Paul Éluard, Critique de la poésie, ca. 1943

Le feu réveille la forêt Les troncs les cœurs les mains les feuilles Le bonheur en un seul bouquet Confus léger fondant sucré C’est toute une forêt d’amis Qui s’assemble aux fontaines vertes Du bon soleil du bois flambant

Garcia Lorca a été mis à mort

Maison d’une seule parole Et de lèvres unies pour vivre Un tout petit enfant sans larmes Dans ses prunelles d’eau perdue La lumière de l’avenir Goutte à goutte elle comble l’homme Jusqu’aux paupières transparentes

Saint-Pol-Roux a été mis à mort Sa fille a été suppliciée

Ville glacée d’angles semblables Où je rêve de fruits en fleur Du ciel entier et de la terre Comme à de vierges découvertes Dans un jeu qui n’en finit pas Pierres fanées murs sans écho Je vous évite d’un sourire

Decour a été mis à mort

Saint Pol Roux, Os Responsórios da Procissão https://pt.frwiki.wiki/wiki/Saint-Pol-Roux

Saint Pol Roux, Pauses in the Procession, 1893 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Pol-Roux

Saint-Pol-Roux’s daughter Divine

The fib erglass splinters in your father's hands are distracting the congregation. They glimmer with work and anger and itch. They draw attention to his callouses, to the omitted index digit, and the sable forked tongue of the cleaved thumbnail, its cuticle a mauve rupt eyelid. The congregation was distracted by this, and so they asked him to soak his hands in the baptismal bowl at intermission (we are a progressive group, here), with most vocal surveil, scowl at the grease on his shirt cuff, the curdled purple gunkhunk curled logy then loping in to fowl the holy wet mirror. But how soft it makes his palm when he rustles your crown, your head buried by the phonebook fog of multiplication tables. Those driven shards of light at the threshold of his flesh, scared to death to find what comes next, listening for the voice of god on the other side of the door.

Benjamin C. Dugdale, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux

Mallarmé was a “master of the dream.” Saint-Pol-Roux declared: “We are the pioneers of the Beyond,” and E.L.T. Mesens said: “Even when asleep, we are tireless.”

Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude, Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora

Vacay 2022 - #29 Finistère ensemble

Août 2022 - Camaret-sur-Mer, le Manoir de Saint-Pol Roux et la plage de Pen Hat.

manoir de Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique by Patrick Doreau Via Flickr: Crozon, Bretagne

André Breton     L’Écriture Automatique     1938

“A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: ‘THE POET IS WORKING’.” André Breton, “Le Manifeste du Surréalisme,”  (The Manifesto of Surrealism)  1924

La vie ne semblait digne d’être vécue que là où le seuil entre veille et sommeil était en chacun creusé comme par le flux et le reflux d’un énorme flot d’images, là où le son et l’image, l’image et le son, avec une exactitude automatique, s’engrenaient si heureusement qu’il ne restait plus le moindre interstice pour y glisser le petit sou de « sens ». La préséance est donnée à l’image et au langage. Quand vers le matin il s’allonge pour dormir, Saint-Pol Roux accroche à sa porte un écriteau : « Le poète travaillle ». Breton note : « Silence, afin qu’où nul n'a jamais passé je passe, silence !... Après toi, mon beau langage. » Le langage a la préséance. Walter Benjamin, « Le Surréalisme » (1929), in Œuvres II, Gallimard, 2007

[…] le poète démêle, cherche ce qui respire à peine sous les décombres et le ramène à la surface de vie.

Saint-Pol-Roux

Manoir de Saint Pol Roux

We came across Le Manoir Saint-Pol Roux.

To cut a very interesting story short (you can find it on Google, it’s worth the read) Pol Roux, a symbolist poet and play write lived here with his wife & daughter. When the Germans invaded the place was taken and used as a command centre and subsequently bombed by the allies.

This is what it would have looked like.

We headed off towards Camaret to go to the supermarket. Right on the edge of the town we came across these standing stones.

The standing stones of Lagatiar testify that this end of the peninsula was inhabited millennia ago. Current historians place their origin at around 2500 BC.

Similar to the standing stones at Carnac, the alignments of Lagatiar counted in 1776 had a set of 600 stones.

When the site was classified as a "historical monument" in 1883, there were only about 100 left as a result of successive deconstruction.

It is suggested that the alignment of the stones is astronomical and responds in orientation to the constellation of the Pleiades.

We suspect the stones delineated the touch lines for prehistoric football matches.

Enough history for today.

After the supermarket we went back on board.

Still no spider crabs big enough to eat.

Later that evening we invited some Brits across the pontoon, Richard and Penny, on board for a drink.

They came round from L’Aber Wrac’h today in their Hanse 31, which they berth in Roscoff. They are on their way east.

We put the covers up, there may be a spot of rain in the night.

Saint-Pol-Roux et l'inconnu.mov from Candela productions on Vimeo.

Ce film de Gilles Jouault-Modem est une perle rare. Une rencontre avec un personnage hors du commun tant dans sa vie personnelle que dans sa place publique. Le montage signé Benoît Quinon, la musique de Sylvie Jourdan, les idées de tournage de Gilles, les rencontres avec Rougerie l'éditeur qui à plus de 75 ans circulait encore sur les routes pour vendre les livres de "ses" écrivains.

The castle of French Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux, he died of a broken heart when the castle was looted and his writings destroyed in 1940. The castle was taken over by German troops which led to it being bombed and later burned down by allied forces.

yes, there is a poet that is just ever slightly 'younger' and 'fresher' than you close enough behind you to squish your shadow and they are reminding you that it's actually evil to say 'clean snow is good' because it is some obscure ~ism they know and you don't (or you do know but didn't conspicuously let everyone else know you know), and that it's actually super disrespectful to write about a snow that's anything other than filthy and riddled with plastic waste [because 'Dark Ecology,' which you want to point out is largely the same as a ton of Indigenous thought but don't point out because it hurts you to hurt others with knowledge (because you used to be very good at that)] which you had mentioned in an earlier published draft excerpt of The Repoetic with the dog shit, but when you messaged the younger poet about that they said that was "so suburban" of you, and sure, you'd always thought yourself trapped in an exurban condition (even though you grew up on a farm), but the point here is not to dwell on the fact that poets that might have been part of your generation (if "generation" wasn't a shrinking category with diminishing returns in an atomized bad neoliberal hellbroth world) are spineless (bad) cowards (okay, it's okay to be scared, just breathe) and don't know how to talk about work unless it's pity porn by marginalized writers (but of course they've never read that work even though they wield it like a cudgel) and they could've been your friend if they weren't traumatized into a mediocre competetiveness and they could've been your friend but you, you idiot poet, you are just a few too many memes behind the times. They're unhappy too, you see, there's this vicious jackal at their heels and they just don't know what to write about and don't want to get their first job ever before finishing their fully-funded phd on cumshit poetics; you get it. So, breathe: don't be a boob, bub.

Benjamin C. Dugdale, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux