Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Found! Poésie trouvée (Part 6).

I have touched upon, in earlier posts, the peculiar jolt one is dealt when a specimen of poésie trouvée is stumbled upon.  
     So it was all the more surprising to discover such a specimen lurking in my own prose.
     Simply, it’s a paragraph from my novel concerning the fortunes of Klara and narrator Éveline who – against all expectations – find themselves falling very much in love.  
     As to rhyme, it’s an unconscious pairing one might say.
     A snatch of dialogue. Klara speaks first . . .

Two Graces.
Detail from Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture (1814), 
commissioned for Empress Josephine and now exhibited
in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
(Source Wikimedia.)

        ‘We agreed. Agreed. For both of us.’
        Klara drew close to me.                
        ‘We are not looking for what we do not want. Because . . .’
        ‘Because we have found what we . . .’
        ‘Need,she pronounced throatily 
        ‘Need.’
 
For more examples of poésie trouvée see my earlier posts . . .
That Cry in the Night
Immured Mustard Field
The Unsought Text



 

Monday, 1 September 2025

A Reissue from the Harcourt Archives! Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu.

Reissued by Éditions Studio Harcourt in a facsimile of the now unprocurable first edition, Verity Askew’s popular standard work (1948) – Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu – remains an informed, entirely novel and exhaustive treatise on a neglected interwar cultural subcurrent, including new structures and patternings such as ‘Cut-ups’, Découpage, Papierausschnitte, Merz, ‘Flourishes’, Pataphysical Illusions, Conjurings and Happenings with an Appendix devoted to ‘past and present’ (interwar and circa mid-1940s) exemplars of this Dadaistic style. An edition to be cherished; to be had at all quality booksellers.

First edition. Original trompe l’oeil dustjacket (1948).