Refiguring Baudelaire’s ‘poète-chiffonnier’ in contemporary French poetry

Baudelaire’s ‘chiffonnier’

The figure of the ragpicker first appears in Baudelaire’s work in ‘Le Vin des chiffonniers’, the earliest drafts of which date back to before the 1848 revolution, but which was first published in the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire, 1991: 152). A frequent presence in nineteenth-century Paris, the ragpicker sifted through rubbish to salvage scraps of cloth, paper, glass and so on, subsequently turning waste products into money by handing them on to be recycled. For Baudelaire, the ‘chiffonnier’ represents an ambiguous and multi-dimensional figure, situated on the fringes of society. The historical or socio-political status of Baudelaire’s ‘chiffonnier’ has been explored in a number of critical works, the most well-known of which is Walter Benjamin’s A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (Benjamin, 1983) and his later essay ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ (Benjamin, 2006). Rather than approaching the ragpicker from a socio-political angle, the following article explores the significance of the comparison between the ‘chiffonnier’ and the poet, asking how Baudelaire’s ragpicker is refigured in contemporary practice, and what role rubbish or ‘trash’ plays in poetry today.

In the essay ‘Du vin et du haschisch’, published first in 1851, and then later in Les Paradis artificiels (1961 [1860]), Baudelaire gives the following description of the ragpicker:

Voici un homme chargé de ramasser les débris d’une journée de la capitale. Tout ce que la grande cité a rejeté, tout ce qu’elle a perdu, tout ce qu’elle a dédaigné, tout ce qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne. Il compulse les archives de la débauche, le capharnaüm des rebuts. Il fait un triage, un choix intelligent; il ramasse, comme un avare un trésor, les ordures qui, remâchées par la divinité de l’Industrie, deviendront des objets d’utilité ou de jouissance … Il arrive hochant la tête et buttant sur les pavés, comme les jeunes poëtes qui passent toutes leurs journées à errer et chercher des rimes. (Baudelaire, 1961: 52)

The analogy between ragpicker and poet is apparent: both sort through the ‘débris’ of the modern city, re-appropriating what others have discarded, re-evaluating their trash as potential sources of pleasure, function and aesthetic value. Baudelaire’s work subsequently demonstrates this ‘ragpicker poetics: the scope of the poem’s lexicon, and its inventory of poetic imagery extends to include the figures and events of modern life that were previously regarded as being outside the remit of poetry. The hierarchy of ‘appropriate’ poetic subjects is collapsed, and the poet finds his inspiration indiscriminately: ‘tout pour moi devient allégorie’, Baudelaire writes in ‘Le Cygne’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 131). In this same poem, he goes on to illustrate this principle, evoking the tragic figure of classical mythology, Andromaque, alongside a more modern figure of destitution, the street prostitute, ‘la négresse, amaigrie et phtisique / Piétinant dans la boue’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 131). The poem juxtaposes the grand, symmetrical architecture of the Louvre in all its permanence and the vibrant disorder of the travelling street market. The poem becomes increasingly heterogeneous, flexible and open, in terms of both form and content, and is populated with the paraphernalia of everyday existence. As Walter Benjamin suggests, the poet is comparable to the ragpicker in his quest to collect and catalogue the city’s waste, making the poet a form of archivist (Benjamin, 2006: 108). Poems thus become archival spaces that document contemporary life, offering ‘the rags and scraps of society as evidence of another, alternative, history’ (Pye, 2010: 2). This is history conceived of not as a linear list of great kings and famous battles, but as a fragmentary picture composed of traces of the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

Pivotal to Baudelaire’s ragpicker poetics is the notion of ‘recyclage’. Troubled by the anxiety that there was nothing new to say, that he was condemned merely to repeat the language, form and imagery of his predecessors, Baudelaire’s work was characterised by an all-consuming quest for the ‘new’, as the concluding line of Les Fleurs du mal proclaims ‘Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 186). ¹ The ‘chiffonnier’ provided Baudelaire with a model for poetic practice that finds innovation in recycling. Age-old themes such as love, lust, despair and death are restaged against the backdrop of modern, urban life, with novel characters and novel situations drawn from traditionally unpoetic domains. For Baudelaire, this process of ‘recyclage’ elevates trash forms into art, involving a sort of poetic ‘upcycling’, where base materials are transformed into a valuable end product. This resonates with a second image, that of the ‘poète-chimiste’, which appears in the epilogue to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Here the poet, ‘comme un parfait chimiste’, addresses the city, writing: ‘Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 250). The poet is conceived as an alchemist, transforming the mud of the city into valuable poetic material.

