On poetry, the ‘ordinary apocalypse,’ and how melancholia can be a source of hope

I have published many suites poétiques—a series of poems about a single theme—in literary journals in recent years. These became the core of the collection, to which I added other poems. I worked carefully on rewriting and reassembling the poems. It was like a puzzle, where you try every possible combination to find a wider cohesive movement, a trajectory to organize the collection.

The reader will follow a journey through various incidents in a world on the verge of wavering. The 4 sections are titled: Geometry of sadness, Hunting, Fallen (the many uses of a lasso), and Compendium for some difficult hours

In each section, I am presenting a series of scenes and “tableaux” that depict vulnerabilities and concerns that one can feel when in relationships with our tumultuous and precarious world. It’s a world particularly marked by the collapse of many founding ideologies, and threatened by economic and social instability and ecological challenges. In that sense, the poems are creating a dialogue between the intimate experiences of the speaker (often here it is a “we”/ “nous” who is the enunciator) and the collective. This dialogue is crucial to me: by exploring these vulnerabilities we can all feel sometimes, the poems are building spaces where we can connect to our common humanity.

Poetry is a peculiar and wonderful material, because it is made of language, and we all use language in trivial and practical forms every day. When these same words are used in a poem, they can suddenly feature in an unexpected sequence and musicality, like making a sculpture with words which conveys emotions and ideas: you open the semantic, the imaginary, and this new space of understanding and feeling to new perspectives.

The evocative scope of poetry allows the reader to insert all their subjectivity in the poem, and to enter into a dialogue with the common humanity of the speaker. As I write in the collection, we can all relate to some of these experiences of vulnerabilities, “car nous sommes malhabiles” (because we are maladroit).

I like to compare contemporary poetry to an abstract painting, where you do not have a clear narrative or story to guide your eye in a specific way (as opposed to a traditional painting featuring a landscape, for example). In the poem, the colours, textures, and movements are the words, and it becomes a space of conversation between the reader and these evocations.

In my research and in my creative writing, I am very interested in contemporary melancholia and by poetics which explore various forms of “ordinary apocalypses,” or what writer France Daigle calls “petites difficultés d’existence” (little existential difficulties). To me, they also reflect the precariousness of the present time in a unique and relatable manner.

I organized the collection around a main theme: this strange and persistent feeling we can encounter presently of a “sentiment de la fin” a sense of the end (the expression is from poet and philosopher Paul Chamberland).

In one poem, I am mentioning the fact that every day we seem to be grasping at “les contours de notre extinction” (the contours of our extinction). Indeed, we are overwhelmed daily by images and discourses about the catastrophes surrounding us or happening around the world. And we can feel some sort of quiet anxiety or sadness toward all of this, even without noticing anymore.

Many experienced the pandemic in this languishing mode too. We were mourning the life we had before, we were lost in a space of anguish and lassitude. More precisely, melancholia is defined by a diffuse feeling of sadness or despair, but without a specific object. Melancholia therefore encompasses many sub-categories such as nostalgia (which refer to a specific time or object that was lost), languishing, grief, some forms of depression and anxiety, amongst others.

If we think of how eco-anxiety can affect us today (environmental philosophy and psychology is also calling eco-anxiety “solastalgia”), we will find another great example of contemporary melancholia’s iteration: not one specific fact or climatic catastrophe will be the only source of us feeling sad or powerless. It is the constant rumours (these rumeurs du siècle evoked in the title of the collection) of catastrophes we are receiving that are creating this melancholic space within us.

In my poetry, I am exploring these melancholic spaces, intertwined by everyday experiences of losses, mourning and anxiety, but also a great desire for connections and compassion. Consequently, we must recognize that melancholia can also become a space of hope, inspiration, and creativity.

This is a very interesting point indeed. Melancholic works are always reflecting—directly or indirectly—on their own tumultuous times, as they express some sense of historical loss, the mourning of collective ideals or forms of anxiety that shaped different epochs and cultural contexts. In my research, I study many writers practising—with sobriety—a philosophical doubt that puts into conversation the melancholic sorrows of the self and the melancholia of our disarrayed times. Literature is always an act of resistance, and maybe in melancholic works we are finding a fertile dissonance in response to this obligation, or illusion, of perfect happiness, which has become a lucrative industry to many extents.

I think that we are now in a new melancholic era, where contemporary Canadian and Québécois literatures portray the vulnerability and challenges of our tumultuous and globalized world. Through an intimate lens, poetics of humility, and a rhetoric of amused despair, we can see how recent works with melancholic iterations. For example, the poetry of Louise Dupré, Paul Chanel Malenfant, Carole David, Nicole Brossard, Hélène Dorion, Katherena Vermette or Dionne Brand, to name a few. Their work offers surprising and unexpected solidarities of inquietude that offers alternatives to any “rhetoric of ruins.”

In my poetry, I am also trying to create spaces of conversation, where my apprehensions and uneasiness about our world can meet those of the reader. We also find in the collection some humour, playfulness, and a call for openness. Therefore, the poems are also expressing a desire for dialogue by trying to recreate concerned and lucid solidarities in order to face our tumultuous present times.

That is a great and complex question. It seems to me that, again, poetry as the language of the essential can bring us to our common fragilities as human beings. In that sense, delving into melancholic territories can be a powerful tool. There are tremendous creative energies which are at the core of contemporary melancholia, and we can explore these using literary forms.

The very definition of mourning implies that the subject keeps reaching—directly or indirectly—toward the lost object, and within that memory process can find new paths to redefine a relationship to that object. Now that we are subjected to new losses, doubts, ironies, and critical distances, we must question and face these with new perspectives.

Paul Chamberland argues that the only way of overtaking our “depressive era,” as defined by French art historian Denys Riout 2005), is to nurture an enlightened intellectual humility and a critical distance. This will allow us to rebuild a fertile dialogue with the greatness of knowledge that shapes humanity. I do not pretend that my poetry is actively succeeding at this difficult task, but what I am saying is that I try to inhabit this posture of humility when I am writing. This is my way of resisting to this “Géométrie de la tristesse,” (geometry of sadness) by building a modest “Compendium pour les heures difficiles” (shelter for these difficult times) and inviting others to do the same.