Jonas Mekas
Debout parmi les choses : Poèmes 1948-2007
Author(s) Jonas Mekas
Format paperback
Year 2024
Language(s) French
Pages 448 pages
Description
Debout parmi les choses documents a writing journey spanning nearly sixty years, throughout which Jonas Mekas renews his approach and forms, where the long narrative poems with nostalgic tones of the early period gradually give way to briefer poems capturing instants. Jonas Mekas's first major book, the Idylles de Semeniškiai (1948), has become a classic in Lithuania. These poems fix in a form balanced between tradition and modernity the characteristics of the world Jonas Mekas knows well and that war is in the process of erasing. Subsequently, the artistic and poetic abundance of 1950s and 1960s New York would lead Jonas Mekas toward more experimental writing. Like his cinema, his poetry becomes more immediate, minimalist; the grand narrative forms are abandoned in favor of a much more punctual, visual and sonic approach, in which the word becomes the measure in place of the sentence. With this book, it is now possible to perceive the trajectory and scope of Jonas Mekas's poetry, a full-fledged component of a body of work whose cinematographic side has long obscured its significance.
Translated from Lithuanian by Stéphane Bouquet, Jean-Baptiste Cabaud, Miglė Dulskytė, Roxana Hashemi, Anne Portugal, Ainis Selena, Marielle Vitureau, with the participation of Tadas Bugnevičius
Foreword by Michaël Batalla
Preface by Stéphane Bouquet
Co-published by Nous/Cipm (Centre international de poésie Marseille)
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