He breaks the silence and deplores the situation.
The writer Sylvain Tesson, implicated for his role as godfather of the Spring of Poets, finally spoke on Sunday evening.
“What is my crime and who are the judges?”
» he asks on France 2. The author of “The Snow Panther” is the target of a forum of 1,200 signatories, the best known of which are notably the authors Baptiste Beaulieu, Chloé Delaume and Marie Pavlenko.
They accuse him of representing “the literary extreme right” and of conveying a “reactionary ideology”.
According to them, the choice of this author to lead the annual event which celebrates poetry “reinforces the trivialization and normalization of the extreme right in the political and cultural spheres, and in society as a whole”.
Also read: Sylvain Tesson, godfather of Spring of Poets: but why this controversy?
Sylvain Tesson deplores that those who question him have “found a word which is the word of absolute conformism and which closes the debate, it is: extreme right”.
On the other hand, he is willing to accept the idea of being seen as “out of date, retrograde, rebellious”.
But “the French language offers such a breeding ground, such a store of words”, that he regrets being reduced to the qualification of being “extreme right”.
He also expressed his enthusiasm for sponsoring the Spring of Poets.
He wishes to fulfill a double mission: to share a taste for poetry and to pay tribute to those who “came to explain to me, when I was 7 years old, that Victor Hugo was perhaps better than Mickey”.
“Poetry and literature is freedom”
The criticisms aimed at him are “symptomatic of an energetic incapacity to accept that things can be something other than oneself”.
Finally, he considers that his critics are on the wrong track and the opposite of what, according to him, writing should allow.
“Poetry and literature (at least that's what I thought, poor naive) is precisely the place (...) where everything is permitted, (...) where things contradict each other, meet, collide, oppose each other... It's called freedom.
»
The controversy caused the resignation of the artistic director of the event at the origin of the choice of Sylvain Tesson as godfather.
Sophie Nauleau.
“The choice, which I fully accept, of Sylvain Tesson as the magical godfather of La Grace
(Editor's note: theme of the 2024 edition, from March 9 to 25)
has triggered a startling, dismaying, not to say monstrous cabal.
In this context, no words being audible, I preferred to reserve mine for silence,” she said in a press release sent to Agence France Presse (AFP).
The Minister of Culture expressed her astonishment at the situation.
“I was surprised that poets excluded other poets,” reacted Rachida Dati.
“Culture is the place where, normally, there is no sectarianism.
It’s curious, sectarianism, among people who themselves say that they are for openness,” she said to the media during the Angoulême International Comics Festival.