Prisme-Partition. Réfractions de l’image et configurations de la voix dans un poème visuel

“Quartet/Quatuor” is an experiment in voice and image. The English poem by Mary Shaw, its translation by the poet herself, Francois Cornilliat, Michael Bishop, and Christopher Elson, along with Shaw's reflection upon her own text as both a prism (a differenciator of colours, possible visibilities) and a score (a painstaking visual organization, shareable, musical and singing) bring to the fore a series of fundamental issues for contemporary poetics. We find in this text the confrontation of the space of the page and the interior voice as well as that of the vertical and horizontal axes of a poetry which is to a certain extent concrete with the psychological and dramatic elements of a (non) dialogue among (at least) four figures of an everyday and yet marvelous story of encounter and discovery.