Meter and Rhythm. A definition.

Metre is a blueprint;
rhythm is the inhabited building.
Metre is a skeleton;
rhythm is the functioning body.

Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form. London: Routledge, 1996, p.7.

Lyricism

J’appelle aujourd’hui lyrisme cette en allée qui ne va à proprement parler nulle part, mais durant laquelle le marcheur connaît avec exactitude son poids et son vertige.

J.M.Maulpoix, Du Lyrisme. Paris : José Corti, 2000, p.10.

I call lyricism this forward leap,
which does not really go anywhere,
but during which one knowns one's weight
and vertigo with precise exactitude.

To Jean D.

If only I had had the time to be more
succinct, then you would not be reading
this, my third line of verse shit. Nor
would you be about to be remembering
the time you commented on your name,
on how in our two respective tongues
its signifier could at once be a female
or male signified in the domain of la langue.

We both knew who you were, what sex you were.
But the foreigner used your name to unsex you on the spot,
to comment on your lack of feminine masculinity

or was it to make fun of your masculine femininity?
In that each time unique moment when your name was spat,
it was you who was moist with saliva, not your wear, but your coeur.

Disappear

These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim. In darkness, he would see me: my word would be his silence, and he would think he was holding sway over the world, but that sovereignity would still be mine, his nothingness mine, and he too would know that there is no end for a man who wants to end alone.

This should therefore be impressed upon anyone who might read these pages thinking they are infused with the thought of unhappiness. And what is more, let him try to imagine the hand that is writing them: if he saw it, then perhaps reading would become a serious task for him.

Blanchot, Death Sentence. Trans. L.Davis.

Le blog?

« Le Journal n'est pas essentiellement confession, récit de soi-même. C'est un Mémorial. De quoi l'écrivain doit-il se souvenir ? De lui-même, de celui qu'il est, quand il n'écrit pas, quand il vit la vie quotidienne, quand il est vivant et vrai, et non pas mourant et sans vérité. Mais le moyen dont il se sert pour se rappeler à soi, c'est, fait étrange, l'élément même de l'oubli: écrire. »

Maurice Blanchot, L'espace littéraire.