Page 69 [69]
“UM MICH NEU ZU MACHEN”
the German language. Anyhow, the main function of poetry is to discover and
enlarge the potentialities of the language, any language—but it is rare to see
it in such a dimension, how a poet traces his discoveries from its earliest steps.
One of Jouet’s first experiments with more complex grammatical structures
is the evocation of his first meeting with the German language. He remembers,
in a sequence of poems written between May 20 and 30, his first teacher of
German, Monsieur Rona, a Hungarian immigrant who taught him in second¬
ary school.” The first poem in the sequence says in a self-reflective manner, in
its first line: “ich hatte damit anfangen sollen” (“I should have begun with
that”). But certainly, this topic was delayed as the author’s level of German was
not good enough for that at the very beginning.
Another way of combining the poetical practice and the grammatical exer¬
cise is writing similar syntactic structures in following lines in the frames of
still another genre: the “poem ‘Choses qui...’, ala maniere de Sei Shönagon”
(“Things that...” in the manner of Sei Shönagon). This genre was experiment¬
ed by Jouet in French for instance in the collective poetry book Niamey, co¬
written by Idi Nouhou, Cécile Riou, and Jacques Jouet, also including a series
of daily poems in chronological order, from December 27, 2017, to January 2,
2018.3 The German poems composed on April 27, 28 and 30, May 16 and 18,
June 7, 10, 12 and 20 belong to this genre. His creation of new poetical forms
was not stopped with his switch to German; June 5, 2022 he invented the
genre Kriminalgedicht, imitating in poetry the crime story; its unique constraint
is thematic, it must be related to a crime. He wrote two of them, on that day
and the following one, but the question is open if they will be followed by
further production in the genre.
Jouet himself considers as a major step in his exploration of German his plays
and experiments with previous German poems: rewritings, reflections, pas¬
tiches on texts by Heinrich Heine or Peter Handke. For instance, the poems
written on May 3, June 23, and 28, July 1, and August 8 refer to different poems
by Heine, published in the Buch des lieder. This manyfold inspiration concerns
the topics, the vocabulary, and the meaning of the models, but not their form,
as far as I can judge it. Another very difficult exercise he tries is the genre of
“poème de métro,” invented by Jouet, which is in fact an improvisation: the
author has to invent every line between two underground stations. The poem
of June 13, composed in Paris, becomes a comment on his existence as a Ger¬
man poet:
© It is worth noting that not every poem of the sequence deals with that topic.
13 Idi Nouhou — Cécile Riou — Jacques Jouet: Niamey, Paris, Les mille univers, 2019.
+ 67 +