Blah

Abstract:This article takes confinements and lockdowns as a point of departure for examining how contemporary poetry turns its back on the public. I diagnose the poetic landscape as overrun by a case of the blahs, and turn my attention to new and recent poetry by Amandine André, Andréa-Fatima Touam, and Liliane Giraudon. The three poets fold back over poetry's recursive history, conventions, and dominations, like the dispositif in relationship to poetic discourse in french. The super-apparatus, the archi-dispositif of reading Touam, André, and Giraudon alongside each other suggests that lassitude and near-but-not-quite surrender find their realization through the simplest of utterances or verbal gestures. Blah.