To mark the release of her book D'un lyrisme l'autre*, poet Laure Gauthier will be bringing together artists exploring contemporary creation between poetry and music at the Maison de la Poésie on November 4. With composer Pedro Garcia-Velasquez, she will invite the public to an acoustic siesta with the installation Remember the future, which will plunge the audience into what they call lost places: a three-dimensional sound immersion, made possible by the presence of computer music director Augustin Muller. 

Laure, how did you come to meet Colombian composer Pedro Garcia-Velasquez?
In 2018, he came to listen to the monodrama Back into Nothingness that I wrote for composer Nuria Giménez Comas at the Archipel festival in Geneva. What kindness on his part! We entered into a spontaneous dialogue.
He was just starting his Études de théâtre acoustique with Benjamin Lazar. It's important for me to see what it's like to work with someone who doesn't come from the theater, either in voice or intention! He had never worked with someone from a poetry background, and Nuria's play gave him ideas for collaboration. We started from her Études.
The question was: "Are you inviting me in, even if I have to make a mess of things? On my side, too, the fact of getting to know something that had begun before me, and accepting that it was a provisional and experimental form, induced flexibility. We took the time to experiment, with confidence.
That's one of my working principles: to be able to counter the times, and to take the long view, which doesn't mean I'm not in the moment (my improvisations with Olivier Mellano). In all my collaborations, it's never: first poetry, then music. We take the time to build together, it's a great dialogue.

Weaving together at last?
Yes, I like to say that we incubate the space and time of the work together. Over time, we insensitively irrigate each other. We listen to and read each other.
That's how it all began. He kept a few passages with Benjamin Lazar's voice, and we came up with the idea of lost places, because we were looking for an idea we could relate to, and the lost place is something that unites us, as is the idea of the poetics of the lost place. We also shared the impression that 3D sound was drifting; that there could be a form of illusion in this perfection of capturing sound.
I suggested to Pedro that we revisit the all-too-common and misguided idea of the poetics of space, precisely at a time when poetry is being shot, when poets are being expunged from society, from the city.
It's as if language were trying to compensate for its guilty conscience! So we worked together in this place, fully aware of our respective displacements: on my side, a prism with Germany in my background, on his side, Colombia, his native country. It's like we're both displaced! We began to hear these spaces together, and I began "in the other's language", i.e. in German. We went together to the ZKM in Karlsruhe to present them for the first time, and then things got even richer. He developed robots and automata.

The first installation was really 3D sound, my voice in German - on two texts: kaspar de pierre, and a few excerpts from je neige, between the words of Villon - and aleatoric (so the text as if ripped out), and we kept Benjamin Lazar's voice. We then reworked this material for Césaré (Centre National de Création Musical-Reims), in a French-language version, with more of an address to the audience, so that people who are not initiated to sound could enter into it.
I proposed a more focused journey into poetry.
At that point, I remembered that when I wrote the second section of Les corps caverneux, I was hearing cave music and trying to compose it. This music is a bit like my own lost place. So I suggested to Pedro that he rework the acoustic theater Études using cave music. We reworked the installation, moving away from the randomness of the first piece. We thought about a temporal montage, a form, with connections between my text and its sounds, without it being illustrative. We both heard the same thing, we wanted to start the journey with water and end it in the Amazon rainforest.
That's how it all came about.
As the process unfolded, we realized that the central issue in our dialogue was the image without the image. When Pedro goes to capture sounds in places where we don't really have access (train stations, prisons...), it inevitably develops an imaginary world! As for me, there are these places that I go through (my caves, for example), where you don't necessarily go, with all that that liberates!
Then we decided to create a website with questions put to Internet users, because we wondered what people could imagine. In fact, we propose installations without images (apart from the real image of the automatons), so we don't impose an image. We were curious about reactions. What would people relate to it? What will they make of it? What images will this crossing trigger in them? A lot of people responded on the site - especially those steeped in music and sound. We're hoping that people with less experience, such as the audience at the Maison de la poésie, will feel differently.

