Abstract

"Toward a tree": I borrow these words from Jean-Marie Gleize's 1995 Principe de nudité intégrale. The phrase in full reads as follows: "It is enough to go toward a tree," and it reappears insistently throughout his works, more recently in Le livre des cabanes (2015) and Trouver ici (2018), at times abridged as "to go toward a tree" (or even, deprived of a verb, "on the way toward a tree").1 The implied simplicity and ease with which one executes such a move are, however, misleading: for a literalist poet like Gleize—acutely aware of the dual necessity and impossibility of capturing the nakedness of the real ("figurer le réel") ("Où vont les chiens?" 78)—the tree may provide a way to resist the intoxication of... Read More.