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I don't know whether it's still possible today to give a poem a real drubbing or if one is only allowed to call it lousy. In practice, obviously, we hardly deprive ourselves. But in theory? I don't see any criteria for judgment that can stand up to a poet's sovereignty, or, more broadly, to a poet's freedom to write whatever, however. It's enough if the text conforms to writerly intentions, that is, to unintentional (unconscious) intentions and to unintended intentions (chance). Like most collections, My Life to Live makes room for recurrence, for turning back on itself, on poetry, and on writing. In its writing, it creates a poetic art that permits the posing of critical questions.

Questions, though, can be traps. I'll give you some examples. Between the epigraph by Bazin and the Forward, three lines glide by whose function is unidentifiable, for we have no way of placing such a textual form (a "peritext" according to the taxonomy used in poetic theory), at this point in a book. What's more, we believed we would reencounter those lines, in another verse form, at the end of the poem, in the final section. But the citation, or the anticipation, is unreliable: hope becomes despair and the word completely is reiterated.  -- Godard's film is cut up into scenes, Baetens reminds us in his Forward. In the same way, the collection is composed of sections. Do these match those? Yes and no: for the titles of the poetic sections often evoke those of the cinematic scenes, but not always, and then, above all, there are fifteen here, while only twelve there.  -- The Forward and then the Final Note announce and specify the formal method in each section of the work. But there are fifteen sections and sixteen methods mentioned, one of them seemingly unrealized in the collection.  -- Two epigraphs appear, one at the head of the collection, the other preceding the very first poem. But, in formal terms, everything separates them: Bazin's prose is put into verse, while the poetic nature of Cocteau's phrase is beyond question; the citation from Bazin is presented in Roman characters and the signature in italics, while Cocteau's is the inverse.  -- Most of the poems violate the ostensible formal rules on which their writing is based, not with respect to any poem as a whole (otherwise, how would one recognize the form?), but all the same in an appreciable number of lines. For the most constrained forms, it's plain to see. In the sonnets (Section VI), there are irregular lines. There's even one with one line too many. The heptasyllabic poems (Section XIII) can have lines of six or eight syllables. In the poem in tetrasyllables (Section II), so rhythmically persistent, one line has only three, though that doesn’t seem to mean much. The "3, 2, and 5 word stanzas" (Section III) sometimes add up to six, when this isn't the order of succession being overthrown (2-3-5). And even with the freest of constraints, those called "free" free verse (Section V), the enjambment isn't consistent.

So this is a lousy collection. Sabotaged by method, derailed by art, even to the point of linguistic lapses and haphazard writing. I'm just being scrupulous when I highlight the typos, the deviant orthography, and the broken rules of grammar. I don't want to back the poetic art of lousiness into a corner. By the time Baetens proofreads the collection for publication, maybe the "noise" will have disappeared: no poet is safe from an over-zealous editor. All the same, the misalignments are sufficiently numerous, spread out, and varied to make sense.

But of what sort? I see only one type sufficient to justify, on the one hand, the concordance of the theme and its poetic treatment, and, on the other, the aesthetic bias that underlies the former: the sense of the everyday. An everyday that gradually makes and unmakes itself, enduring the imperfection of things that can't be stopped, and about which we know neither if they're half undressed already or half dressed again, those that go and come, at first just a little, later just in time, and frequently -- alas! -- once too often. It's an anxious time that contains its share of disenchantment, for we imagine that the opportunity's lost already, even though this opportunity repeats itself again and again, stumbling over the ends of lines. There's nothing to do, nothing to protest. It's the life to live, it's everything. How can this life, still just a rough draft of the one we figure we're entitled to, not set forth in tatters while we're tentatively extricating ourselves with a semblance of order? Order, rules, freedoms under constraint -- law is essential for the illusion of sense. It must be proclaimed, clearly, everything must be very clear. The law has changed, for all that, but it's the law. What is in effect terrible about the law of living is that it seems to have only retroactive effects: we initially didn't choose it, but it gets better nevertheless, because we follow it. No one should be surprised, therefore, if disorder aims headlong at order, and then profits when they collide. Or if some smudges, some stains, some fading, and some vomit come to compromise the immaculate purity of each impending day. As one finds, the formal imperfection isn't the only evidence of an aesthetics of the everyday (it's simply the aspect that struck me first). The impure, the heterogeneous, the sketchy, the anecdotal (no kidding), the banal, and the discreet all contribute to shaping it as well.1

