François Luong
Eleven Poets From Québec

I am not from Québec. I am not even remotely Canadian.

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2008: I am invited to have dinner with a famous Canadian poet in 2008. He is well known for having written a book on pataphysics and Alfred Jarry. Curious about his interest with French things, I ask him about Québec. To my surprise, he doesn't know anything.

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From the "Charter of the French Language of Québec":

Every person has a right to have the civil administration, the health services and social services, the public utility enterprises, the professional corporations, the associations of employees and all enterprises doing business in Quebec communicate with him in French.

The Charter is a product of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and of the Trudeau government in the 1970s, addressing the various socio-economical fractures of Québec. Even though Québec has been a historically a French-speaking province of Canada, until the 1960s, its economy was driven by Anglophones. Even today, in Montréal, the more affluent neighborhoods, like Westmont, are Anglophone.

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From an email to Angela Carr:

I want to explore how some choose to negotiate this bilingual space. Or not. How part of it is Francophone, but not necessarilyattached to any French tradition after 1960. How an economy of poetic traditions may or may not occur (between Québécois and metropolitan French; English, with the US very close by). But also the other groups that François, Chantal and you showed me during my visit, the Scots-Irish of Verdun, the Italians of Meyerland.

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2010: I arrive for the first time in Montréal, to visit François Turcot, Chantal Neveu, Daniel Canty and Angela Carr. I also meet Oana Avasilichioaei, Pascal Dufaux (an artist) and another writer whose name I cannot remember. The customs agent keeps switching between English and French with much less effort than I do.

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When referring to Canadian poetry in the U.S., most people mean "Anglophone poetry."

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Since the 1960s, Québécois poets do nothing like their continental counterparts. They are not interested in a purity of language (see the recent Smiroubaud/Prigent polemic). There is a greater acceptance and consciousness of foreign linguistic elements. What Deleuze and Guattari would call a "minor literature." Some do speak and write in English, others don't, but are conscious of those foreign influences and migrations (see François Turcot's Cette maison n'est pas la mienne).

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This is not meant to be an authoritative gallery of poets from Québec. As a matter of fact, the poets presented here all live in Montréal.