Louise Warren, poet and essayist

Photographie Richard Gravel, 2006

LOUISE WARREN, poet and essayist, born in 1956 in Montréal (Québec, Canada), lives and works in Lanaudière region. She has published more than fifteen poetry books, amongst them at les éditions de l’Hexagone, La pratique du bleu and Une pierre sur une pierre. She has written a literature history essay on the first woman to publish a poetry book in Québec, Léonise Valois, femme de lettres. Un portrait. More recently, she published many essays on the experience of creation and artwork : amongst them, Bleu de Delft. Archives de solitude and Objets du monde. Archives du vivant, and composed an anthology of Québec poetry dedicated to the visual arts : La poésie mémoire de l’art. Louise Warren had been invited to many international events and received many awards.

To view lists of books, awards and events, click on « Accueil », « Publications » and « Événements ».

One of Québec’s most delicate and subtle poets, Louise Warren gives us here a collection of mental flashes and images, coherent yet at times contextually elliptical, for floating, often amenable at once to a grounding in the quotidian and a reading in the light of the most open of absolutes. [...] Une pierre sur une pierre, a title that, moreover, suggests a slow, steady building of the meaning of one’s being, rather than any sense of a scatteredness or a despairing chaos.

‘Livre en constante mutation’, writes Louise Warren, without a fixed centre, without even any definitive orientation, other than that multiple trace or ‘archive’, as she likes to think of a good deal of her recent writing, of an ontos lived at the heart of its ephemeral and yet persistent strangenesses watched over and hatched out by she who inhabits ‘l’élan qui m’habite’. If this élan, this poiein, this surging forth of self’s inscribed being, generates something resembling a proof, half-flagrant, half-obscure, a mode of ontological presence that is equally ‘un vol de cendres' or what she may deem a vestige of ‘l’envers des arbres’, it is not far from that same poietic energy at the dynamic and equally tensional heart of another of Louise Warren’s books, her today reprinted Bleu de Delft, in which we see once more all the fine-bonedness, all the serene-despite-all, ever firmly questing vigour of a perception and an expression that explain why the work of a great artist such as Alexandre Hollan can hold her attention: a telluric anchoring and the intuition of a sacredness in the bosom of the ‘simple’, as Yves Bonnefoy might say, the search for a ‘goldenness’ – perhaps unattainable, the mere mirror of one’s high desire - , but ‘dans le parfum de l’hiver’, immanent to the core ( - though the ‘core’ of the finite remains clouded in dreams of some half-sensed ‘azure’).

Louise Warren’s essay to accompany the exhibition of Hollan’s work (Alexandre Hollan. Un seul arbre) at the Musée d’art de Joliette [...] testifies to what some might consider to be a deep ambivalence Warren lives and breathes as to the nature of being, an ambivalence that Une pierre sur une pierre may seem to convey in like measure. But it is perhaps less of a rational refusal of presence’s deep and swirlingly mysterious alterity, than a determination to live ‘cette ligne d’énergie à émettre’, hic et nunc, in the fragile and exquisite and endlessly contrasted oneness of a being that, stone upon stone, unsayableness upon unsayableness, the poem, a collection of poems, curiously manages to assemble in its provisional (non-)lieu.

Michael Bishop

Dalhousie University

(from a critical review to be published in The French Review, Montana State University, 2006)

A light purely interior.

Tortoise, stag, snakes, all that is.

As truly as the stag’s antlers spring out, other things exist.

There are no other links.

Accept this movement.

Night falls quickly. Everything is alive.

Like it, I throw myself into obscurity.

Yes, hair is mute.

But you can hear a voice through the leaves of the trees calling your name.

Waiting alone is a still, upright state.

A deep kiss.

That’s how it is in this world.

Wind, blue, sand, the sea breaks up and must remain that way.

Winter is large enough to contain time and space.

The neck is a warm and lonely place.

I will come back for this flower of snow.

These light-crystals, this water which catches fire in tea.

Wait for me.

(from Une pierre sur une pierre)

Translations

Extracts from Madeleine de janvier à septembre (with English translation by George Lang) in Ellipse (Sherbrooke, Québec), nº 39 (« La nouvelle poésie amoureuse / New Love Poetry »), 1988, p. 46-49.

Extracts from Wonderment (translation by Elaine Lewis) in Portulan (France), October 2004 and in the anthology Poetry in Performance 32, composed by Barry Wallenstein (New York), Fall 2004.