Daniel Blanchard's 'Crise de mots' explores language crisis and poetry

In 'Crise de mots,' published by Éditions du Sandre, Daniel Blanchard recounts his experience of a profound inner collapse—a 'crisis of words'—that began in the 1960s despite his involvement in the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie and a common platform with Guy Debord and the Situationist International. This crisis, a feeling of language's petrification and its irreparable distance from lived experience and emotions, recurred throughout his life and led him to poetry. Blanchard, now 79, has published ten collections since 1970 and works as a printer and translator. He draws on Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mandelstam, and Pavese in his search for a new, critical, and truthful enunciation capable of amplifying scattered voices. For Blanchard, poetry must keep the crisis open, beginning with a 'sweet shipwreck' of the self. He critiques the growing instrumentality of language and the division of the contemporary speaking subject, noting that the internalization of an impoverished language now operates through the injunction to participate rather than propaganda. He rejects the discourse of endings as a central component of contemporary alienation. The book is reviewed by Laurent Jeanpierre.