Guy Sacre Sheet Music for Voices

These poetic 'collages' were born from a freedom left to words to arrange themselves in images, almost without the assent of thought. I say 'almost'. In this field, regardless of what one might allege...

Contrary to my custom, I decided to bring together in this cahier songs set to poems by three different writers. Their date of composition, which provides this (false) semblance of title, would certai...

I came to Reverdy late - I was already in my twenties - through two verses from Les Ardoises du toit, that I happened to be leafing through by chance at a friend's home: 'The last belltower still stan...

In the preface to my Trois Poèmes de Supervielle, recently published by Symétrie, I describe his poetry as 'familiar, peaceful and reassuring', deeming it 'faithful to all stages of our life'. But I d...

I can never repeat too often how much my taste in poetry - a certain kind of poetry - is indebted to Georges Schehadé. After a childhood carpeted with Victor Hugo's alexandrines, and an adolescence in...

In a tale by Anatole France, the king of Persia wanted to learn 'the universal history of men'. However, his scholars having taken so long in compiling the volumes, he will no longer have the time to...

My liking for Schehadé dates back to when I was very young. One of my aunts acted as secretary to the poet, and in the silken cocoon of those long afternoons when she was typing out the chansonnettes...

Those who feel intimidated by Le Soulier de satin or the Cinq Grandes Odes (and at the same time fascinated—and dwarfed—by their sheer immensity) are surprised, on opening his Phrases pour éventails,...

My liking for Schehadé dates back to when I was very young. One of my aunts acted as secretary to the poet, and in the silken cocoon of those long afternoons when she was typing out the chansonnettes...

When I consider, with hindsight and possibly an element of forgetfulness, the mélodies I have written, I am struck by the fact that, with a few exceptions (Fargue, Verlaine, Schehadé, Cocteau), I have...

A few words about Poil de Carotte; a few words to admit that his experience is very remote from my own… I am lucky in having had a happy childhood, whence the constant and ever-increasing feelings of...

What can be said about Mauvais cœur—the text, that is—without resorting to paraphrase? It needs to be referred to in the same roundabout way in which it is written. Its mystery is as complete as it ha...

Those who feel intimidated by Le Soulier de satin or the Cinq Grandes Odes (and at the same time fascinated—and dwarfed—by their sheer immensity) are surprised, on opening his Phrases pour éventails,...

Those who feel intimidated by Le Soulier de satin or the Cinq Grandes Odes (and at the same time fascinated—and dwarfed—by their sheer immensity) are surprised, on opening his Phrases pour éventails,...

Apollinaire's poetry—like Verlaine's—is already almost music, so how could it not tempt a musician? But precisely, this attraction should put him on his guard. What is a virtue in poetry can turn agai...

Is it really possible for a poet of this quality to disappear without a trace? Not alone, moreover: along with Carco, Derème, and a few others of this "fanciful school", who, on the fringes of the noi...

It is not always well known that Rilke, in the evening of his life, wrote a few poems in French. He gave an admirable motive for this in the very middle of his collection Vergers: Perhaps if I dared w...

Let no one make a mistake about the word épigramme (epigraph): here it does not designate the vengeful witticism, the skilfully fired dart. Régnier uses it in its most Greek, most primitive sense: an...

Those who love Max Jacob (are there many of us left these days?) almost always hesitate between these two poles of the poet's inspiration: the tragic and the humorous - and all the more so given that,...

Ordinarily, what we like and admire in Tardieu is the virtuoso worker of the language, who dismantles the machinery of our speech and hearing, so amusingly and cruelly, and sets fire to all the distre...

I have not forgot my astonishment the day when I discovered the Odes et Prières by an author of whom I, like just about everyone, knew only the droll Knock and the hilarious Les Copains. The vast, lig...

To each of us, Supervielle can effortlessly speak 'his sweet native tongue'. This is not necessarily the criterion for 'high-wrap' poetry, and Mallarmé would be there to tell us the exact opposite. Bu...

So many contradictory masks have been attributed to him: the mystic and the rebel, the wild boy and the scholar… Let us others persist in seeing in Rimbaud, the poet Rimbaud, only the face of a child....