“Avec tous les mots à la fois.” Exploring the poetics of Christophe Tarkos
by CARLOS G. CAJARAVILLE
In the dense fabric of poetic modernity, Christophe Tarkos (1963-2004) emerges as a singular, defiant voice. Tarkos is not particularly significant as the author of poetry books per se, but rather for having made his performance an integral part of poetic substance. His poems would not be the same without his voice and performance. One might even say, quite literally, that Tarkos was the poem.
This disintegration of the poetic subject begins not with the poem, but with the poet himself: “Je suis né en 1963. Je n’existe pas. Je fabrique des poèmes.” This is how he presented himself on the Éditions P.O.L website. From this inaugural negation, Tarkos is less a poet than a suffering incarnation of the very substance of language — a language that coagulates in the throat like a spasm of flesh struggling to find utterance. This post explores how Christophe Tarkos radically redefines poetry performance as an act of linguistic failure — a bodily and vocal struggle that refuses traditional forms of poetic expression in favor of what he calls “pâte-mot.”
The struggle between presence and disappearance is also evident in Tarkos’s visual presence. In Olivier Roller’s portraits his gaze is adrift, even when directed towards the camera. At times, his eyes are closed, his hand pressed gently against his throat, as if striving to contain the words within him — as if the very act of speech were itself a wound. He turns to the lens in a pose at once strained and dislocated. Every line of the poet’s face seems charged with a deep unrest. Beyond the studied arrangement of the body, one senses the inarticulate throb of pain… “Cela ne veut pas s’arrêter,” (“It doesn’t want to stop”) he writes in his ironic “Manifeste chou” — “Cela continue. C’est incroyable. Ça va durer. Ça peut durer encore comme ça,” (Tarkos, Écrits, 44) “It goes on. It’s incredible. It will last. It could go on like this for even longer”. Does this not recall the ending of The Unnamable by Beckett? “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Beckett, 407)
Only from an anguish that exceeds the bounds of literary artifice can such declarations be made with so much force and poetic fury. The tone, the gestures, the unyielding breathlessness, all echo the same airlessness that haunts the worlds of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Gherasim Luca and the aforementioned Beckett. But is it lived experience itself that is at stake, or the word, or poetry itself? Everything seems to merge inevitably, without any clear boundary. In this sense, Tarkos transforms language into “pâte-mot”, that “substance of words sticky enough to want to mean” (“la substance de mots assez englués pour vouloir dire”), yet barely able to stammer forth (Tarkos, Signe, 32).
“il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas. Dans l’utilisation faite du mot poésie, dans l’utilisation qui est faite du mot. Ce n’est pas possible. Il faut faire quelque chose. On se retrouve dans n’importe quoi, la divagation, on ne sait plus où on met les pieds, il y a tout et rien, personne ne sait plus ce qu’il fait, ça ne veut plus rien dire.” (Tarkos, Écrits, 43)
(There is something wrong. In the way the word poetry is used, in the way the word itself is used. It’s not acceptable. Something must be done. We end up in complete confusion, in rambling; we no longer know where we’re standing—there is everything and nothing, no one knows what they’re doing anymore, it no longer means anything.)
Within Tarkos’s work, the fragility of speech manifests itself as a tangible, almost organic substance, where each word is born already bound to failure. This amorphous paste, so difficult to articulate, slides through his poems as a desperate echo of the ceaseless struggle between the desire to communicate and the impossibility of doing so fully. The “expressivité du texte” — that expressiveness which both ironizes and celebrates — is revealed as a heroic act of resistance: each impression is a rending, a wound that will not heal.
Beneath that damaged heart beats the impudence of a mischievous, sardonic, sharp-tongued child. This becomes evident in his spoken performances. Consider, for example, his 1993 rendition of “Le texte est expressif.” Four visceral cries heighten the surrounding silences. Suddenly, Tarkos swallows, lowers his voice, and assumes the manner of a circumspect intellectual. He speaks as though conveying something of profound significance. More than a lecture or a sermon, he resembles an imperious schoolmaster dictating to his pupils. He speaks slowly, refining his diction, pausing deliberately, exaggerating articulation and stress. Short, simple sentences are set apart by deep pauses, as if time were needed for the audience to reflect and absorb the discourse. These plain statements gradually enter into a combinatory play, introducing new details — subtle, almost imperceptible — slight variations that give rise to a fresh assertion, a perspective opened from a different angle; one which, of course, exists only to be undone and reinitiated from yet another position:
“Le texte est expressif, il tient. L’expressivité du texte est ample, il exprime, il impressionne, il intensifie, il surprend, il extrait. Il es ten expressions, il est expressif, il est expressément, il est ample et beau. Le texte en expression est expressif et vrai, est Surprenant, est intéressant, compréhensif, simple, ample, bon, fin tient. Le texte expressif, le texte exprime, le texte est exquis, le text este vrai” (Tarkos, Écrits, 232)
(The text is expressive, it holds. The expressivity of the text is ample: it expresses, it impresses, it intensifies, it surprises, it extracts. It is in expressions, it is expressive, it is expressly, it is ample and beautiful. The text in expression is expressive and true, is surprising, is interesting, understanding, simple, ample, good, fine — it holds. The expressive text, the text expresses, the text is exquisite, the text is true.)
