French poet, Jean-Marie Gleize, is better known in French than English. However, over the last decade, scholarship has begun to emerge in English about his postpoésie writing and his recent poetry collection, Tarnac: A Preparatory Act has been translated into English. In his Oxford talk, ‘Democracy’, Gleize outlines what the Tarnac collection develops: why a ‘preparatory act’ of resistance is now a musical question — one of resonance. Gleize’s acts of writing he calls dispositif writing and the approach resonates with poet Charles Olson’s ideas outlined in his Black Mountain College Charter, The Act of Writing in the Context of Post-Modern Man. Olson’s ideas are often assumed to pertain solely to breath and voice, owing to his infamous ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto, but a lot of his work was about the act of inscribing. By looking to Performance Writing, a field which first emerged as a course and drew on Olson’s charter, the ideas pertaining to the act and action of inscription are illustrated. Additionally, by relating dispositif writing to performance writing dispositions and the ideas inherent in Olson’s charter, the validity of all three approaches illustrate how the ‘act of’ and the ‘act to’ inscribing spaces within the line and sign is a form of poetics, albeit, post-poetry.
Keywords: Jean-Marie Gleize; Charles Olson; performance writing; postpoésie; post-poetry
