BERNARD NOËL
(from The New French Poetry, ed. Kelley & Khalfa)
Where is poetry bound? (extract)
(translated from the French by Peter Collier)

Metaphor and the poetic image worked to unfasten the whole system of
references linking words to things and providing the justification for
language.
The writing hand no longer followed the rhythm of the mouth. The
hand started to write under the impulse of the dark tide of words.
Today,
the hand rebels against the mouth.

(Seeing comes infinitely prior to speaking.
Seeing for ages was all that thought did.
Seeing was filling the head with the skies.
And with air. With all sorts of space.
When speaking was added to seeing,
The eye moved down into the mouth.
When writing was added to speaking,
The mouth moved down into the hand.
The eye played its part in the move,
But still under sway of the mouth.
The hand wants to break this constraint:
It wants to relate to the eye
With no intermediate powers
As it does when it paints.
The image already puts sight
Into writing, but this is not visual
Sight. The image in the text reveals
From inside what the eyes never saw,
Will never see, for the heavens
Within have no need of the other
To give us eyes to see...)

I repeat: writing, throughout its history, has recorded the
oral,
and this has confined it to the linear, to the logic of the temporal
thread. Poetry in rejecting the line rises once more erect upon the page
and recreates an origin. But this erection occurs in a space, and that
has
changed the nature of the page.
The page on which the poem rises today is no longer a
background:
it has become analogous to mental space.
I must now speak of this space, although I'm aware of
approaching
it with an inadequate vocabulary.