On Michel Houellebecq's Poetry

We're as surprised as writer Russell Williams that French novelist Michel Houellebecq has been chiseling away at poems since 1991. (Who knows, maybe even earlier.) But it's true, and as Williams so expertly informs us, "Before he blossomed into France’s most significant, and notorious, contemporary literary export since the days of Camus and Sartre, Houellebecq first made his name, in bookish circles at least, as a poet." Let's start there, from Los Angeles Review of Books:

As a student at agronomy college, when he was still known as Michel Thomas, he collaborated on a short-lived poetry revue, Karamazov. “Michel Houellebecq” was born in 1988, when he put his pseudonym to a selection of seven poems published by Michel Bulteau in his edgy poetry journal, the Nouvelle Revue de Paris (No. 4). The first poem in this, his first mature publication, sets the tone for the work he was to publish in the following years:

Our eyes entangle, interrogate in vain
The thickness of space
Whose fatal whiteness surrounds our hands
Like a halo of ice.

Themes of depressive isolation and the desperate search for meaning will come to dominate his writing over the next two decades.

Often presented as an alienated outsider, Houellebecq actually spent the 1990s as an active figure in the Parisian literary sphere, giving and attending readings and publishing in small-circulation revues, including the now-defunct Digraphe, Jungle, and Présages. 1991 was a landmark year for the young poet: he published his first volume of poems, La Poursuite du Bonheur (Éditions de la Différence); Rester Vivant, an inspirational “méthode” or survival guide for aspiring poets; an edited volume of the poems of Remy de Gourmont; and an essay exploring the work of H. P. Lovecraft, where he highlighted the “poésie” within the fantasy writer’s style. Although he has gradually come to be known as a novelist, following the critical success of Extension du domaine de la lutte, translated as Whatever (1994), and his breakthrough The Elementary Particles (1998), he has more or less consistently written poetry either alongside, or entwined in his (primarily prose) narratives. As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, the foremost French scholar of Houellebecq’s work argues, “Michel Houellebecq est poète avant tout [above all, Michel Houellebecq is a poet].” [1]

Read on at Los Angeles Review of Books.