Toward a Tree

“Toward a tree”: I borrow these words from Jean-Marie Gleize’s 1995 Principe de nudité intégrale. The phrase in full reads as follows: “It is enough to go toward a tree,” and it reappears insistently throughout his works, more recently in Le livre des cabanes (2015) and Trouver ici (2018), at times abridged as “to go toward a tree” (or even, deprived of a verb, “on the way toward a tree”).1 The implied simplicity and ease with which one executes such a move are, however, misleading: for a literalist poet like Gleize—acutely aware of the dual necessity and impossibility of capturing the nakedness of the real (“figurer le réel”) (“Où vont les chiens?” 78)—the tree may provide a way to resist the intoxication of lyricism (as he puts it, “a way to not surrender to the lyrical narcotic” [Trouver ici 20]), but only to the extent that it never invites this movement “toward” it. Indeed, a definition of poetry among the many offered in Gleize’s output makes clear that in this particular case, the solution (“It is enough to…”) is also meant to be understood as an obstacle: “That is ‘rough poetry’: when one literally bumps against a tree” (Trouver ici 27).2 As if the promise of the preposition toward was inseparable from its opposite: against. To head toward a tree would thus mean to come up against its unintelligible presence, its silence, at the risk of finding oneself, in turn, muted.