Why the title Remember the future?
Once again, it's a question of dialogue between Pedro and myself, and between our two imaginations. Time is at the heart of these installations. The poetization of space also has a strong link with time. There's the time of spatialization, the present time of listening provided by the automata, the time of the voice-over, and the dialectical images of the past, as in Walter Benjamin's work. There's the idea that seeds of the future can be found if we look at the past.
So it was this idea that memory has a "futurative", transgressive dimension. So there's a political aspect - in the sense of the polis, the city - because if we free up the imaginary, if we liberate images, these images touch on the temporality of each individual, on memory. And if we manage not to bury people, but to unburial them, there's a transgressive dimension, or at least a seed of the future!

I'm intrigued by the rhizomatic structure of your writing, which can be seen in your various collaborations with musicians.
It's very instinctive; I'm always thinking in terms of a crucible, or Saturn and the rings of Saturn... I already hear music before the book, music that's like in suspension, that asks me questions, and that brings in bits of film. And at some point, it's written. Or it's music that I invent, that I "compose" in quotation marks, that rises up in me, that crosses over, settles in the form of a book, which is a necessary form, and one that I hold dear to my heart.

Does the sound appear before the word?
Yes, often! There's something inside me that has to do with sound. Sometimes I even dance my texts, before my texts. I hear something, and the images come together. Then it becomes little bits of film that get written. Then there's a whole set of reflections in other notebooks, and at some point, things come together, and it becomes a book, or a book project, a horizon.
The book is a resolution, a choice, a possibility.
And rather than over-produce, I hold back the writing, and move through the text with others. I interrogate my texts in dialogue with others, opening up my poetry to others. I let myself move through encounters that come naturally. I like the idea that there are clouds over a work, and questions that I can't answer on my own.
So there's always this idea of singularity and collective - as with cave paintings, which were done by several people.
I like to think that I'm throwing a stone into the garden of composers.
For example, on Corps caverneux, I was in dialogue with several composers: Thierry de Mey, Nuria Giménez Comas, François Paris, Pedro Garcia Velasquez, Olivier Mellano. There was also a seven-minute kaspar with Sofia Avramidou. She wanted to work on violence, and asked me for a miniature kaspar, so I reworked my text, and took three moments. It's spoken/sung in English. Each time, it's displacement!

Is it a prism game?
Yes, and I can already hear that in the next book, mélusine reloaded.
I can't tell when things start anymore. Each project by itself develops bundles of questions. Collaborators arrive with a torch in my cavern, and other rough edges appear, but it's still a cavern room. On some texts, I'm all alone. On others, the text calls for a musician. I go in without knowing it, on instinct!

You often talk about sound and music in connection with writing, but what is your direct relationship with music? Have you had any musical experience?
Not much, I played the piano, did a bit of solfeggio and guitar, but I was so uncomfortable with it! There was also something petrified in me, for example, a difficulty in putting my voice down.
As a child, I never sang. There was also something in my body that danced, but didn't dare. It was as if I were beside myself, and unable to perform, but there was a need to tell the story, to observe my life, and to tell it (in permanent dolly mode). And very quickly, writing came along: at the age of seven, I wrote my first book!
here was sound and movement right from the start; a sound that set me in motion, right down to the line of the writing, as if I were my own librettist. There was something that didn't work, and that was socialized elsewhere, but in a place of refusal, of savagery, of muteness, that I bypassed. So I go to music as a handicapped person, with a great sense of fragility, and I meet my composer friends as if I'd just come out of a cave or in rags: I go as a savage in fact, and those who accept me, accept me like that.
I don't want to socialize!

"kaspar de pierre "by / read by Laure Gauthier from Thierry De Mey on Vimeo.