Revising the ragpicker

In Baudelaire’s work, frequent references are found to trash or rubbish, understood in its most literal sense: ‘ordures’ (Baudelaire, 1987: 85), ‘tas de débris’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 152). These references constitute a motif that sustains the presence of the poet-ragpicker image throughout his poetry. So too in contemporary poetry, trash populates the works of a number of poets, from the ‘éboueurs’ in Pierre Alferi’s Kub Or (Alferi, 1994: n.p.), to the English interjection ‘Litter litter litter litter’ in Valérie Rouzeau’s Vrouz (Rouzeau, 2013: 96), or Dominique Fourcade’s exclamation in Le Ciel pas d’angle, ‘Merci Ville de Paris d’avoir doté ma rue d’une benne à ordures’ (Fourcade, 1983: 34). These references operate as markers of the banal, the quotidian and, significantly, the ‘unpoetic’. Their inclusion in the poem signals a broader poetics at play, and serves to situates them in a lineage of modern poetry that, since Baudelaire, aims to extend the possibilities of poetic language and imagery. In the following example, from Dominique Fourcade’s Le Sujet monotype (1997), rubbish is not only the subject matter, but also a metaphor for the very techniques and practices of poetic composition:

bien plus que le chewing-gum son emballage en papier aluminium, merveille d’efficacité et d’intelligence, protéger la fraîcheur, et merveille d’inédite élégance, rien vu de plus méthodique, c’est là que j’ai appris à plier, à déplier, essentiel pour un écrivain. (Fourcade, 1997: 97)

In his references to ‘plier’ and ‘déplier’, Fourcade evokes the widespread motif of the ‘pli’ in modern poetry, which describes the folded page of the book, as well as the poetic line. Unlike the prose line, which is continuous and set by the publisher’s formatting, the poetic line is folded and unfolded on the page by the poet. Stéphane Mallarmé, the obvious figure associated with the ‘pli’ in poetry, is noticeably absent from Fourcade’s reflection. ² Instead, it is in the disposable chewing-gum wrapper that the poet finds a metaphor for poetic practice. For Fourcade, the workshop in which the poet learns his trade need not be the traditional classroom, concerned only with canonical poets of the past, but in the banal routines of the ‘quotidien’, the network of everyday objects and events in which both trash and poetry are located. In Fourcade’s description of the chewing-gum wrapper as serving to ‘protéger la fraîcheur’ of its perishable contents, we might find a further level of signification: trash prevents poetry from turning stale, keeping it fresh by injecting it with new material and new sources of inspiration. The disposable nature of the chewing-gum wrapper makes it an apt metaphor for contemporary poetry, where the ‘jetable’ constitutes a prominent motif, for example in the Revue de littérature générale (Alferi and Cadiot, 1995: 3). The disposability of poetic techniques resists the codification of practice, and ensures that once the potential of a given practice has been realised, it is then abandoned in the pursuit of new ones.