The text is true…of course! Beneath the anaphoric rhythm, the redundancy, and the pompous, exaggerated performance laced with layers of irony, something remarkably simple is asserted: the text is expressive, surprising, expansive — and it holds precisely through a fundamental dissonance between the theatricality of his voice and expression and the apparent simplicity of the message conveyed by the text itself. Irony, like high comedy, was not born to be fair, but rather to be revealing: the text is true.
But let’s imagine, for a moment, that all we possess is Tarkos’s printed text. Would we not, to a great extent, interpret it as an exercise in style and rhetoric, tinged with a trace of underlying irony? Tarkos’s performance leaves no room for doubt: the poet’s interpretation forms an integral part of the poem’s very structure. Voice, intonation, diction, and silence are formal elements that shape the meaning of the poetic text. The poem attains its full significance only in performance.1
This tension between assertion and collapse continues across Tarkos’s audio recordings. In track 4 of Expressif, dedicated to the clouds (Tarkos, Expressif) his childlike voice lists the banality of clouds: “ils se laissent aller, ils voguent.” Innocence and despair entwine in a circular movement, where repetition is not mere redundancy, but a ritual to conjure away the void. This insistence upon fragility deepens in “Sinusite,” (Track 7) where his phonetic play degrades the meaning of the word until it becomes a moan, a whisper of a meaning that refuses entirely to die. “Trouver le mot juste,” Tarkos says, “il existe des mots pour le dire.” Yet this promise of clarity is fleeting: the poem sinks once more into the blind night of sound, into a toothless tongue that, nevertheless, obstinately strives to articulate its own failure.
As we have seen, even humor resists comfort: it is a grimace born of anguish. “J’ai un problème” (Track 10) stages tragedy with cruel comedy: a voice entangled in its own “pâte,” stumbling, stammering its impotence before the laughter of an audience that fails to recognize itself in the distorted reflection. As Tarkos reminds us: “le mot n’est pas le référenceur.” (Tarkos, Signe, 36) Words no longer represent anything; they float alone, staggering within the void of their own meaninglessness. But is this void not, rather, a radical affirmation? In “Le petit bidon,” (Track 3) Tarkos celebrates the futile existence of an unremarkable object: “On a de la chance d’avoir un petit bidon posé sur la table. Merci le petit bidon.” There is no metaphor, no sublimation: the bidon is simply a bidon, and within that desperate tautology lies a form of grace.
So Tarkos’s “pâte-mot” embodies the image of a language defeated, yet still faintly vibrant — that, against all logic, continues to breathe. There is no lesson to be drawn from Christophe Tarkos’s poems, no consoling message hidden within its folds. Rather, through the broken breath of his performances, through the stubborn weight of his “pâte-mot” clinging to the throat, he gives form to the visceral persistence of speech itself. It is not the redemption of language that resonates in his voice, but the bare act of survival within its ruin — the obstinate murmuring from the wound, the frail reminder, with each fractured utterance, that something, somehow, still resists the pull of silence.
References
Tarkos, Christophe. Le Signe =. P.O.L, 1999.
Tarkos, Christophe. Expressif, le Petit Bidon. Éditions Cactus, 2001.
Tarkos, Christophe. Écrits Poétiques. P.O.L, 2008.
Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Translated by Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles, Grove Press, 2009.
- The audio poems are available here: https://manufacture-des-cactees.bandcamp.com/album/expressif-le-petit-bidon ↩︎
Author Bio:
Carlos Gutiérrez Cajaraville is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Valladolid (Spain), where he oversees courses on Music and Poetry and The Musical Expression of the Affects. His research focuses on unraveling alternative modes of listening that challenge normative Western paradigms, as well as elucidating the various conceptions that imagination has held throughout history, exploring the diverse relationships that emerge between music, sound, poetry, and thought in different contexts.