Every year, with the month of November, comes for me the magical moment of the 10th grade poetry period.
Magic? Why?
It is the privileged moment when an entire class is immersed in language, and every year, the miracle happens: I see each one of them, one by one, succumb to the beauty and accuracy of a text, or be caught up in a moment of grace where they find their "voice" as a poet... This moment sometimes comes very late, sometimes it has already happened, but it almost always happens. Fifteen years old: what better age to make this discovery?
To begin with the diction of various texts, strong or unexpected, is always a delight. Something happens. A particular listening, a special quality of silence: the angels pass. And then, there is the moment when, through the game, one pushes to the extreme the total freedom that poetry offers, not only with regard to linguistic codes, but also with regard to reality. One wrings its neck. One "baruffle him the ouillais" as would say Michaux. One settles his account: it is the poet who commands. The white page is his game console: he transforms the world as he pleases, with metaphors, oxymorons, neologisms and the blasting of meaning.
After this drunken escapade into the madness of words, comes the writing of haiku: another blessed time when, listening to nature this time, we explore the tiniest detail, with the most careful delicacy. And at that moment, we touch a little, with the tip of the pencil lead, what is the power of the only word, simple and common, which recovers all its power of evocation by the only fact of being isolated on the page. And then again, we vary the pleasures: sound constraints, the straitjacket of the sonnet, the anaphora, the rich rhyme,... or total freedom, carried by one of the "springboards" constituted by the moments lived together in the botanical garden, or at the Bains des Pâquis, in front of a well-deserved hot chocolate...
Finally, we must choose: which text to retain in the personal anthology? Which poem to tell to the public during the poetry evening? How to say it? How to make its own rhythm resound? How to make its colors shimmer? How to silence the body in order to leave its place, all its place, to this word?
This is the fascinating journey that constitutes this period. Exciting but difficult because, beyond learning a particular artistic language, it is a question, as in any creative activity, of confronting oneself: how to say the world? What is important to me to write, in the end? Am I the one writing or am I being written by someone bigger than me? What are "my" words? Who am I?
And that is the miracle, the magic: to see before one's eyes beings who develop their sensibility and their feeling of existence by reading, writing, saying poetic texts.
BY CATHERINE MUGNIER, FRENCH TEACHER
