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#Jean-Michel Maulpoix
thebluesthour · 1 year
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Jean-Michel Maulpoix, excerpts from "The Blue Look", in A Matter of Blue: Poems (trans. Dawn M. Cornelio)
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les-toupies-h · 2 years
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« Ecrire et disparaître sont une même chose. » Jean-Michel Maulpoix
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soracities · 1 year
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You let your heart go a bit / Like a dog that you call back when he wanders off.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix, from “From all over, she flows...”, A Matter of Blue: Poems (trans. Dawn M. Cornelio)
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les-portes-du-sud · 14 days
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Le bleu ne fait pas de bruit...
(extrait)
Le bleu ne fait pas de bruit.
C'est une couleur timide, sans arrière-pensée, présage, ni projet, qui ne se jette pas brusquement sur le regard comme le jaune ou le rouge, mais qui l'attire à soi, l'apprivoise peu à peu, le laisse venir sans le presser, de sorte qu'en elle il s'enfonce et se noie sans se rendre compte de rien.
Le bleu est une couleur propice à la disparition.
Une couleur où mourir, une couleur qui délivre, la couleur même  de l'âme après qu'elle s'est déshabillée du corps,  après qu'a giclé tout le sang et que se sont vidées les viscères, les poches de toutes sortes, déménageant une fois pour toutes le mobilier de ses pensées.
Indéfiniment, le bleu s'évade.
Ce n'est pas, à vrai dire, une couleur. Plutôt une tonalité, un climat, une résonance spéciale de l'air. Un empilement de clarté, une teinte qui naît du vide ajouté au vide, aussi changeante et transparente dans la tête de l'homme que dans les cieux.
L'air que nous respirons, l'apparence de vide sur laquelle remuent nos figures, l'espace que nous traversons n'est rien d'autre que ce bleu terrestre, invisible tant il est proche et fait corps avec nous, habillant nos gestes et nos voix. Présent jusque dans la chambre, tous volets tirés et toutes lampes éteintes, insensible vêtement de notre vie.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix
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blog-bleu · 3 months
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Jean-Michel Maulpoix. Une histoire de bleu (1992) suivi de L’instinct du ciel (2000). Poésie Gallimard. 2005
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hedgehog-moss · 4 months
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Loved your mentioning of learning poetry by heart: this is something I haven’t done since school! What are some of your favs that you’d suggest to ease my brain back into it?
(Française ici donc les options 🇫🇷 autant que anglais sont welcome :) merci!)
Hi :) You can look at the poem tag of my quote blog if you want—some of the ones I've learnt by heart (or excerpts from them) include this one by Sara Teasdale - Nanao Sakaki - Velimir Khlebnikov - Wallace Stevens - Rabindranath Tagore - Archibald Macleish - Howard Nemerov - and these paragraphs by Henri Peña-Ruiz which I consider prose poetry... My favourite French verses (from Corneille, Aragon, Anna de Noailles, Hugo, Valéry...) are all alexandrines and I find it to be the easiest type of verse to remember, as the structure is so rigorous and consistent. I sometimes translate English poems into alexandrines (like this one) to make them easier to learn in this more familiar form—I think even after all this time English prosody still feels foreign to me; the patterns of sound and rhythm in French are more deeply embedded in my brain so it can more easily predict what comes next...
Re: easing your brain into it, I guess that depends on your style of learning? For me the best way to learn a text is to spend time with it in written form, be it by translating it, or by writing it down by hand (slowly) and then (sometimes) keeping it for a while in a place where I often stand idle, like taped to my microwave so I re-read it as I wait 1 minute for something to heat up.
One thing I like about learning poems is that it's a costless, always-accessible way to get a sense of personal accomplishment. Beyond that, I've got three categories of poems I like to learn for different reasons—I'll go into some detail in case it can help you figure out what you're after :)
1. Classic poetry, because it's just fun to have little snippets of ancient tragedies or epic Victor Hugo poems living at the back of your mind and accompanying you through your own everyday tragedies—as an overdramatic person who tends to feel devastated or exasperated over tiny stuff, it helps me to take some distance from my feelings. Like if I spill a bucket of manure on my boots and my first reaction is rage and despair and my second thought is a couple of verses by Euripides where Iphigenia bemoans her relentless fate, it's a way to make fun of (and get over) myself.