When did you first discover contemporary and creative music?
In high school, thanks to radio broadcasts, at the end of the second year. It was all kinds of music, everything came together!
I've also always been interested in Baroque music (my thesis subject).
I started listening to contemporary music on the radio. I pulled a thread, and realized that behind this music, there were fascinating, strange things, which could correspond to things I was hearing. My first concerts of contemporary music were during my university studies, and more and more, with questions posed to the contemporary and a rather great dissatisfaction with the voice. I believe that today's poets can make a great contribution in this area, which is why I turn to composers.
This is undoubtedly due to the fact that for me, text quickly becomes voice. I write from my voice, I vocalize internally, and I hear the voice, voices, even before I write it.
I dare to say that "I give my blood" to try and get something moving in the relationship to the text, towards greater enjoyment. I sometimes hear the text as artificially glued together. As for the voice, I often find that it could be more fun, like pop or rock. Because audiences aren't stupid!
Perhaps there's something essential in what these artists do, something that tells us something about the world we live in. They're in the moment, just as we're in the moment when we listen to Schönberg's Un Survivant de Varsovie! We need both music of the moment (improvisation) and written music, developed over a long period of time.
More and more, I'm looking for musicians who are in this in-between position. Often, when a composer chooses a text, he doesn't think about meeting a living author. It's often the same authors from the past who come back, and the musicians work from them.
I'm convinced that it's possible to do things differently. At the beginning of the history of opera, authors and composers met, and at the beginning of La Nouvelle Vague, young people met. I really believe in meeting people, and in the idea of working together! It's all about listening.
We're contemporary when all fields get along and work together.

This is the starting point for the book D'un lyrisme l'autre, published by Musica Falsa. You interviewed both sides: poets and composers.
This book is 1914-2014.
I said to myself that the First World War had raised a great many questions: a very rich array of dialogues on language, being, the unconscious, what is music, what is poetry. A century on, I think there's a real need to work together again, and as I've been exploring, I've realized that in reality there are authors and composers working together, but there's also an extreme reaction. There's a totalitarian and reactionary danger today, and that's why I've written this book.
I think we're in the midst of a hatred of intellectualism today - as strong as the excessive intellectualism of the 1970s and 80s, perhaps because we wanted too much experimentation, too much intellectualization, too much deconstruction - and the danger today is that we want to go to a place where there's nostalgia and a total absence of critical thinking. In the relationship between text and music, we sometimes arrive at artificial and simplistic collages, forms that have already been tried and tested.
And I say to myself that with every artistic reaction there's a danger of a political reaction: what will we fall into? Not to mention the desire to return to extreme narrative, in all its naivety...
It's a complex issue: you have to remember the 20th century, critical thinking and all the contributions of the 20th century, while at the same time wanting to invent a voice that can also be beautiful and pleasant, by inventing a vocality, which is what pop and rock have done. I don't think we should forget that. I don't think it's possible for a voice to be just a belch of phonemes; that was necessary at one point, but you can't make a school out of that, you have to deviate! At times, it's true, you have to kick the anthill, but at some point you have to deviate, and I think that in the past, the Dadaists deviated in conscience.
I've shared these reflections with poets and composers who have this same conscience, and I wanted us to open a door together, despite our aesthetic differences, and even if we part ways afterwards. In this book, I don't propose a lyricism: it's "from one lyricism to another" (or the others), and my idea is that we need to be together, if we want to open something, without falling back into reaction, without "re-serving the dishes". This book opens up new avenues, thanks to the proposals of 24 poets and composers from a wide variety of backgrounds. 

We've talked about your collaborations with composers who navigate the waters of what we call contemporary written music, and I'd like to talk about your tandem with a musician who is also an improviser and poet, guitarist Olivier Mellano. How did you come to meet him?
I don't usually approach musicians spontaneously; I often wait for them to cross my path. But this time it was me who contacted him. It was during the lock-in. I'd heard his work with writers, and it was different from what you often hear: all too often, words and music are simply juxtaposed without any interaction or real listening. However, in Olivier's collaborations with writers such as André Markowicz, Laure Limongi and Hélène Frappat, there is a real mutual listening, even a two-way writing process.
I knew he had a side to written music and also this ability to improvise, and I always found - in his listening to poets and his way of doing things - a mixture of strength and delicacy.
He read Les corps caverneux very quickly. Immediately he said to me: "I see where I can come from, and where I can take your voice", with the idea of me being more me, of giving myself back this fluidity, a way of being closer to my writing. It's also the strength that improvised music can bring to a poet.
From then on, I went to his concerts, I listened a lot: hear Eonhis written vocal pieces, as well as his pop and rock collaborations: The Gling (MellaNoisescape), How we tried or with Régis Boulard(Nord ), his live music as in the project Rothko project with Claire Ingrid Cottenceau.
For his part, he's read all my books-except the very first one, which I'm still not giving away! - and he went through the installation with Pedro!
Once again, we've been working together for a long time: we've been seeing each other and listening to each other incredibly well, and in our discussions on contemporary music and the voice, we've realized that we're in a very close place, that we need time for depth, writing and energy.
Like me, he's interested in all kinds of music: modal music, baroque music. His music is tonal, and he makes no secret of it. He moved me to a different place, into a real re-enunciation of the texts, with totally overturned durations, much longer and developed by two people than on our own.
We improvised, and we were amazed at how much we agreed on the precise moments in the text where we felt the need for music. During the improvisation, we both had the animal impression of having so many paths open to us, thanks to this incredible mutual listening.

