Utopia

            Poetry is completely divided between the desire for the country that does not exist and the need for common ground:  between elsewhere and cliché, its two contradictory genies.

            The language of the poem is as irreparably the language of the tribe as the language of purest meaning.  Its matchmaking vocation makes it the voice of a utopia.

            Utopian body of the poem:  vertical, hierarchical and solitary.  It is its own space, hell’s motionless sky.

            Utopia less eludes earthly localization than metaphysical shelter.  In the first place it frees itself from the religion of its time and builds up the walls of a church that is “uncertain of its God”:  the blue chimney of the poem blustering in the middle of the sky.

            The phantom city, the waterless city, the kingdomless people:  a shared concern in utopia and in poetry to paradoxically clear out the world to allow the birth of true absent life.

            Just as utopia is the madness necessary to the preservation of social health, so poetry is an illness of the word that is a condition of its survival.

            In the same leap, utopia and poetry skip history .

            I would happily replace the poem with the utopia of the fragment, fragile piece of word around which the traces of the lyrical fracture must be sought.

            Utopia of the fragment:  “Like a small work of art, a fragment must be completely detached from the surrounding world and closed in upon itself like a hedgehog.”  (The Atheneum, Fragment 206).

            Its very subject is a utopia:  lost, exhausted and faint, it scatters its powers.

            Wandering word, compelled to never find its resting place, the fragment exists without hearth or home:  the poem’s memory devours it.

            It neither develops nor culminates.  Unfinished, it is writing that is suspended between prose and verse.

            The fragment is a crystalline stone.  A spark from the metaphysical table fractured by frost, that the poem’s transparent torrents bring down in our valleys.

            This ruin of language evokes ancient monuments of words.

            Uncultivated language:  patches of text not quite tilled, sentences not quite inked, too brief, slowly covered over with water by the time that passes.

            It is nothing, it is everything.  Its voice, its ear and its echo.  Like a shell, it locks within itself the entire murmur of the sea.  Alone it talks about infinity.  The absolute is its ridiculous intimacy.

            Utopian writing:  beyond genres, preoccupied with its own breaks and incandescence, meditating and savoring the language it consumes.