L’oeuvre de Maurice Carême. Une poésie à lire et à voir

Abstract

Maurice Carême (1899–1978) was a Belgian francophone poet. We present revisiting the appreciation that is sometimes assigned to a « poet of images » to deepen that « above all visual » of a poet who writes « with the gifts of observation » (Moremans 1930 : 19), and gives, in his poetic intuition, a content to see. The visual, in symbiosis with the tangible, manifests itself in the work of Maurice Carême through the fascination with the gestures of graphic, pictorial and even sculptural production. The passion for the imprints left by these gestures is expressed by the presence of a pictorial isotopy, by the frequent recurrence of words such as trace, draw, paint, sketch, model and other terms belonging to the same semantic field, as well as by the use of the presentative « there ». In this synthetic designation, the poet sums up, in a simulation of gestures und unique denomination, the landscape and its outlines. Explicitly referring to pictorial techniques is one of the most visible processes these expressions are part of a network of visual patterns that relate both to the gestures of writing and painting. This leads to anchoring in the reader the impression of visual poetry