the multi-media aspect of today’s media, in which visual elements may have a dominant position, but are surrounded and supplemented by other semiotic material, including music and written or spoken texts. This is not only true for the older medium of film, but also for digital and multi-media formats like movies in WMP or Quicktime, computer games and flash-animated websites, which all give an important position to verbal material. On the other hand, the “death-knell” supposes too narrow a delineation of literature and poetry; these do not in fact have to appear in a printed format, and are very capable of adapting to the new media environment. Poetry, according to Roman Jakobson’s conception of the poetic function, is determined by the dominance of paradigmatic over syntagmatic textual linkage (350–377). There is no implication that it needs to be exclusively verbal. Thus, although the past century has given rise to a plethora of new media that appeal more to the senses than ever and are generating previously nonexistent media languages and experiences, this evolution does not entail the disappearance of the word, or, for that matter, of poetry. On the contrary, it promises to breathe new life into it and to amplify its potentialities.

This essay will explore an example of what poetry can achieve when taking advantage of the language of audio-visual, digital media. More precisely, it will examine a volume of poems by poet-writer-filmmaker-artist Pierre Alferi, entitled Cinépoèmes & films parlants. In this collection, [End Page 52] the boundaries between the filmic and the literary seem to evaporate, as Alferi introduces film into the literary paradigm, and vice versa. These experiments with the filmic inside the poetic are not completely new to the tradition of literature, since they echo the Avant-Garde’s interest in film and movement and take it to a new, audio-visual level.

The Visionary Poet

Pierre Alferi is a philosopher by education, and his first book was a treatise on William of Ockham, the 14th-century English logician, whom he studied in his doctoral thesis. Early on, however, he switched to the artistic field, trying his hand successfully at poetry (Les allures naturelles, Le chemin familier du poisson combatif, Kub Or, Sentimentale journée, Personal Pong, Handicap, La voie des airs, L’estomac des poulpes est étonnant), prose (Fmn, Le cinéma des familles), essays (Chercher une phrase, Des enfants et des monstres) and translations. He co-founded both the journals Détail (with Suzanne Doppelt) and La Revue littéraire générale (with Olivier Cadiot) and wrote song texts for the jazz-rock band Kat Onoma and for his spouse, actress and singer Jeanne Balibar. More recently, Alferi has explored the field of film-making with Ça commence à Séoul, an imagistic story of encounters between Alferi and sculptor Jacques Julien, focusing on works of art.

The cinematic experience and the film medium have been major influences on Alferi’s entire literary production, since his writings appeal to the readers’ filmic memories, inducing them to remember images of films they have seen, or to read and visualize certain passages as if they were part of a film. Agnès Disson has shown how many of his writings can be conceptualized in filmic terms; Kub Or as a flip book of photo stills, Sentimentale journée as a home movie and Le Cinéma des familles as a feature film, with Charles Laughton’s The Night...

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