Quentin Dallorme is a poet, winner of the Apollinaire Découverte Prize 2022 (Plein sud, éditions de l'Aire), published in the 2024 anthology of Printemps des Poètes (
These moments of grace in eternity, 116 poets of today
, The Astral Beaver).
Contemporary political language is favorable to artists.
It is so flat that poetry alone has enough power to stamp it.
However, our poets, at least some, festoon, distribute labels, here they are on the verge of distinguishing good from evil.
What a symbol: by targeting Sylvain Tesson, master walker, they are at the same time threatening homelessness.
That of the mind.
In his spare time, Erri de Luca, rather popular on the left side of the spectrum, translates biblical texts.
He makes discoveries.
One of them focuses on the multiplicity of meanings that a word from the Old Testament can express.
One word from the early days is worth ten today.
For what ?
The transalpine writer guides us.
According to him, man has gradually separated and fragmented language to adapt it to his activities.
Agriculture, work, daily life: the more we progress in history, the more words formulate the world around us and the less the reference to the spiritual is established there.
We have torn away its mystique from the language.
An alphabet freed from its shadow.
The earth separated from the sky.
It is here, I believe, that poetry holds an essential place.
It refreshes and rests language, reminds it of its roots, our roots.
Among other things: wonder.
This contact with the primary unity.
Sylvain Tesson: what did he bring us in his backpack?
The world.
And with it, this precious capacity to always marvel.
Its silences palpitate, its paths whisper.
Meanwhile, the universe expands.
Renaudot has behind its coats generations amazed by mountains, whipped by space, they ask for more, and I am!
Stuck between the end of history, transhumanism and the rise of dangers, our society really needed a breath of horizons, something to stretch out, to breathe deeply.
The more he walks, the more Sylvain Tesson makes us grow.
It was too much.
They cherish what was and extend it into what is.
This is their fault, maintaining this reservoir of the sublime that is the past by immersing it in language.
Quentin Dallorme
We would have been deceived.
So see: from guide, Tesson becomes guru.
The bohemian fascination his writing gives us is not good for us.
Battalions of fascists camped there, pen in hand.
Their ink is not diverse but studded with dubious references.
Raspail!
He would therefore have prefaced Raspail!
Another runner of the world, razer of the summits, always so covered in glaciers and savannahs.
It stinks of the ocean.
Above all: he loves history.
Nothing is more reactionary than running through time and space.
With them, no movement is impossible.
Being comfortable in the world seems a provocation to those who are stagnant.
Indeed, part of the poetry is in the swamp.
Soaked in politics, it stifles the diversity that many claim to defend.
We find
poorly extinguished fires
, will-o'-the-wisps.
This is not surprising, many texts backfire, full of gas.
To fan yourself, you turn the pages a little faster.
Tesson loves Raspail as Raspail loved tradition.
They are conservatives.
They cherish what was and extend it into what is.
This is their fault, maintaining this reservoir of the sublime that is the past by immersing it in language.
Crazy that we are.
Tradition is not the long chain of our abominations and errors, it is the cradle of all creation.
Raspail loved extinct communities.
For them, more traditions, more language, more people.
For some, this would be an ideal political program.
When the German tanks made France crumble, nothingness at the end of the cannon, it was not with Dadaist gesticulations that Aragon addressed the country.
He brought his lip to the living water of centuries.
And the rhyme and rage, that of proclaiming one's land, took refuge in his mouth.
The
French Diana
ignited the imagination as much as she rooted it.
Also read: Petition against Sylvain Tesson: the incredible reversal of freedom of expression
The signatories of the forum – it does not cover the entirety of French poetry, let us say it – are indignant at the philosophical orientations that they attribute to the work of Sylvain Tesson.
They are so accustomed to the fact that they cannot imagine seeing an author advance without ideology as his driving force.
These future jailers give full meaning to Tesson's travels.
Where we reduce, it opens a little.
Where one restricts, he expands.
Above all, he opposes a limit to the rise of the void: where there is a landscape, there is a soul.
In his footsteps, we find this lost unity of heaven and earth.
The role of poetry is in no way to constrain speech but to push back the nothingness that would oppress us without it.
To say the world is to inhabit it.
Where will they make us live?
Each era has its freedoms.
Ours are precarious.
Usually, spring relieves us of the contractures and rigorisms of winter.
He lets all fertility unfold.
May the next one be fruitful, bursting with openings.
Without ax, whatever the language.