Le poème de Jacques Dupin, « De la piqûre désirée à la glu du piège, à l’infini translucide du miel »

Abstract

Much more than a simple thematic figure, the beekeeper is, for the poet and art critic Jacques Dupin, the medium for a poetic game with the figures of the lyrical subject to renew our thinking on poetry. Thanks to a verbal materialism that both captures and provokes the encounter between the subject and the world, the wax produced by the beekeeper is equivalent to the page of the poem, on which the poem can be engraved, and nourishes the poet's lamp, who learns from the beekeeper an ethic conveyed by simplicity, humility, a taste for the essential, and an openness to the infinitesimal elemental world that is thus fully inhabited. By representing himself under the mask of the beekeeper and pursuing his swarm-poems and bee-words, Jacques Dupin encounters an authentic poetry that is fuelled by the transfer of the playful, moral and hermeneutic figure of the beekeeper to the critical figure of the poet. The posture, gesture and wisdom of the beekeeper thus promise the poet access to a fair knowledge of the things of the world, but also of the power of the poem. To look at oneself as a beekeeper and to confront the bee is also to look at oneself as a poet and to question the possibility of a renewal of lyricism in the poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.