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. The anthology Une collection de lumières (Poèmes choisis 1984-2004) offers a survey of the twenty first years of poetry writing. As an essayist, Louise Warren 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, the Archives trilogy: Bleu de Delft. Archives de solitude, Objets du monde. Archives du vivant and La forme et le deuil. Archives du lac. The last was nominated for the Governer General 2008 Prize in the Essays and studies category. Louise Warren had been invited to many international events and received many awards. From May 27 to 30 2010, Louise Warren (altogether with the French poet Christian Prigent) will be special guest at the 11e Marché de la poésie de Montréal.

To view lists of books, awards and events, click on « Accueil », « Publications » and « Événements ». Each title generates a webpage, including an extract of the book and quotations from critics.

[On Une pierre sur une pierre, Montréal, l'Hexagone, 2006]

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. 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)

[On La forme et le deuil. Archives du lac, Montréal, l'Hexagone, 2008]

That Warren could describe so exactly the activity of reading in which I was at that very moment engaged confirmed my sense of her living presence within the book that I held in my hand. And I was ready - eager - to accompany her wherever she might invite me to follow. In actual fact, she had already opened her studio door to me and I had already crossed that threshold in the book's opening pages, where she reflected on the passage from mourning to form. [...]

The first two essays in Warren's book together serve to introduce the work. In the first, untitled, she expresses the desire and intention to investigate the relationships between deuil and forme and establishes this investigation as one most meaningfully done in company; in the second, "Le fauteuil de lecture," she situates the practice of reading in relation to her personal history, a history marked in this piece by a legacy of literary preoccupations and a specific loss (the death of her aunt Marraine). These are Warren's starting points - a loss, an understandong that creativity responds to such loss, and a particular appreciation for the materiality of the book and the act of reading. [...]

But what is this book? Like the two previous volumes in Warren's Archives trilogy (Bleu de Delft: Archives de solitude [2001] and Objets du monde : Archives du vivant [2005]), La forme et le deuil is marketed under the rubric "essai." But what is perhaps most engaging about this book is how it resists generic categories, nudging at the borders between prose and poetry, between critical essay and memoir, between lyrics and narrative, between exposition and commentary. Warren's essays remind the reader of the work of celebrated essayists such as Montaigne and Woolf. [...]

Indeed, Warren's writing on art is remarkable. She has an incomparable gift for seeing and then stepping back just far enough to let the reader see what she sees. But this book does not read like a compendium of discrete essays culled from earlier publications; the texts are transformed by their inclusion and placement within this volume. As Warren describes the films she has seen, the books she has read, the art exhibits she has visited, the people and places she has encountered, she is inscribing her own delicate ventures into the materiality of language and into the shared spaces of memory, feeling and thought.

[...]

Toward the end of the final essay, Warren writes: "Je cuisine des potages pour une amie malade. J'écris dans le même esprit, nourrir le vivant ". This is a deeply honest book, personal but not private, a book of generosity and connection, a book that accompanies and nourishes life and the living.

Karen S. MCPHERSON, American Review of Canadian Studies (2009)

Translations

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.

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.