In contemporary poetry, the motif of the ‘jetable’ also appears in the pervasive references to fads, trends and fleeting fashions, where the minutiae of daily life, and the often transient neologisms that accompany them, are transcribed in the poem: ‘faux cils’ (Fourcade, 2008: 64), ‘monokini’ (2008: 76). This engagement with the ephemeral phenomena of modern culture is an expression of what Baudelaire famously described as ‘le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable’ (Baudelaire, 1992: 355). The appearance of brand names, ‘biscuits lu’ (Rouzeau, 2013: 20), ‘rimmel’ (Fourcade, 1994: 110), ‘Microsoft word 98 édition Macintosh’ (Roubaud, 2008: 9), alongside abundant references to the material goods of everyday life, presents a broader commentary on the rampant consumerism of contemporary society. The poems in Pierre Alferi’s La Voie des airs, with their references to ‘le ketchup’ and ‘le robot ménager de marque Odradek’ (Alferi, 2004: 69), offer a salient example. In the poem ‘L’Objet se dérobe’, Alferi evokes the insatiable desire to consume, and the subsequent excess of a society where food goes to waste (Alferi, 2004: 81–2). Alferi draws on the language of commerce throughout the poem; resembling the text on a till receipt, the central polyptoton, ‘item … item … item …’, reinforces this picture of the sheer quantity of ‘stuff’, both in everyday existence, and in the poem that describes it. Amidst this depiction of the unrelenting marketplace, the poem evokes: ‘item les souvenirs stockés / au cas où, photos / dans cartons à chaussures / cassettes enregistrées / plus touchées faute de temps’ (Alferi, 2004: 81). This presents in turn a metapoetic reflection, where the poem might be conceived as a catalogue or stockpile, an archive of the sounds and images of modern life. In a comment that resonates with Baudelaire’s original poetic project, Alferi writes: ‘j’ai besoin d’images de toute origine / pour le portrait-robot du truc’ (Alferi, 2004: 44). In such a way, in the collection Kub Or (1994), the humble Oxo cube becomes a structural model for the subsequent poems. The typographical arrangement of each poem presents a two-dimensional square that is transformed into a cube by the semantic density of the text. The text then expands or dissolves during the reading process, like the Oxo cube in hot water. In the poem entitled ‘préface’, we read (Alferi, 1994: n.p.):

en voilà une idée grunge

sept fois sept fois sept fois sept

et tirée par les cheveux

en cubes durs d’à peu près

n’importe quoi tiens comme à

la télé presque aussi bonne

que de comprimer l’ordure

 préface

This highly metapoetic poem announces its own structural composition: the second line, ‘sept fois sept fois sept fois sept’, describes the internal architecture of the collection, which is composed of seven sections of seven poems, each of seven lines, each of seven syllables (with the exception of the fifth section which is comprised instead of seven square photographs by Suzanne Doppelt). The poem defines a central tenet of its own poetics, an ‘anything goes’ approach, where everything is permitted, ‘comme à la télé’. It conceptualises the poem as a trash compressor, compacting the rubbish of modern life into ‘cubes durs’. In keeping with the machinic imagery developed throughout Kub Or, and elsewhere in Alferi and Cadiot’s essay ‘La Mécanique lyrique’ (Alferi and Cadiot, 1995: 3), Baudelaire’s conception of the ‘poète-chiffonnier’ is reformulated here as a ‘poème-compacteur-de-déchets’. It is fitting that the human figure of Baudelaire’s original image has been replaced by a machine; it reflects not only technological changes in modern industry, but also the move from nineteenth-century lyricism towards a post-lyrical contemporary field, characterised by the ‘disparition élocutoire du poète’ (Mallarmé, 1945: 366).

As the title Kub Or would suggest, Alferi’s collection revisits the motif of rubbish and gold found in Baudelaire’s image of the poet-alchemist. Behind Baudelaire’s image lies a Romantic belief in the transformational power of art; it conveys an implicit value system, whereby the ‘trash’ that the poet is tasked with re-evaluating is seen as intrinsically worthless, obtaining value only through its re-appropriation in the poem. Conversely, reflecting a broader change in attitudes towards literature in contemporary practice, Alferi nuances this idea, dismantling the dichotomy between mud and gold, and between the intrinsically worthless and the intrinsically valuable. Rubbish and gold are not two diametrically opposed ends of a continuum of values, but are on a plane of equivalence. Indeed, the value of the central image of the ‘Kub Or’ lies not in its literal interpretation as a cube of gold, but in the cheap stock cube which serves as a conceptual model for the dissolving and expanding of the text. Likewise, in the final line of the poem above, the simultaneity afforded by homophonic play in ‘comprimer l’ordure’ suspends two possibilities: the poem is both compacted rubbish (‘ordure’), and condensed gold (‘or dur’).

