retournement

By Philippe Bootz

Retournement is a syntactic animation. Movement automatically captures the reader's attention, building a sentence that is perfectly coherent and grammatically correct. In this syntax, the order of apparition of the words determines their syntactic function. The poem, in a permanent unsteadiness seems to speed up to its end that is nothing but its own utterance: "la mort immense achève" (the tremendous death achieves). This final poem seems to be printable. But is it really printable? During a changing of positions, heights, readability and visibility, the value of words is flickering, modified with time, creating a discursive development into the sentence.

Retournement represents in words and aesthetic what the title indicates: a reversal, a shift. The music, the words on the screen, the colors and graphic elements emerge, “dance” for the audience and disappear as quickly as they appeared. Retournement, from 1991, exemplifies the poetic work of the French L.A.I.R.E group in the Alire publication from 1989 to 1997. The poem, although brief, encapsulates the philosophical and poetic work of the group, and their sustained investigations into a literature that moves closely to the functions and characteristics of the computer.