Pascal Boulanger

Pascal Boulanger

Pascal Boulanger, born in 1957, was a librarian in the suburbs of Paris from 1980 to 2018. He now lives in a village in Brittany, near Combourg. A poet and literary critic, he was named a Knight of Arts and Letters in 2023. He has contributed to numerous magazines, including Action poétique, Arpa, Artpress, Les Cahiers Tinbad, La Polygraphe, Recours au poème… Among his latest books – poetry and notebooks – are: Mourir ne me suffit pas, Éditions de Corlevour, Trame, anthology 1991-2018 followed by L'amour là, Tinbad, Jusqu'ici présent je suis en chemin, Tituli, L'intime dense, Éditions du Cygne, Si la poésie doit dire tout, Éditions du Cygne, En bleu adorable, Tinbad and L'amour malgré, with paintings by Nora Boulanger-Hirsch, Voix d'encre. The Gap is the fourth volume of his notebooks.

As much as possible, I escape the chattering and blotting bonds. I prefer the trees of the forests to the noise of the cities, they make me invisible. The birds are not very talkative, they are content to punctuate the sky. I listen to the waves trembling and sometimes barking as they hit the breakwaters... Why speak, indeed, when everything already speaks in speaking words? Spoken words are born of the imagination, they are a matter of management and communication, and consequently they lie. Its society voraciously swallows words that make noise. The reign of the quantity of words is the eternal present of the spectacle, the programmed and very often encouraged death. We have forgotten that all our passions can only be sensual, they should occupy the place of exception. They make silence heard and watch over secrets. If desire separates, the distance must be maintained so that words, which themselves are distances, can be heard. Failing to symbolize – to make absence bearable – the addiction to transparency through the inflation of communication, it denies the chain of Time and its necessary markers. Our era constructs nothing, it deconstructs speech, which becomes a speech without speech, a speech without self-awareness. Conversely, poetry is like the sea: the dwelling and endless narration of a silence that is not silence. Publication: June 2, 2025 Order Press release