I like Michèle Finck’s poetry . You only have to open any of her collections, to any page, to be struck by its absolute authenticity. Michèle Finck doesn’t beat around the bush: her poems talk about death, mourning, separation, and madness. Poetry seems, for her, to be a lifeline, a breath of fresh air, a way of finding, despite the harshness of life, something to celebrate. Attentive to music, to hearing, to sound, she delivers, from one collection to the next, a poetry that is both intimate and universal, sensitive and tragic, intense and meditative. Today, for this “Sunday quote”, I suggest the poem “Cry 2”, published in La voie du large , a very recent, sublime collection, which I will have to tell you more about.
Just capture the murmur of the streets
noisy matter
(I listen therefore I am)
be a sound
and rhythm taker
connected to the hubbub of the city but no microphone headset
cable and boom only a notebook of sounds and rhythms and know how to be invisible incognito today the street does not simply murmur a dull hissing chanted which increases more and more the street squeals squawks rambles lisps stridulates and suddenly squeals like an old flat tire why? is it because it becomes a sounding board amplifying the complaint of the silent ones? today it chatters swells and swells again until the cry what? what happened? almost nothing? a homeless person near me shouted
In this poem, I liked the image of the poet as a “sound recorder”. To be a poet, and indeed to be an artist in general, is above all to perceive, before creating. Or, to put it another way, to create one must first receive, perceive, feel, hence the importance of openness to things and beings that I often talk about. And, with Michèle Finck, this happens through listening, through hearing, and attentively capturing the rumors of the city.
I also liked the incredible crescendo that goes from the initial “murmur” to the final “cry”, passing through a large number of auditory nuances that create the incredible soundtrack of this poem. There is something jubilant, for the reader, and no doubt also for the poet writing, in this deployment of the auditory lexicon. The pleasure that Michèle Finck takes in listening to the city is contagious. It would be necessary to note the numerous alliterations to show it.
Finally, I liked the final surprise, this emergence of the “homeless” , which gives a completely different meaning to the poem, which brings out the gravity of social reality in what could have been nothing more than a walk in the city. This cry comes to grab the poet, and the reader with her, and brutally brings us back to reality. So here, right next to us, in this blind spot into which we too often refuse to look, there is a distress so vivid, so intense, so dazzling that it expresses itself in a cry.
And, discovering this cry, we go back into the poem, and we hear a rumor that rumbles and grows slowly, we hear the “complaint / of the silent ones”, we hear the city that becomes a “sounding board” of distress. The poet detects in the urban rumor a deep malaise of which the final cry is perhaps ultimately only the most visible symptom. What threshold of suffering can a population tolerate before it degenerates into violence?
Thank you, Michèle Finck, continue to take the pulse of cities, to be their poetic seismograph, to make us hear the hoarse and wild cry of despair, the death rattle of the abandoned, so that we too can hear it and, who knows, perhaps react in time!