My grandmother did this a lot, she knew so many poems by heart and often used them ironically. If I went whining to her when I was little she'd recite to me the last few verses of Alfred de Vigny's La Mort du Loup (it sounds better in the original but):
[...] With all your being you must strive To that highest degree of stoic pride [...] Weeping or praying—all this is in vain. You must instead shoulder your long and heavy task In the way that Destiny has seen fit to ask Then suffer and die without complaint.
(Let me tell you, that's just what a five-year-old wants to hear after scratching her knee at the park) But really I admired this treasury of poetry she carried within her, especially as she only went to school until age 14 and came upon most of it thanks to her own curiosity; as well as the way she used it playfully in everyday life, using dramatic classical verse to de-dramatise minor annoyances.
2. Nature poems are great in the opposite way, to magnify minor positive things :) Like seeing a fox and having a few lines by Mary Oliver come to mind, seeing a frog and thinking of that Basho haiku... I recently discovered Jean-Michel Maulpoix and I also love his nature poems, like 'The recovery of blue after a downpour', the way he describes snow melting in the spring, or golden-blue evenings:
[Snow] takes some time to leave, but delicately. She doesn’t insist, hardly persists, never roots… She gives way. No one else dies so merrily With such good humour Unmatched is her disdain for eternity…
L’azur, certains soirs, a des soins de vieil or. Le paysage est une icône. Il semble qu’au soleil couchant, le ciel qui se craquelle se reprenne un instant à croire à son bleu.
3. And then there are the poems that proudly serve no purpose. <3 I mean beyond distilling language in a beautiful way. No deep meaning—or no meaning at all, e.g. surrealist poetry. I learnt this passage from Les Champs magnétiques back in middle school:
La fenêtre creusée dans notre chair s'ouvre sur notre cœur. On y voit un immense lac où viennent se poser à midi des libellules mordorées et odorantes comme des pivoines. Quel est ce grand arbre où les animaux vont se regarder ? Il y a des siècles que nous lui versons à boire. . . Prisonniers des gouttes d'eau, nous ne sommes que des animaux perpétuels. . . Nous ne savons plus rien des astres morts ; nous regardons les visages. . . Quelquefois, le vent nous entoure de ses grandes mains froides et nous attache aux arbres découpés par le soleil.
—and I've often recited it to myself just to enjoy these gratuitously nice sentences that aren't here to deliver information. Like Kay Ryan said, "Poetry makes nothing happen. That's the relief of it." It's a nice break, a way to remember that communicating isn't all language is for; beyond the social dimension there's also an intimate one that relies on our own aesthetic sensitivity. Most of the time we look through language, to access ideas, meanwhile enjoying poetry means looking at language, for a change, appreciating it for itself.
I just realised I'm paraphrasing John Brehm here—in The Poetry of Impermanence he wrote something that can be read as an ode to learning things by heart:
When you read lines that seem especially lit up—that move or intrigue you in some way, or that are simply pleasing or even dazzling—don’t focus on being able to formulate a statement about what they might mean, as if you might be called upon to explain the poem, to yourself or to someone else. Just linger with those poems or passages that resonate with you. . . Rest your mind on them; let them live inside you.
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ellednorih · 3 months
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Les tentures brodées de myosotis et les miroirs profonds encadrés de faïence avouent quelle nostalgie l’habite.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Une histoire de bleu (1992)
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marie-chatelaine · 5 months
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🎨 Marc Chagall
Entre guerre et paix
Desir
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Une histoire de bleu.
Le bleu ne fait pas de bruit.
C'est une couleur timide, sans arrière-pensée, présage ni projet, qui ne se jette pas brusquement sur le regard comme le jaune ou le rouge, mais qui l'attire à soi, l'apprivoise peu à peu, le laisse venir sans le presser, de sorte qu'en elle il s'enfonce et se noie sans se rendre compte de rien.
Le bleu est une couleur propice à la disparition.
- Jean-Michel Maulpoix -
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leparfumdesreves · 8 months
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Ce n'est pas, à vrai dire, une couleur.
Plutôt une tonalité, un climat, une résonance spéciale de l'air.
