Gilbert Bourson
Gilbert Bourson, born in 1936, was a director and actor. He published several books of poetry, novels, and essays with various publishers, including Éditions du Chasseur Abstrait, La Grisière (Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés), Compact, Z4, Jebca (Boston, USA), Tinbad, and Douro/La Bleu-Turquin. He contributed to the anthology 49 poètes, a collection edited by Yves di Manno and published by Flammarion. He also published in several journals: Arpa, Cheval d'attaque, Cahiers du double, Les carnets d'Eucharis, Polyphonie, Substance (USA), Action poétique, Travail théâtral, and Les cahiers de Tinbad. A large portion of his work is published by Chasseur Abstrait. He also contributes to this publisher's online journal, La RAL'M. He lives and works in the Paris region.
My "passages" are fragments of my vision of the world I inhabit, moments where I create poetry from everything around me, marking my presence in the place where things place me and name me with an "I," multiple and singular, poised for blood. A bird-like breeze lays the path I follow upon the white where the miracle is but this stubbornness to invest the most acute secret of number, and to sniff out the time when its gaps open to be the ravine whose fall is the source proclaimed in silence by naked speech, and kills under the compital magic of words, which multiplies it until it tears apart.
Floor of Heaven follows Heaven Writes Nothing, which appeared in the same "The Writer's Diagonal" collection last year. Each piece in this book is often composed of a quotation followed by a text. For the others, Gilbert Bourson has chosen to inscribe their very first letter in bold, somewhat like the illuminated initials of medieval scribes. The first observation: it's not a question of writing like, but rather of writing with. What is the status of these texts? Pure exercises in style? Not so simple. For one has the distinct impression, upon reading each one, that each text writes itself, of itself, that it somehow self-generates. To go where, you might ask? Simply to go towards itself. And one cannot help but think of Roland Barthes and his The Pleasure of the Text. For each text written here, as in the previous book by Gilbert Bourson, is a pure marvel. But there is also what is perhaps most important: the feeling that every reader of Bourson experiences—that of living and attaining, through reading him, a certain form of metaphysics. Metaphysics of language and metaphysics of Being. Gilbert Bourson is undeniably a stylist without peer. Publication date: September 1, 2023. Order now. Press release.
I begin "I Will Only Speak in the Presence of My Writing" with the evocation of an "accident" that is about to occur, so that this rain of meanings, made possible by the poem, may be unleashed. (I am thinking of Epicurus's clinamen.) This evocation is that of a body "struck" by the desire of another body, whose blood will stain the plane trees of words. Poetry is an undertaking to rehabilitate the reality hidden by "too much reality," to use Annie Le Brun's phrase; a poem can only be explained by its unreasoned reading, just as one looks at a wall, a tree, or a door. The reason for the arrangement of the words that compose it will become clear when the reader reads it for themselves "in all good faith." What we call readability is often what remains within the conventional sense of what must be seen, without reading within oneself the content of one's vision. Once the writing begins, she chases after that something that intrigues her with great skill, her hair as ruffled as a partridge. In partridge there is the word "lose," and what is gained from this connection is the poem. Gilbert Bourson Publication: December 1, 2023 Order
To write, to rummage, to sift through the flea market of language, seeking in life's opportunities its sustenance of things and feelings. Whoever speaks, gives themselves up without being freed, except from boredom. So many loves fading and so many games lost, and so much the worse for the rules. The three-legged horse found is only limping with one more vice. To speak in order to see oneself and hear the axle of the self creak, searching for what, for whom, and for nothing. And literature piles up its formulas, its styles, its sales, and its scraps, pinning up its new patches for a new cycle. Solitary reveries of one who is spoken of by so many wanderers, who, in speaking of him, give him all sorts of names and become entangled in the titles of the book that he is: "China," "Chains," or "Dung." But a love lies hidden beneath the written words, "Under Construction" within "Things," its dedication obscured by the enlightened commentary of those passionate about the delicacies of culture. Publication date: July 1, 2023. Order now
“The Sky Writes Nothing” is a title that came to me as I contemplated a cloud, which, of course, was forming beneath my fingers. I often thought of the little prose pieces I wrote then as those small meteors that appear in the sky and tell stories we invent ourselves. These clouds are merely the pages on which we write. As for the sky, it’s the keyboard that falls on our heads when this unpunished vice of writing tickles us. Everything lies in the affinity with the disjointedness of a cumulonimbus. Eyes on the keyboard, considering the consequences of demolishing the walls of our vision, ruffle their fresh cement blindness. Something lights up in a black crow to prune the sky and slash its laughing emptiness and its white collar. And this swivel chair in which the observer of these lines sits is therefore, at this moment, the closest in space and thus the most significant, for we see its unraveling structure in close-up and the ripple of the wind in the precise fabric that is, first and foremost, the sky and its arrangement. Publication: November 1, 2022 Order
The first part of the text evokes the frolicking of Leda and the swan (a sign) and conjures up small, baroque erotic fantasies. The second is the tale of Little Red Riding Hood going to meet the wolf. The writing of "Anellemâlités" makes the author and the reader both: She and He, the feathers and the beak (of the sign), the fangs and the "buttery skin" of Little Red Riding Hood (the pot will be broken by the male wolf). White and red mingle, as in the name Caroline, which is the name of Carolingian script in the 9th century. Humor and sex intertwine, with the language of nocturnal negotiations and the frolicking of bed-lovers on tiptoe, ruffle these pages, like a bed (in slang, a page means a bed). Publication: December 1, 2021 Order
