Dismantling, sifting, sorting: Valérie Rouzeau's poetics of scrappage

Abstract

Taking as its starting-point Julia Kristeva's work on the relationship between pre-verbal experience and poetic language, notably in La Révolution du langage poétique and Polylogue, this essay sets out to establish that the poetry of Valérie Rouzeau is marked above all by sonorous mayhem, rhythm and an absence of boundaries in space and time. Close analysis of the poems in the collections Pas Revoir (1999) and Quand je me deux (2009) reveals a highly ludic and dislocatory approach to the word, anarchic punctuation, erratic rhymes and unrestrained image-association. The article concludes that Rouzeau is raiding the semiotic domain of her auditory imagination, and that her poetry brings the reader to a place of omnipresent simultaneity, where the indeterminacy of pre-verbal experience of self and world can be apprehended through sound.