The Garden – Semiosphere in the Ecopoetry of Jean Tortel

In: Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska. Sectio FF, Philologiae, Volume 41, Issue 2, p. 89-101

Abstract

In his latest collections, the poet Jean Tortel (1904–1993) manifests an ecosemiotic approach to space which avoids the naturalist pitfall (systemism, determinism, thought of a subject "surrounded" by nature). Perceived in the instability of its "limits", the representation of the garden-semiosphere dissolves in the experience of its transformations giving way to the ecophenomenal environment of the exercise of relations between living and non-living and their interactions. The body of Seeing is traversed by space, adjusted to its variations. The ecopoem is no longer itself a circumscribed space but a form of life open to otherness, to contact and to the possible renewal of cosmo-poetic enchantment.