The flat space and the open diagram: The topology of André Vallias's poetry

Abstract

According to Roman Jakobson, poetry acquires its differential quality by being endowed with a subliminal verbal patterning - a parallelistic texturing that originates the juxtaposition of "grammar figures" and "sound figures". This verbal patterning inserts a kind of "abstract skeleton" into the body of the poem. When, in semiosis, metalanguage is implied as an integral material of the sign, the creative act ends up being confused with it - the parallels between language and metalanguage begin to generate figures of figures, the "skeleton" turns inside out in a proliferation of images or similarity diagrams. Movements of this magnitude usually give rise to creative leaps; it is by performing one of these leaps that André Vallias inaugurates a new space of poetic imagination. In the sequence of poems of this phase (in particular Nous n'avons pas compris Descartes and de verso), the intervaled universe of discrete alphabetical structures and of rhythmic distributions touches the continuous universe of images: rhythmic diagrams, as abstract representations of the intensity oscillations between syllables, become themselves poems. It is such a metalinguistic approach that we try to understand. Departing from concepts such as "smooth space" and "open diagram", we try thinking about how Vallias translates the phonetic imagination of the page into a topological imagination.