why pulverized poem?
The artists consider, as a central generative source, The Library is On Fire, by the French poet René Char. Char’s poem responds to a transforming experience he had as a member of the French Resistance. In an essay on this subject, Mary Walling Blackburn cites the following from poet and translator Christopher Merritt1: “The Library is on Fire. These were the code words [during the German occupation of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste maquis of the French Resistance – words that acquired a mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and set fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the position of René Char’s group. The Frenchmen barely escaped with their lives. And the poet thought the fire was proof of the power of language to shape the world. ‘I believe in the magic and in the authority of words,’ he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed.” What are the implications of Char’s astounding (mis)reading of this episode? The poem is used as mater
