FREN 1205 · The Lyric

Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum

1. Module 5 ○ Open

   The Lyric

   Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum

   The question

   French has one of the great lyric traditions — Villon, Ronsard, Racine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Valéry, Senghor Simulacrum, Césaire. The forms are codified (the *alexandrin*, the sonnet, the *ode*), the music is precise, the diction is — until Rimbaud and after — held to a high register. How does a writer working in twenty-first-century French write a lyric poem that does not feel pastiche, that earns its line breaks and its concentration, that carries the inheritance without being crushed by it?

   Outcome

   The student can write a fourteen-line lyric in French — an unrhymed contemporary poem if they prefer, or a sonnet to formal specification — that earns its line breaks, holds register, and adds something the inherited tradition does not already say.

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   Practice scenarios

   Fourteen Lines

   Senghor Simulacrum asks you to write a fourteen-line lyric in French. You may choose: a sonnet with full formal observance (*alexandrins*, the rhyme scheme of your choice, alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes); or an unrhymed contemporary lyric (free metre, but the line must still earn its break). The subject is yours, but it must be something specific (not "love", not "death" — *the moment a friend told you something they had never told anyone* is specific; *grief* is not). You write the poem; Senghor Simulacrum reads it as a poet, asking on each line: does this line do work the line above did not, and is the diction held throughout?

   Your goals

   • Fourteen lines, no fewer, no more.
   • Either a sonnet with formal observance (*alexandrin*, rhyme scheme, alternation), or an unrhymed contemporary lyric where every line break is earned.
   • The subject specific enough that no other poem could have been written about it.
   • *Register littéraire* held throughout, with at most one deliberate register-intrusion that does work.
   • A revision pass: send a first draft, then a revised draft after Senghor Simulacrum's reading.

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