Jean-Marie Gleize

Jean-Marie Gleize (2 April 1946 – 12 March 2026) was a French poet, essayist and literary critic who taught French literature at the University of Provence and then at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he directed the Centre for Poetic Studies () from 1999 to 2009, and he edited the journal Nioques, which he founded in 1990. He died at Volx, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, aged 79.

His writing is associated with "post-poetry" and with ("literality"), a poetics that he developed from the 1990s in opposition to metaphor, imagery and representation. He put it into practice in his own books from Léman (1990) onwards, most of which appeared in the "Fiction & Cie" series at Éditions du Seuil, and he wrote critical studies of Francis Ponge and the poet Denis Roche. Two of his books, Tarnac (2009) and Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (2011), responded to the Tarnac affair.

Life and career

Gleize was born on 2 April 1946 in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. He studied at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and in 1981 received a doctorate in literature from the University of Provence for a thesis on the history of French poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries, supervised by Raymond Jean.

He taught French literature at the University of Provence, in Aix-en-Provence, before joining the literature department of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he directed the Centre for Poetic Studies from 1999 to 2009; he later became emeritus professor of modern and contemporary literature there.

His first books were works of criticism: a study of Francis Ponge (1981) and Poésie et figuration (1983). The 2024 collective volume Jean-Marie Gleize, littéralement presents the latter as the starting point of a trajectory leading from Lamartine to Denis Roche by way of Ponge and Rimbaud, towards "post-poetry" and critical creation. His book Simplification lyrique (1987) proposed the concept of "lyrical simplification" (), and in the 1990s he elaborated ("nudity") and as terms of poetic and artistic analysis, which he put into practice in his own writing from Léman (1990) onwards. That book opened a "literalist" cycle that he continued for the rest of his career. In 1990 he founded the journal Nioques, in which he pursued experiments in realistic writing in the line of the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Most of his critical and literary work appeared in the "Fiction & Cie" series at Éditions du Seuil. Alongside his books on Ponge, he published a study of the poetry of Anne-Marie Albiach (Le Théâtre du poème, 1995) and, in 2019, Denis Roche: éloge de la véhémence. Several of his texts appeared in illustrated and bibliophile editions produced with artists including Patrick Sainton, Agathe Larpent and Henri Maccheroni.

His last book was T.R.N.C.. He lived in Volx, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, where he died on 12 March 2026, aged 79.

The Tarnac books

Gleize wrote two books about the Tarnac affair, the case opened in 2008 after acts of sabotage against railway lines and the arrest of Julien Coupat and others accused of criminal conspiracy. Tarnac appeared in 2009 and Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (Tarnac, a preparatory act) was published by Seuil in 2011. The later book, dedicated to Coupat "and his comrades", assembles documents, chronologies, photographs and commentary in seventeen chapters, and asks how a revolutionary event can be written.

Poetics

Gleize's poetics centres on ("literality"), a term he developed in books including A noir: poésie et littéralité (1992), Le Principe de nudité intégrale (1995) and Littéralité (2015). Taking up Rimbaud's phrase "" ("literally, and in every sense"), he argued for writing held to the literal rather than the figurative pole of language, freeing it from what he described as its compulsion towards analogy and metaphor.

His books are typically short and fragmentary, built from what he and his commentators call : notes, quotations and documentary material, heterogeneous texts, intertextual borrowings that can approach appropriation, and references to photography and film. Christophe Wall-Romana has discussed this practice as "dispositif-writing", in which the poem works as an arrangement of materials rather than as a lyrical utterance.

He set out aspects of the literalist position in journal articles including "La poésie morte ou vive" (1991) and "L'un et l'autre" (2000).

Reception

The first collective volume devoted to his work, Jean-Marie Gleize, littéralement, edited by Romain Benini and Laure Michel, appeared in 2024. Its essays examine his writing and its consequences for literary study, and present his work as an attempt to detach literature from the analogies and images carried by dominant discourses, holding literature "outside itself". Laure Michel's book À la lettre (2024) studies his work alongside that of the poet Emmanuel Hocquard.

His work reached English-language readers through anthologies of contemporary French poetry. In Writing the Real (2016), edited by Nina Parish and Emma Wagstaff and published by Enitharmon Press, extracts from his book Tarnac appeared in English translation by Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang and Bonnie Roy. The anthology presents the "refracted politics of post-poetry" in his work and that of Christophe Tarkos.

Selected works

A selection of his books:

External links

• Jean-Marie Gleize at Éditions du Seuil