Métail, Michèle

Michèle Métail © L. Roquin

Michèle Metail, born in Paris in 1950, is a writer, artist, French sinologist and translator from Chinese. Her work is dedicated to the dialogue between different forms of artistic expression. Text and image, performance and installation meet in her works. Metail was a member of the poetry group Oulipo until 1998, working there with Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. Later she left the group. Many of her texts are not available in print, but only in “oral publication.” This process of transmission is considered to be the creative final stage of writing in her eyes. In this sense, the finished text is a score for her. Later, however, she published books that artfully play with genres (poetry collections, photography books, studies, etc.), most recently Phantome Phantome (Edition Korrespondenzen 2020).

Festival Content

2022 BERLIN POETRY LECTURE – Michèle Métail: The Between Language

Michèle Metail (born in Paris in 1950) will trace the history of her own work in 17 chapters: from the “infinite poem,” beginning with a continually-renewing chain of composites, to the “purely oral publications,” which define a text as a “tossing of the word into space,” to the “topographical poems” and the multipart “gigantextes.”

Métail, Michèle