PARADOXES AND PROMISES OF STILL LIFE IN POETRY:

READING NOTES ON LU MENEZES AND SUZANNE DOPPELT

Abstract

The pictorial genre called “still life” is surrounded by a fundamental ambivalence, which manifests itself on different levels. In this article, I propose to address the ambivalence of gender at two of these levels, which seem to me to be the most important and the most productive in terms of poetic thinking about the relationship between man, language, and the world. The first is the level of the history of transformations in artistic forms; the second is the level of a philosophy of the image in its oscillation between a drive that could be called rhythmic-plastic and a representative drive. By modulating these ambivalences, the appropriation of still life in poetry (poems that refer to scenes of still life or that interpret with verbal means the pictorial universe characteristic of still life) allows us to think about the power and limits of art in relation to experience. This will be demonstrated by reading poetic texts by Lu Menezes and Suzanne Doppelt.