Oldal 69 [69]
OCR
“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 secondary 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 exercise 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 experimented by Jouet in French for instance in the collective poetry book Niamey, cowritten 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, pastiches 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 German 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 +
