Traversées de la parole dans Panneaux-Réclame de Michèle Lalonde

Poetry, more than any other literary genre, has been both celebrated as the purest expression of human feeling and thought, and at the same time banished from the social and political realms. This article argues that works written from a minoritarian perspective intensely manifest the ways in which poetry and politics can mutually traverse each other. The heritage of domination and diglossia confronting many Francophone authors has resulted in countless works that are insistently preoccupied with the status of language and literature's sociopolitical powers. Here, I examine Panneaux-réclame, the powerful forgotten work of québécoise poet Michèle Lalonde. Written for the 1970 Nuit de la poésie, a live anthology of poetry of the Quiet Revolution, Lalonde's poem represents less a commitment to a party line, or the positive expression of a political message or ideological conviction, but rather an engagement with and within language, a critical dialogue with politics exposing the ways in which language can sustain or subvert an oppressive order.