Jérôme Melançon : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I’m a political philosopher by training, so most of my writing focuses on being extremely precise with concepts and arguments, with relating descriptions and analyses to contexts. I inhabit the world Maurice Merleau-Ponty laid out and I’m still trying to find my way through it (that’s my book La politique dans l’adversité and the four projects I’m editing at the moment) and out of it (by asking questions I don’t think he can answer, by reading philosophers and thinkers who are very different from him). I have hesitations about rhetoric and persuasion. I’m not sure arguments work unless they have something else attached to them - affectivity, beauty, refusal, a desire for something different.

Maybe poetry can be more convincing than arguments. Poems can help us develop a sense for the perspectives of others, how they intersect with our own, maybe even enlarge or shift our perspective. They can appeal to common elements in perception, to common emotions and sentiments. They can carry values, embody them, instead of defending them. They help us relate to each other and to ourselves.

There’s also a reinvention of language in poetry, both in terms of making language say things that haven’t been said before, that couldn’t have been said before, and in terms of developing a relationship to language. That’s something I do when I teach creative writing: my students either have French as an additional language, or use English more than they do French. A lot of making them write poetry is about helping them move through language, find a measure of freedom and find themselves within it, instead of being constricted by its rules and seeing it as belonging to others. The politics of who is Francophone can be stifling.

And perhaps through this reinvention and this new relationship to language there can be a better awareness of rules, how to resist them to make other lives within them, how to transform rules, how to live with ever-changing rules. Can be, because there is a lot of conservative poetry. And attitudes toward poetry do not align with political attitudes. I’m interested in developing this emancipatory aspect of poetry now.