All this contrasts with the values usually adopted by the poetic arts! While the Poet seeks the sublime, the poems that make up My Life to Live aim to avoid transcendence: neither Language nor Reality is overtaken, but we do approach the studio-world of a film. Faced with the mad desire for mastery, Baetens, for his part, admits that the words are defeated in advance. And notwithstanding the sources of genius and inspiration from which, paradoxical as it seems, the master-poet presumes to draw diligently, he plainly clarifies his processes in a note, and uses the ancient analects unselfconsciously.2  But it is to the Poet, I mean the prince among them3, that Baetens intends to bring his point of view. The first sonnet in Section VI could thus be considered as a direct response to the aesthetic manifesto contained in "Salut" 4. The coffee bar has replaced the Mallarméan banquet, and poets are no longer drunken sailors, they're prostitutes and pimps who don't even take their jackets off (standing up to raise a toast, they'd have had to think of sitting first). Solitude, reef, star. No, no: percolators, saucers, clasps, cigarettes. Apparently, it wasn't worth the trouble to write a sonnet. (And now the opportunity is lost).

But I shouldn't get so annoyed. By presenting him as the scourge of some earlier modernism, I'm painting a far too modernist portrait of Baetens. It's well known that the history of modernism is constructed from radical antagonisms. One of these is always in circulation and maintains the delusionary pretension (otherwise derisory) that it is the ultimate one; it's the one that advocates, precisely, for generalized Imperfection, and Impurity, Heterogeneity, the Sketchy, the Banal, etc., all those 'revolutionary ideas' that lead to illegibility pure and simple (not even capitalized). So we'll bet on the Machiavellian face of literature, the one that can laugh at itself, but in fact maintains the game of the sublime and its values.

None of that in My Life to Live. Nothing excessive. If there's anything that's immediately apparent on reading these poems, it's their readability. That's due in part, as we've seen, to the transparency about methods, and to the forms employed being common and easy to identify. The vocabulary isn't particularly refined, the syntax, not too baffling. And then, there's a story! Even if you haven't seen Godard's film, thanks to the section titles, the book can be read through the reassuring prism of a simple, stereotyped story -- a news item. So, and now it no longer bothers me to say it, because "it's not inconsistent": yes, there are many verses I find nicely turned; and stylistic discoveries that delight me; and varied rhythms that are to this poetry what reversals of fortune are to the novel. The reader will derive great benefit here, I'm sure of it.

All told, the poetic art of My Life to Live has something oriental about it. Baetens warns us that, for him, banality is the most shimmering of subjects. The classical Orient, for its part, aspired to blandness, as François Jullien points out in his beautiful book In Praise of Blandness, Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics5: "...the merit of blandness is that it provides access to the undifferentiated foundation of all things and so is valuable to us; its neutrality manifests the potential inherent in the center. At this stage, the real is no longer 'blocked' in partial and too obvious manifestations; the concrete becomes discrete, open to transformation" (p. 24).

In the Chinese language, the same word (dan) is used for bland-tasting things and for the interior detachment sought after in Taoism. Such is the foundation of sensory experience, our immanence in the world at its most ordinary. This interior detachment doesn't involve an ascetic retreat from the world, as mystical Christianity has accustomed us to think. On the contrary, the engagement with neutrality becomes a place and an opportunity for deploying all the world’s flavors and leavings, according to an infinite progress. To do that, it's enough to proceed from the center of sensory experience, a center that consists of blandness, or banality. My Life to Live has a Chinese air because it puts into practice the concrete-discreet. No doubt, French poetry isn't based on the same customs as Chinese painting, nor does it use the same means. But we see clearly how abstraction (of a theoretical Idea) and excess (of its application in a poem) put it at risk of losing its proper tone. The poetry and love of the everyday, in any case, crave treatment as little demonstrative and systematic as possible. Which obviously wouldn't prevent them from being part of a real project.

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