Linguistic ragpickers, linguistic archives

For Baudelaire, writing in the nineteenth century, the constraints on poetic imagery, language and verse forms inspired the desire to draw on traditionally unpoetic domains. After a century and a half of experimentation and radical revision of form and language, the constraints on contemporary poetry are significantly fewer: as Alferi writes in the passage above, anything goes. In this sense, the image of the ragpicker loses a certain significance in the contemporary field, because the idea of drawing on the resources of modern life is no longer a revolutionary practice, but a given. However, as the following section will suggest, the image of the ragpicker is revived in contemporary practice by its reincarnation as a linguistic ragpicker, a seemingly slight modulation, but one which incorporates the image into a framework more appropriate to the concerns of poets today. This shift represents a wider change in emphasis across the twentieth century, where a wariness of the image and lyric voice is matched by a focus on language and its functioning within the text. Baudelaire’s original conception sat within a lyrical framework, stressing, for example, the potential of ‘unpoetic’ poetic imagery; today, the significance of a ragpicking poetics rests in the way it transforms poetic discourse.

Valérie Rouzeau explores this idea of the linguistic ragpicker, when she describes herself as a sort of scrap merchant, a ‘récupérateur’, assembling the heterogeneous linguistic fragments of the poem. In reference to Pas revoir, a collection of poems written after the death of her father, Rouzeau describes how this model is derived not from Baudelaire’s ‘chiffonnier’, but from her father’s own employment:

Mon père était récupérateur, son travail consistait donc à ‘récupérer’ : ferrailles, papiers, chiffons, métaux, pneus usagés etc. et pour les voitures vieilles ou accidentées, le carton en vrac il les pressait avant de les livrer sous forme de dés à jouer de cinq cents kilos aux usines de recyclage. J’avais fait cela avec les mots, quasimodo! (Martin, 2005: 107)

As Rouzeau suggests, the linguistic memories of her childhood are recycled in the poems of Pas revoir, which present configurations of child language, slang expressions and snippets of conversation between father and daughter. In an article on Rouzeau’s work, Mary Noonan describes how these practices of recuperating, sifting and sorting form a ‘poetics of scrappage’ (Noonan, 2012). Such practices are found throughout contemporary poetry, where the notions of ‘recyclage’ and ‘bricolage’ constitute significant motifs. In her thesis on Olivier Cadiot, Anne Woelfel describes how these processes appear in L’Art poétic’ (1988), which is assembled from cut-ups from grammar books and dictionaries, and Futur, ancien, fugitif (1993), where the protagonist, marooned on a desert island, must use the linguistic remnants washed ashore with him to reconstruct the novel (Woelfel, 2014: 322). The techniques found in L’Art poétic’ situate Cadiot in a lineage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and artists who use techniques such as collage and cut-up to explore the various possibilities of recycling pre-existing or ‘ready-made’ materials. ³ A recent example of this appears in the work of Anne-James Chaton, who creates performance poems and recordings comprised of auditory collages of scraps of discarded language. This includes till receipts and metro tickets, read out in all their glorious banality, barcode numbers and all. As Jeff Barda points out, Chaton presents a particularly salient example of a Baudelairean chiffonnier, refigured in the modern age (Barda, 2014: 80). ⁴ Chaton’s work exemplifies what the critic Jean-Michel Espitallier describes, when he writes: ‘les poètes peuvent trouver des pépites en fouillant les poubelles et recycler des matériaux triviaux, a priori sans intérêts, rebuts de langue, bribes perdues, objets normés et aliénants, pour leur donner des couleurs, en extraire des merveilles’ (Espitallier, 2006: 81–2).

