Pierre Alferi: Compressing and Disconnecting

“L’Hypothèse du compact” is the title of a text by the poet Jacques Roubaud that appeared in the first issue of the Revue de Littérature Générale in 1995, edited at the time by two young poets, Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi. In his article, Roubaud speaks of course of poetry: poetry does not think, says nothing, says what it says in saying it, is not paraphrasable, is “now,” is memory, memory of a language, memory of a language in the language—all propositions that he would reprise and expand the same year in his Poésie, etcetera: ménage.