Jonas Mekas - Debout parmi les choses : Poémes 1948-2007

Debout parmi les choses (Standing among things) charts a writing journey spanning almost sixty years, during which Jonas Mekas renews his approach and his forms, where the long, nostalgic narrative poems of the first period gradually give way to briefer poems that capture moments in time. Jonas Mekas' first major book, the Idylls of Semeniškiai (1948), has become a classic in Lithuania. In a form that balances tradition and modernity, these poems capture the characteristics of the world Jonas Mekas knows so well, and which the war is in the process of wiping out. Subsequently, the artistic and poetic ferment of New York in the 1950s and 1960s led Jonas Mekas towards a more experimental style of writing. Like his cinema, his poetry became more immediate and minimalist, abandoning large-scale narrative forms in favor of a much more punctual, visual and sonic approach, in which the word becomes the measure instead of the sentence. With this book, it is now possible to perceive the journey and scope of Jonas Mekas's poetry, an integral component of a body of work whose cinematic side has long obscured its scope.

Translated from the 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
A Nous/Cipm co-publication (Centre international de poésie Marseille)
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448 pages
Paru en 2024
ISBN : 978-2-370841-39-1