Rhyme and Life
The three texts of this section are chapters from the essay La rime et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2006 [1989]). Meschonnic combines general reflections on poetics with detailed analyses of poets. He focuses on the relationship of language and poetics to life. Meschonnic identifies life with poetry since in poetry everything becomes life through language and at the same time language becomes life. The poem, for Meschonnic, is not necessarily the literary form but more generally an activity, a process of transformation. For him, orality is not part of the duality of oral and written. He constructs a tripartite constellation of the written, the spoken and the oral. Meschonnic defines the oral as the mode of signifying characterised by a primacy of rhythm and prosody in the movement of sense. Meschonnic draws a connection to the subject and criticises the psychoanalytical reduction of subject and language.