Through the Sandglass of Lucien Suel: A Portrait of Rust and Conscious History
Lucien Suel, the north-of-France-born poet, novelist, and publisher, remains a figure of strange alchemical presence in contemporary French letters—a sort of literary tramway conductor guiding the specter of the avant-garde through industrial graveyards and metaphysical peat bogs. Born in 1948 in Guarbecque, Pas-de-Calais, Suel has remained compellingly local, even provincial, but only in the manner of a root system whose tendrils have drunk deeply from Baudelaire, Whitman, and Artaud. Far from the Parisian salons and the glitter of academic approval, Suel has built a career on bricolage, mail-art, and the obsessive care of language’s compost pile. It is no exaggeration to say he has fashioned new loam from the discards of official culture.
Suel’s poetic methodology often involves Oulipian constraint married to working-class mysticism. His “livres pauvres” (poor books), often handwritten and produced in limited runs, act as both text and reliquary, sacred object and political whisper. He has worked with visual scores, budded sentences like fungal caps from suburban detritus, and performed his works in grimy installations and peasant barns alike. One of his most ambitious undertakings remains the concept of “texte anachronique,” in which the syntax, vocabulary, or even the very topology of the language is lifted out of time and repurposed as both artifact and oracle; here, Suel is not just a poet, but a palimpsestic cross between a rural shaman and a forensic archivist.
Of the many works that range across his corpus, it is his 2008 novel *Mort d’un jardinier* (Death of a Gardener) that best distills his voice into a single narrative flow. Told in a single, sinuous sentence—some 150 pages of uninterrupted thought, built thought by thought like a compost heap of syntax—the novel navigates the stream of consciousness of a dying gardener. The work is riddled with the epistemology of memory, the sacred profanity of flora, and the kind of daily eternity that characterizes great mystics. One moment near the end of the book feels emblematic of Suel’s method: “je me souviens d’un poème écrit avec de la bouse de vache sur le mur de la grange”^1 (“I remember a poem written with cow dung on the barn wall”). It is this tension—between the organic and the symbolic, the immediate and the eternal—that electrifies his oeuvre.
Indeed, Suel’s allegiance is clearly to a literature of the particular, the rusted, the refused. His long-running fanzine *The Nightshades* published translated and original work alongside poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Tom Raworth, forming in miniature a transatlantic lichenscape of the postmodern grotesque. In translating his spiritual kin—from William Blake to Jack Spicer—Suel adopted not merely their idioms but their metaphysical commitments. He, like them, seeks the razor-pitch between nonsense and ecstasy.
To understand Suel’s deeper philosophical project, however, one must approach his writings not just with the eye but with the ear tuned to the haptic rasp of time, what Walter Benjamin might have called the “aura” decaying into a network of signals.^2 Suel’s *poèmes express*—instant poems formed from fragments of magazines, advertisements, and other printed flotsam—restate this urgency. They are not parlor games, but desperate fragments reassembled in the teeth of entropy. One such poem reads:
> “l’amour est un disque / rayé sur l’épaule de Dieu / une soupape de / révolution grammaticale.”^3
Each line here jammed together like bones in a badly reconstructed fossil skeleton. And yet, Suel’s verbal misfirings produce alternate logics—grammatical revolutions—not merely semantic arrangements.
Let us suppose, then, a strange allegory: You are a gardener in Suel’s world, dying of an unnamed illness on a plot of land carved out of the old coalfields of Les Hauts-de-France. Around you are cabbages reeking of diesel, nettles whispering Baudelairean phrases, and in the sky—an ever-scribbling god who jots notes on the backs of packaging receipts. In your fading mind, you recite again Suel’s lines, this time from his homage to Spinoza, written on the back of a third-hand grocery bill:
> “Dieu ne sait rien / il s’infiltre dans le moisi / dans les vrilles de nos nerfs familiers.”^4
—God knows nothing, he seeps into the mold, into the tendrils of our familiar nerves.
Here, theology becomes biology. Epistemology blooms in mildew. Suel eschews metaphysical structure in favor of transverse emergence, a drift toward “dirty transcendence” where the sacred is figured not in glory but in filamentous decay. If Heidegger traced Being to the clearing of language, Suel traces it to the clutter of syntax, to the residue caked onto vowels like sediment.
Is it still useful to speak of Suel as a fringe writer? Fringe to what, exactly? If poetry is spirit channeled through form, then Suel’s work is not marginal—it is talismanic. We often mistake brilliance with polish; Suel’s brilliance is one of soil, rust, and spit. His poems, at first glance scrappy and erratic, are in fact hyper-considered artifacts of the everyday numinous. They ask the reader not to gaze up but to kneel down—to press ear to soil and listen.
And so, back to the gardener. You, now no longer imagining, but inhabiting your last days, lie murmuring lines dealing with rust, railways, onions. There is no closure, certainly no narrative arc. There is only a winding syntax and the smell of parsnips pulling loose from the wounded clay. In that last breath, Suel’s hand may press ink to Lidl receipt, scrawling with urgency:
> “chaque larme est une percussion / sur le tambour noir des jours.”^5
Each tear is a percussion on the black drum of days.
That is the rhythm Suel leaves us with—not story, not structure—but vibration, recurrence, entropy rearranged into pulse.
For those who pursue postmodernism not as style but as prayer, Suel serves as patron saint—and as beekeeper, and as soil-keeper. Far from the luminous heights of more sanitized literati, Lucien Suel offers art as fermentation, as error sublime, as memorial graffiti scrawled in dung and love on the walls of history’s grange.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, anachronism, phenomenology
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^1 Suel, Lucien. *Mort d’un jardinier*. La Table Ronde, 2008.
^2 Benjamin, Walter. *The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility*. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. Harvard University Press, 2008.
^3 Suel, Lucien. *Poèmes Express*, 2012, from his personal blog “Le tourneur de pages.”
^4 Suel, Lucien. “Hommage à Spinoza”, *Le Coin du Bois*, 2015.
^5 Suel, Lucien. Unpublished poem from the *Fragments Rouillés* notebook series, 2019.