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Spring Selection of Poets

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Creation: 2010

Design and interpretation: Eric Cenat and Patrice Delbourg

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“Frédéric-Louis Sauser, better known under the pseudonym of Blaise Cendrars, was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, on Swiss territory. Beret on the side, poached eyes, his ruddy face of illuminated advertisement for old calvados is not that of an academic troubadour: “I really have a dirty face. This pleases me”. First commentator of themodernity, he keeps writing on themovie theater, theremusic, therepoetry, les paintersde la Ruche and the drunkenness of Montparnasse.

Léger, Chagall, Braque, Delaunay, Modigliani surround him. He shares with visual artists the same simultaneous vision of a time in full mutation. It is no longer time for the artist to wander around as a witness to his time and to build a monument for generations to come. “Everything falls. The sun is falling. We fall next.” So make way for the poet, whose task is to say what is, to know how to decipher the signs of the story that is being written before our eyes, too concerned that they are for the moment, they risk not seeing themselves. profiling tomorrows.

His traveling biography passes through Saint-Petersburg, Buenos-Aires, Portugal,Brazilabove all, his second homeland. He observes more than he lives misery: “Where does this love of the simple, the humble, the innocent, the fads and the downgraded come from? This devil of Cendrars and his gray galurin are everywhere  both: Greenwich  Village, in Montmartre, in New York where Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia play the trappers of the 'avant-garde. His thirst  to confuse horizons is immense, the redundant choice of his books testifies to this: “At the heart of the world”, “From the whole world”, “The end of the world”, “take me to the end of the world". He extends his only arm (the other having been amputated on September 26, 1915 in the mud of the trenches) towards Negro art, towards Walt Whitman, towards the gold diggers in Alaska, the clear waters of Lake Baikal or the lands aléoutiennes.  Poetry is at stake everywhere, you just have to look outside to see it at work, pure musicality, orgiastic flavors, primers of movement. This is what he was already saying in the prose of the Trans-Siberian:

“All life is  just a poem, a movement. I am only a word, a verb, a depth, in the wildest, most mystical, most living sense”. -Blaise Cendrars

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Patrice Delbourg

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