Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the content calendar apparently reads "write everything, in every language, across every register of human experience — then publish."
Mara: That's actually a fair description. Today's episode covers work by Adam Donaldson Powell — poems in French spanning abandonment, insomnia, identity, satire, and elegy, along with prose poems and lyric sequences that push into some genuinely uncomfortable territory.
Pip: Let's start with the French poems themselves and what they're actually doing.
Abandon, Insomnia, and the Interior Fire
Mara: The post collects a wide range of French-language poems, and the organizing question across them is what it means to stay present inside a body or a mind that keeps slipping away — through illness, sleeplessness, or the sheer weight of consciousness.
Pip: The poem "Sois ici maintenant" puts that plainly — a speaker living with chronic pain who finds escape not through relief but through mental flight. The poem names that escape as its own kind of glory.
Mara: The lines read: "Voilà ma gloire : non pas être intact, mais pouvoir encore voyager au-delà de la rupture." So the claim isn't wholeness — it's the capacity to move beyond the break.
Pip: Not restoration. Transit. That reframes what survival actually means.
Mara: The "Sommeil / Non-sommeil" sequence extends that into five movements on insomnia and uncontrolled sleep. One section describes the mind's attempt to empty itself backfiring: "j'essaie de vider mon esprit mais il se remplit d'instructions sur la façon de le vider." The joke is also the diagnosis.
Pip: Five movements on not sleeping — that's either very dedicated craft or the most productive insomnia on record.
Mara: The sequence earns it. "Voyage nocturne" and "Réinitialiser la nuit" close that arc by moving from nightmare panic toward a willed, careful descent — "Non traîné, mais porté."
Pip: The haiku sequence "Abandon" opens the post with four tight images — love, self, life, death — each a single surrender. Small forms, enormous territory.
Mara: "Le Buffet des Mots" shifts register entirely into a satirical alexandrine meditation on language as a market, where words carry price tags, danger labels, and moral consequences. Every phrase paid for in consequences, not coin.
Pip: Then the post turns inward. "Quand son mieux n'est jamais suffisant" is a prose poem about the gap between someone's maximum effort and what the other person actually needed.
Mara: It doesn't resolve that gap. It asks instead: "l'un est-il prêt à apprendre ? l'autre est-il prêt à expliquer sans détruire ?" Whether naming the gap is justice or cruelty stays open.
Pip: Satire gets its full turn too. "La grande victoire" runs a Voltairean mock-elegy on wealth as the only surviving metric of worth — the morality at the end instructs the reader to hoard and deceive, because the richest corpse wins.
Mara: "Le Secret de Polichinelle" works the same vein as a rondeau — a tyrant in a sweating room, everyone performing loyalty while privately praying for his fall. The form mirrors the subject: circular, grinding, never arriving at release.
Pip: Paris gets its own extended treatment. "dirty talk — verlan (paris)" and "Imagine (Paris Verlan)" build a city portrait in street French — scooters, cages, luxury windows.
Mara: The line that lands hardest is that the difference between a damp studio in Saint-Denis and a seven-million-euro duplex is that they "peuvent enfermer un cœur exactement pareil."
Pip: "PUTAIN" takes the post somewhere rawer — a Tahitian dramatic monologue confronting colonial damage, nuclear testing, and cultural erosion in Polynésie française. Deliberately uncomfortable.
Mara: "une apologie de l'identité" is the post's most formally ambitious prose poem — a long, recursive self-examination of desire structured around the speaker's attraction to inaccessibility, named openly as identity rather than pathology.
Pip: "Épitaphe" asks to be measured not by work or argument but by something quieter.
Mara: "la gravité tranquille des mains tenues sans témoin" — the quiet weight of hands held without a witness. It's the post's most concentrated ethical statement.
Pip: "L'épopée du touriste à Paris" is a five-part comic sequence — bad French, existential croissant philosophy, a phone number on the bill. The lightest thing in the post, and it does not apologize for that.
Mara: "au fil des années" is the autobiographical spine — a long poem tracing a life from childhood through multilingualism and illness to a place where "la poésie n'est plus quelque chose que je fais. Elle n'est plus une fuite… Ma poésie est désormais ce que je suis."
Pip: "Et si je m'attardais" closes in seventeenth-century French — a speaker who has survived near-death multiple times, naming the dead in evening prayer, fearing the morning that ends the dream where they still exist.
Mara: The through-line across all of it: presence, rupture, and what survives the crossing between them.
Pip: From haiku to alexandrine to verlan to old French — the range is the argument.
Mara: The forms keep changing because the territory keeps shifting — illness, satire, elegy, colonial history, the city, the self.
Pip: All charting the same interior geography. Next time, we'll see where that range lands.
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