Julien Blaine

The fact that Julien Blaine's poetry can be described as semeiotic, experimental, material, or visual has little importance, when all is said and done, in our understanding of his plentiful work. Since the 1960s, the artist has been continually incarnating (boning) language. Through performance, and by way of publishing, he focuses on delivering the physical quality of the poem. So there is something physical in this work, something to do with mass and the organic. It is a body falling down the stairs of Saint-Charles train station in Marseille (Chute-chut!); a tongue sticking out, hanging, trembling, and declaiming (La langue n'a point d'os). Blaine's poetry is the body of the word as much as the word of the body.
As the founder of the magazine Robho (1967) and DOC(K)S (1976), the artist is also stepping up his publishing experiments. As a pivotal figure in an international network of poets, he is also the go-between for numerous events directing people he calls ambassadors. Because this is what we believe we understand through his work, as through his life: poetry is politics (and vice versa) and Julien Blaine is a committed man. Translated by Simon Pleasance