Alongside these processes of linguistic ‘recyclage’, a further extension of the ragpicker motif appears in the incorporation of what I want to call ‘trash language’: neologisms and slang, brand names and anglicisms, advertising slogans and phatic communication. These instances of language use all represent socially devalued, often stigmatised forms; their inclusion in the poem constitutes a desire for poetry to present, or indeed archive, the heterogeneous reality of contemporary language. Blaise Cendrars presents an early reflection on this extension of the linguistic possibilities of the poem when he describes his quest to ‘créer un style nouveau en collaboration avec les ingénieurs. Ce style nouveau travaille toutes les formes du langage et toutes les parties du discours’ (Cendrars, 1987: 98–9). One particular manifestation of this can be found in his exploration of poetry and the language of advertising. In Publicité = poésie, published originally in 1927, he describes advertising as an art form, seeing it as a modernist domain of linguistic innovation and imagination, drawing on internationalism, ‘polyglottisme’, and crowd psychology to produce ‘matières nouvelles’ and ‘procédés inédits’ (Cendrars, 1987: 117). Cendrars argues that advertising meets poetry in so far as it is characterised by a striking lyricism, endowed with the capacity to reflect ‘la conscience humaine’ but in the plastic, spoken language of today. Appealing to his fellow poets, Cendrars writes: ‘Amis, la publicité est votre domaine. / Elle parle votre langue. Elle réalise votre poétique’ (Cendrars, 1987: 118). This recalls Guillaume Apollinaire’s famous proclamation in Alcools (1913): ‘Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut / Voilà la poésie ce matin’ (Apollinaire, 1920: 7). In such a way, their poetry incorporated catchphrases and advertising slogans, levelling the traditional hierarchy between poetic language and the everyday language of commerce and marketing. In turn, the incorporation of other discourses in poetry creates a form of dialogism, as Carrie Noland suggests when she remarks that ‘Cendrars exploits the tension between the discourse of advertising and the intimate language of lyric poetry to reveal their dialectical interdependence’ (Noland, 1997: 41).

In contemporary poetry, the interest in advertising slogans and newspaper headlines continues. Valérie Rouzeau, for example, satirises the absurd expressions of internet adverts in her collection Vrouz: ‘Rencontrez l’âme sœur sans payer jusqu’à dimanche / 23h59 ensuite c’est impossible’ (Rouzeau, 2013: 82). In Anne-James Chaton’s performance poem ‘Événement No 23’, the central refrain ‘the king of pop is dead’ is drawn from a newspaper headline (Chaton, 2011). The poem was composed of ‘found’ linguistic fragments that the poet assembled on Friday, 26 June 2009, the morning after Michael Jackson’s death. The repetition of the phrase ‘the king of pop is dead’, superimposed on Chaton’s monotonous recitation, contributes to an overall acoustic effect that sounds like the rhythmic whirring of printing presses, churning out the morning’s newspapers. Elsewhere, in Dominique Fourcade’s Outrance utterance, the poet reflects on the marketing slogan, ‘dites-le avec des mots’, spotted in a florist’s window display (Fourcade, 1990: 71). The phrase itself is a revision of the slogans that precede it, ‘dites-le avec des fleurs’ and so on, only here the cliché has gone full circle so that it has become tautological, and ultimately meaningless. However, its re-appropriation in Fourcade’s writing offers the possibility of some profounder insight; in the shift in context from shop window to poem, the phrase oscillates between resisting signification, and being laden with possible interpretations. Where Fourcade’s highly metalinguistic poetry approaches language with a heightened attention, frequently taking language itself as the object of study, the semantic hollowness of the language of advertising appears as an antithetical type of language use. The two discourses animate each other: they are set up in a relationship of ‘dialectical interdependence’, to return to Noland’s expression.

A further form of ‘trash language’ that appears frequently in contemporary poetry is phatic communication. One particular manifestation of this are the frequent references to the linguistic platitudes of customer service: ‘Merci pour votre achat’ (Chaton, 2013), ‘Nous vous prions / De bien vouloir nous excuser’ (Rouzeau, 2013: 130), ‘on lui répond que l’on regrette de ne pouvoir pas donner suite / À son appel et on la prie de bien vouloir / Patienter’ (Alferi, 1997: 13). Olivier Cadiot’s works are filled with social niceties, verbal tics and empty exclamations. Futur, ancien, fugitif, for example, opens with the following lines:

Mr. et Mrs. ***

auraient la joie de recevoir

……………….…………….

pour le dîner

 du ………………

(Cadiot, 1993: 9)

By leaving the blanks incomplete, Cadiot accentuates the phatic quality of this ritualised language use; the overt sentimentality of the fixed expression ‘avoir la joie de recevoir’ is undermined by its depersonalisation – it has no expressed subject or object. The passage above continues, becoming increasingly frenetic in its excessive adulations:

