Details are decisive in the reception of a poem. The materiality of the book is central, and plays a primordial role in reading. It is therefore important to examine the successive operations that punctuate the layout, production and publication of a collection of poems. How are these operations taken into account in the field of contemporary publishing? How do they need to be deployed to end up in a volume of poetry?
Through the study of a few concrete cases, by questioning the specificities of the layout of the poetic genre, by carefully considering certain editorial ideas and typographic choices, this article endeavours to detail all the dimensions of the book in order to better understand them. It opens up avenues of reflection, defends an editorial practice that is attentive to the notion of displacement and proposes to “deduce an image from the stanza”.
A few examples taken from the catalogue of the ISTI MIRANT STELLA publishing house will thus make it possible to sketch out a theory and to establish “a path for the hand and for the eye”—in other words, to present a possible way of publishing contemporary poetry.