Un empilement de clarté, une teinte qui naît du vide ajouté au vide, aussi changeante et transparente dans la tête de l'homme que dans les cieux...
Jean-Michel Maulpoix "Une Histoire de Bleu"
Photographie du Cap Ferret
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annlocarles · 1 year
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D'abord ligne de fuite, la mer prenant son large, joie de mourir ainsi à soi, de se répandre. Là-bas, les merveilleux nuages emportent une provision de ciels. Mêler nos corps à cet inachevable, nos doigts, nos chevelures, et quantité d'autres fragilités désirables...
Quand l'âme est à marée basse, nous ne recueillons sur la plage lessivée que les embruns salés des vagues et ce butin maigre de coquilles, d'algues, de crevettes et de crabes que le profond silence des mers avec parcimonie nous octroie.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix
Extrait de "Terrain vague"- Editions Seghers, 1982
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lesondupapillon · 2 years
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Il passe au bleu. Ses contours se perdent, dilués dans l'inexistence. Il ne peut que s'enfoncer indéfiniment en soi, incapable de se connaître ni de se mirer. Épuisé par sa propre ignorance, le ciel bleuit de lassitude.
/ Jean-Michel Maulpoix
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thebluesthour · 1 year
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"The movie in my mind is blue--... / I think of little else but you." (Wendy Cope)
Carol Mavor, Blue Mythologies | The Shape of Water, dir. Guillermo del Toro & "Indigo Bleu" by Rea Kolarova | Jean-Michel Maulpoix, A Matter of Blue | Salome Wu, "Where the Long Shadows Fall - The Lovers" & Mona Sa'udi, "The Lovers" | Terrance Hayes, dedication in Lighthead
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readandtread · 4 months
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A Matter of Blue by Jean-Michel Maulpoix
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I read all the words, I did not understand their significance when gathered. There were snippets of pretty word pictures, there were an exhaustive amount of references to blue and it's shades and items that feature blue, like sea and sky, also much mention of love and some of death, and I think mermaids. Poetry is still hit and miss for me, and this was a miss.
⚠️Vague allusion to suicide, unflattering depiction of sex worker as metaphor
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soracities · 11 months
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thinking of Kafka's so called failed drawing of a horse and my theory regarding the classic "its impossible to draw a horse" dilemma is not that you can't draw a horse but that hardly anyone can truly draw a Horse because even when you have it down anatomically you've still missed the Essence of Horse, the horseness of the Horse, if you will, and this is EVERYTHING
you can draw a cat or a pigeon and absolutely capture the catness and the pigeonness of a cat and a pigeon but the horseness of a horse is so phenomenally antithetical to any and all visual representation it will never sit right ever. got the proportions perfectly rendered? faithfully captured the sheen on the coat? delineated all the sinews and muscles of this insane beast in motion? great. still not a Horse though!!!
truly i think 3 year olds are sometimes the only people who see the horse for what it is bc accurate depictions of horsenessness have nothing to do w anatomy and EVERYTHING to do w expressing the Vibe of being near these ridiculous animals. like the entire history of art flounders before the horse bc no amount of breaking them into circles and boxes will help you whatsoever these creatures are made up ENTIRELY of an utterly INCOMPREHENSIBLE marriage between mad staggering bulk and fluid motion like lets be real a static image will NOT cut it no matter how perfect we think the flank-to-belly ratio is.
im sorry but the cult of Realism has warped our minds Kafka nailed it this is precisely what a horse IS precisely !!
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i rest my case
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les-portes-du-sud · 11 months
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Bleu est la couleur du regard, du dedans de l'âme et de la pensée, de l'attente, de la rêverie et du sommeil .
Il nous plait de confondre toutes les couleurs en une. Avec le vent, la mer, la neige, le rose très doux des peaux, le rouge à lèvres des rires, les cernes blancs de l'insomnie autour du vert des yeux, et les dorures fanées des feuilles qui s'écaillent , nous fabriquons du bleu .
Jean Michel Maulpoix
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Le goût de la transparence : Composition, Léon Zack, circa 1960...
"L'infini ressemble à une poignée de sable. Les dieux l'ont jetée sur nos têtes afin que nous nous souvenions de la lumière." Jean-Michel Maulpoix — Poussière de Ciel
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