A poética de Christophe Tarkos: a pasta-palavra

Abstract

This article presents the work of Christophe Tarkos , one of the principal names of contemporary French poetry, with a focus on his formulations about language. The objective is to explain the linguistic theory that can be deduced from his work, both in the more essayistic writings and in interviews, and in the less conceptual realization in the actual poems. Our hypothesis is that Tarkos's poetics creates its own concept, that of the "word-paste" (pâte-mot), bringing with it a singular and poetic way of understanding the linguistic meaning. KEYWORDS: Contemporary Poetics; Christophe Tarkos; Repetition RESUMO O artigo apresenta a produção de Christophe Tarkos (1963-2004 Christophe Tarkos probably did not have a prepared theory about language and poetry when he began to write and publish his poems in several magazines in the 1990s.His first books would be launched only in 1995 and 1996: respectively Morceaux choisis and Oui, but Tarkos was already an active poet in the French poetry scene, participating in diverse public performances and publications like Facial, Java, Action Poétique, Le Jardin Ouvrier, among others, together with his friends and fellow poets Nathalie Quintane, Christiane Prigent, Philippe Beck, Charles Pennequin etc. In Oui, something of his theory about language, which is above all a poetic theory, was already sketched out with vigor, but it was perhaps with Le signe = (1999) that his theory became clearer, at least for us the readers. And only posthumously would we have more systematic access in Écrits poétiques (2008), which, besides reuniting previous books, includes transcripts of two interviews the poet conceded to radio programs. There we see clearly the extent of his reflection about poetry, which would become amplified to a consistent reflection about language and, still more, about life, existence -things that, for him, would never be separate or separable. The interviews confirm the density of a poetic thought permanently under construction -if we comprehend as poetic something that does not exclude concepts and images of philosophic thought nor that which we understand as theory.There is in Tarkos's work, therefore, a poetics under construction that is on display, or an autopoiesis of a poetic, one that thinks in concepts and images at the same time, and that is constructed and takes form in the very same texts. Always hybrids, these texts are a mixture of poems, essays, stage directions, short stories, aphorisms, manifestos. And it is as if theory about the poem and the practice of the poem were retro-nourishing each other continually -therefore, the idea of autopoiesis, in an attempt to define this poetry-thought that seems to unfold in real-time before our eyes.In other words, before anything else, it is worth avoiding the idea of a preconceived theory that would have existed beforehand, pre-existing the poem, the text that embodies it. If there is a "theory of language that is disseminated in the work at the same time as it is manifested," 1 in order to agree with the te...