In my collaborations with composers of written music, we move together towards a third work. With Olivier, I feel more like I'm writing live. It's a bit like in je neige, between the words of Villon. In Villon, I heard the place that, for me, is just before it's written: where it's written (with an e). I have the impression that Olivier did with me what I tried to do with Villon, to liberate the transgressive force of language.
Thanks to this dialogue, I return to the place that is not sedimented, a writing of the instant, in which he himself is in a slight withdrawal: he hands me things, and it's very generous. He's instantly responsive. It's like automatic writing, and in my opinion, Olivier goes very far in this respect! He invents with poets a vocality between poetry and music. And for a text I've just submitted to the publisher outrechanter, I asked him if he'd also be willing to contribute his voice, because I love his status as a voice, and the fragility of what he says. I find it an extremely interesting voice; it's the voice of someone who writes, it's a voice of poetry. He's in the text, without adding any artificiality.
He heard this text, and offered to work with me on a collection de outrechanter, le terme des lamentations, which will play on lyricism, and then perhaps in mélusine reloaded, the next book. I don't know if we'll ever work on written music with him, but we'll see!

When, Laure, did you first feel the need to perform your poetry in public?
I'm not really aware of it, but anyway I write from a voice.
It's not a textual vocality (or "the voice under the text"). I write from a real voice.
At some point, I redo everything by ear. The whole way I sculpt the text - what I retain from the material - is always by way of the musical, systematically.
It's lyrical, everything is lyrical - I hear voices!
And hearing voices, the only question was to overcome the savagery, and the cultural inhibition, and that was done quickly, because it's so wild that it comes back!
I destroyed my texts for 20 years, between the ages of 17 and 27. So I wasn't talking about it: it was all covered by a thesis, it was nicely and socially covered, so obviously I didn't say anything! I did a bit of theater during those years in Germany; I founded a troupe in Hamburg called Les Infemmesbut there I gave my voice in German - there's that problem of being too close to yourself again! As soon as I agreed to stop destroying my texts, I rewrote marie weiss rot, marie blanc rouge - this was between 2010 and 2012.
As soon as I was there, I was in the voice, which I heard screaming, so present. It was so essential, this extension between the voice before, the voice in the text, and the voice after, that nothing was going to get in the way; it was obvious!
So I started reading marie weiss rot, marie blanc rouge, in the language next door, to feel this fragility, and I started by taking off my shoes, because I needed the floor. If I could, I'd carry around a bit of earth, a piece of grass under my feet, to feel the elements, but the problem is that I don't want to perform and be talked about! I'd like it to be invisible, just for me.
The first time I spoke this text was at the Salle de la Cité in Rennes, where I was invited. I'd asked a German actress to read the text in French, so that there'd be this fragility, and I read it in German, in the language next door. And from then on, it was a matter of course to read my texts.
La voix après le texte is an attempt to address the text, in a fragile way, in front of another person, in real time, and simply to offer the energy of the moment when I'm going to write. And when that fails, it's because despite everything there's going to be something that's going to make me re-socialize the voice, and for me there it sounds wrong, it's too professional, it's failed, it's ruined!
That's when the other person intervenes, and saves me from the pitfall.
I like to read my texts with others, so as not to fall back into the slippers of language. You need this porosity, this fragility, to escape the danger of habits, of the craft, because little by little you get creased. I do everything I can to despin the voice.