Ah mon cher

Cher Monsieur

C’est avec plaisir que

Eh bien recevez acceptez croyez cher Monsieur,

à mon meilleur souvenir …

Votre si dévoué fidèle entièrement à vous

votre ami – (Cadiot, 1993: 10–11)

The accumulation of ‘formules de politesse’ in this passage pokes fun at a semantically null instance of language use. ⁵ Their excess undermines the sincerity of what is being expressed, so that, in the space of the poem, phatic language is effectively trashed by the poet’s reworking of it. This emphasis on phatic language might also be because it offers an insight into the functioning of the linguistic system as a whole. Like the blank invitation above, these set phrases present a prototypical example of the depersonalised and recycled nature of expression, pointing to the iterative nature of language more broadly.

A notable feature of contemporary poetry is the presence of anglicisms, which reflect the highly politicised influx of English and American borrowings into the French language more generally. Poetry, once heralded as a bastion of the purity of the French language, now depicts the fragmentary soundscapes of modern life in all their heterogeneity. In Courir les rues (1967), Raymond Queneau attempted to capture the current state of the spoken language, describing ‘un ouisqui sur les rocks / à l’heure du five-o’clock’ (Queneau, 2013: 76). Referencing Queneau throughout, Jacques Roubaud’s Ode à la ligne 29 des autobus parisiens (2013) traces the poet’s bus journey across Paris, presenting a number of more recent English borrowings: ‘grunge’, ‘Un egg-head’, ‘Expertisant mon look’ (Roubaud, 2013: 43). These anglicisms often give rise to macaronic puns that play on the two languages: from his seat on the bus Roubaud observes the ‘Bric à brac de fast food avec un faste fou’ (Roubaud, 2013: 44). Given the frequent allusions to Baudelaire in Roubaud’s work, we might find in this observation an implicit reference to the ‘bric à brac confus’ of nineteenth-century Paris that Baudelaire describes in ‘Le Cygne’ (Baudelaire, 1991: 131). As in Roubaud’s example, foreign-language borrowings provide new phonological and linguistic forms to work with, offering a repertoire of novel prosodic features, puns and images, that enrich poetic language rather than being detrimental to it. As Cendrars pointed out in 1927, the ‘polyglottisme’ of advertising and commercial language (which is often the point of entry of anglicisms into the French language) presents a source of linguistic innovation, rather than a cause for despair.

Alongside anglicisms, a further aspect of the French language that is frequently stigmatised, and which is pervasive in contemporary poetry, is slang. Again, Queneau’s Courir les rues provides an early example of the use of ‘l’argot’: it draws not only on slang terms and expressions, but also on the syntax and phrasal variants of the spoken language. In contemporary poetry, slang appears in a number of forms: in ‘À donf dans la drepou’, Pierre Alferi uses verlan (Alferi, 1997: 33); in Vrouz, Valérie Rouzeau configures colloquial speech with her own personal idiolect. Roubaud’s Ode à la ligne 29 is filled with slang expressions and colloquial syntax: ‘banlieusard’ (Roubaud, 2013: 12), ‘Largué’, reste planté’ sur le trottoir, l’air con’ (Roubaud, 2013: 19, author’s punctuation). The poem comments explicitly on the quirks of contemporary language, such as the tendency to confuse the spelling of the past participle with the infinitive verb form. In Poésie, etcetera, ménage, Roubaud writes that ‘la poésie est mémoire de la langue’ (Roubaud, 1995: 101), and we find throughout his work a desire to archive the state of contemporary language – its vocabulary, syntax and spelling. Linguists suggest that colloquial speech is the part of the language that is the most plastic, the least codified, and therefore a locus of sustained lexical, grammatical and phonological change. In such a way, the inclusion of these stigmatised slang forms in poetry allows for greater innovation in poetic language.

