Poetry at the Margins: Jacques Darras’s Neo-Epic La Maye

Abstract

Jacques Darras’s La Maye, an opus in eight cantos composed between 1988 and 2012 constitutes a singular attempt in the field of contemporary French poetry to reinvest the topos of the region (his native Picardy) and interrogate key elements of the Long Poem tradition. Rather than reverse the power differential in the center/margin dichotomy, Darras deploys a series of geographic and literary drifts to map out a trans-local vision of the North that complicates a notion of regional identity construed as immediate and solvable. Whether by delving into records of site-specific history that were glossed over in the grand récit of the nation or by appealing to the poetic traditions of the North for specific meters and multilingual borrowings—drawing inspiration from frontier territories such as Quebec or the Orkney Islands and their vexed historical and linguistic relationships with the center—Darras’s project participates in a form of critical memory. Following a brief discussion of the major characteristics of his oeuvre, I turn to its formal elements—the frequent use of toponyms and allusions to Anglo-American modernists, in particular—as crucial markers for Darras’s visionary poetics of place and for defining its fraught relation with the Long Poem.