"Entre les mots de Villon" - Christophe Manon and Laure Gauthier from Maison de la Poésie Nantes on Vimeo.

That's also why, for the next book, I'd like to include the voices of John Greaves and Olivier Mellano, to avoid this pitfall. As we won't be rehearsing a lot, we'll keep that edge, that energy: the idea ofhaving your back to the wall, or like a tightrope walker, and here I'm thinking of those high diving boards and that feeling when you're at the very end and about to jump into the void, but it's still a springboard!
That's why I don't rehearse much. Bringing others into my texts prevents them from settling; I know they won't belong to me, that I won't become a pro with my texts.
The cement can't set, and that's good!

To conclude this interview, I'd like to talk about the singular work formed by your transpoems, christened called "eclectic cities". How did you come up with such a sound, graphic and poetic object?
In the beginning, there was no formal idea. It was like wood shavings, leftovers. It just came spontaneously.
It's probably the most induced thing in my practice, and one that I left in its imperfection, as a small form; something I let live. It came from my way of rehearsing; they're litanies, incantations, because I incant things. I incant my texts-sometimes they come, sometimes they don't. They're fragile, because poetry is an art. They're fragile, because poetry is very fragile today: I suffer a lot from the fact that it's no longer in the city, but on the bangs. So I started saying my texts vor mich hin - as they say in German (in French you could say à voix haute et pour moi), and in a non-performative way, in different places, at the time when we were working with Pedro on his lost places. I used to say my texts on my cell phone, and Pedro advised me to use a zoom lens.
So I came up with the idea of switching from one to the other depending on the situation, and I started cutting out bits of texts and saying them in lots of different contexts, from Paris to Porto, without knowing where I was going with it.
There was also the idea of immersing my poems in the world...
I usually avoid repetition, but for once, I took the same texts and said them several times, in different situations: in the forest of Fontainebleau, in Porto, in Pompeii, in an exhibition, in a café... I stick to the sounds of life, without ever thinking about how my voice sounds, and all this without any desire to make chapters or build something. I got hooked and kept going. It was a bit haphazard, I kept losing my sheets...
I was always going at it with a trembling heart, dropping everything, and still hoping that everything would stay engraved.
So I accumulated 200, 300 fragments of texts.

With the idea of bringing your poetry, your words and your voice into friction with the world?
Yes, in this idea that there are iridescences and always this fragility. I call it "language-pilotis". That's where poetry is today, objectively speaking. It's on stilts, which means it's almost nothing. I take note; that's where we're at.
I soak my texts, and just as I collaborate with musicians, I collaborate with the landscape, so as not to fall back into the slippers of language. I'm completely porous, I' m one with the landscape! What will the landscape trigger?
After that, the texts raised questions. I started grouping the texts by question, and I said to myself that I wasn't going to offer this object to a traditional publisher, I wanted it to circulate in a different way.
At the time of the confinement, I zoomed in on a collective of twenty-year-olds Acédie58; I wanted to work with them, and they invented a form. They searched and groped, generously.
The transpoèmes dictated six texts, six reflections, around six big questions. One of them revolves around the "parti-pris de la voix", in response to Ponge and objectivism.
I've tried to listen to the questions posed by these transpoems. This is something new for me.
This multi-entry object is both a book and a listening booklet.
The graphic designers went through my text according to what they heard, sometimes cross-hatching it, sometimes staining it. I also thought it would be easy to listen to, and even boring, as my voice isn't very performative. It's my everyday voice, unedited, from life itself.
I told my friends: "Go to sleep, do the dishes while you listen to it...".

Interview by Anne Montaron

Join Laure Gauthier at the Maison de la Poésie, for an evening of poetry and music at 8pm on November 4, with David Christoffel, Pedro Garcia Velasquez, Sereine Berlottier (accompanied by Jean-Yves Bernhard). 

*D'un lyrisme à l'autrepublished by Editions MF

Photos @Pedro Garcia Velasquez, ZKM-Karlsruhe 2018