In Ode à la ligne 29, which is composed in alexandrines, Roubaud contrasts the classical verse form with contemporary slang and deliberate, often phonetic, misspellings, although he is quick to point out that this distinct orthography is intentional: ‘Je vous fais remarquer ici que l’orthographe / De mon mot-rime n’est pas du tout une gaphe’ (Roubaud, 2013: 59). This same juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern can also be seen in La Dissolution (2008), where Roubaud uses the colloquial practice of adding a proper name to the end of a phrase (in the style of ‘Tu l’as dit, bouffi’) to transform Baudelaire’s canonical poem ‘Correspondances’:

 Correspondances, Hortense!

 La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers, Olivier

 Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles, Carole

 …

The gesture is a playful one, but here Roubaud disrupts the altogether more serious Romantic tone of Baudelaire’s poem, changing not only the line length, but the overall effect of poetic voice too. Roubaud’s modifications create a ludic, distancing effect, so that the lyric voice of the original is transformed and ironised. The poem’s revision, however slight, symbolises a broader practice in contemporary poetry of reworking and updating traditional modes of poetic writing via the inclusion of contemporary ‘trash’ forms. It also represents a prototypical example of the dialectical, or indeed dialogic, nature of discourse in contemporary poetry. Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of poetry as ‘monologic’, involving a singular unified poetic voice, might hold for certain types of traditional lyric poetry, but has been largely dismantled in contemporary practice (Bakhtin, 1981: 296). Instead, the desire to draw on all forms of language, and to present the poem as a heteroglottic assemblage of inter-animated discourses, has resulted in a revision of poetic discourse more broadly.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this article, I asked two principal questions: how is Baudelaire’s ragpicker refigured by contemporary poets, and what is the role of trash in poetry today? Like Baudelaire, contemporary poets draw on trash, in all its various forms, as subject matter and as a source of inspiration for poetic imagery. Trash appears in their work in and of itself, revelling in its own haecceity, and in this sense forms part of an archive, documenting the rich heterogeneity of modern life. Like Baudelaire’s ‘peintre de la vie moderne’, with his equal measures of the eternal and the ephemeral, contemporary poets are also concerned with depicting the transitory aspects of contemporary culture (Baudelaire, 1992: 355). What better way to capture the transient aspects of a society than by raiding its litter bins? What better way to ‘tirer l’éternel du transitoire’ than by identifying the aspects of daily life that unite people throughout time and space – their rubbish, their trash cultures, their trash language – however these manifest themselves at any given moment (Baudelaire, 1992: 354)? Baudelaire’ ragpicker also undergoes a number of revisions and extensions. The poetic practice that Baudelaire’s image evokes is developed: from Fourcade’s chewing-gum wrapper to Alferi’s rubbish compactor, trash provides contemporary poetry with metaphors or conceptual models for poetic processes themselves. More broadly, the notion of ‘recyclage’ has been developed in a variety of poetic techniques from across the twentieth century: cut-ups, collage and the use of the ‘ready-made’, for example. One of the most salient revisions of the poet-ragpicker image is the novel emphasis on trash language – slang, anglicisms, brand names and advertising slogans. Contemporary poetry operates as a linguistic archive: as ‘mémoire de la langue’, it documents the lexical, grammatical and stylistic variants of language today. The inclusion of ‘trash language’, as well as the practices of linguistic ‘recyclage’, involve a revision of poetic discourse, which becomes increasingly dialogic and heteroglottic. In this respect, it is particularly fitting that many critics see Baudelaire’s use of ironic distancing techniques as a ‘point de départ’ for the radical experimentation with poetic voice and discourse that appears throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

True to Baudelaire’s original project, the inclusion of trash in contemporary poetry represents a desire to continually extend the boundaries of what is permitted in poetry, and to avoid the impending threat of codification that is always present in any given artistic enterprise. Whether describing cultural practices or linguistic forms, trash is, by its very nature, subject to continuous renewal, lacking top-down or centralised codification and regulation. It therefore presents itself as a locus of innovation, where the rate of change is faster than in more overtly valued, and therefore more highly codified, cultures and language varieties. In such a way, trash can reinvigorate poetry: it provides a continual wellspring of untapped poetic material, conceptual models, imagery and language. Despite a number of revisions to his image of the ‘poète-chiffonnier’, contemporary poets share Baudelaire’s original quest for the ‘nouveau’, and find in trash that same possibility of renewal.