‘Dans le tissage de la vie’: The Poetic Notebook as an Ecological Form of Exploration

Abstract

A slow but steady stream of critical studies on the diary form have emerged throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although a remarkable number of notebooks ( carnets, in French) have been published by poets in the same period, they have not attracted the same critical attention. Taking some steps to redress this imbalance, this article questions whether the lack of critical work on the poetic notebook is due to the pronounced interest that many of these works show in the nonhuman world. Drawing on contemporary models of nonhuman or ecological thought, this article explores how the poet Lorand Gaspar conceives of the notebook as a woven or entangled form of writing. It investigates how his notebook interlaces different knowledge systems, perspectives and styles in order to explore the entangled nature of worldly forces and humanity’s immersion in this immense weave.