I found the following in Pierre Joris's A Nomad Poetics:

6. BAROCCO: We will write in foreign languages (real or made-up ones) in order to come to the realization that all languages are foreigh. And those that are not are uninteresting in their self-reflecting egoism. All live languages are creolized by what Edouard Glissant has called the chaos-world. The first need thus is to have done with the prison-house of the mother ongue, i.e., why should one have to write in the mummy/daddy language, why should that oedipal choice be the only possible or legitimate one, why should it not be my own choice, that moment of one's discovery of the other, that moment when it is our body/mind that speaks and not that of our progenitors. The mother tongue will become the lover's tongue, the other's tongue. A nomadic language of affects, of free lines of erotic flight, that break the triangular (the strongest of shapes, as Bucky Fuller has shown us) strictures of the Freudian scène de famille and of its sociopolitical macroprojection, the nation-state.

The night I met Adam Zagajewski, he told me I should write more in French (I being an arrogant and snotty very young poet at the time, freshly off the plane, replied that I was more interested in writing poetry in many languages; I was also starstruck that night, having seen Adam on French television 2 years before). Somewhere in his book A Defense of Ardor, Adam also writes that irony (& by extension language experiments) is a fine tool to punch holes into the walls of language, but that ultimately, if you punch too many holes, there is no language left. One's language, Adam writes, is something precious that should be preserved and revered.

We have two different positions about language and poetry, and it is evident that I veer more toward Joris's position (even though, I have nothing but respect for Adam), since I write mostly in not-French. I feel that Adam's position is somewhat problematic. Why should there be any prescription about the language a poem is written in? And could this be a more "liberal" version of the SoQ's imperative (oh, I hate this label) that a poem should be written in a "natural language"?

I am not quite sure whether Adam really likes Paul Celan or not. In DoA, Adam admits that Celan might be too experimental for him, but that can be forgiven because of his tragic life. Once again, we are tying one's poetry with their biography, which could excuse Adam's attitude toward language-in-poetry. Adam comes from a time when Polish was under assault from Soviet authorities (again, from DoA and from Two Cities). And we see the current crop of Polish poets much more willing to experiment.

But I still don't think that history should determine the language we write in (which it does anyway) and whether one should or should not experiment. For one, one cannot completely abandon their mother tongue. Heidegger talks about a Erdeverbindung somewhere in his collection of essays Holzwege. Even if I am writing in English, my writing is still inflected by French, the same way that Celan's German is inflected by Yiddish. This is just an excuse for me to quote my favorite Celan:

Nah, im Aortenbogen,
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.

Mutter Rahel weint nicht mehr.
Rübergetragen
alles Geweinte.

Still, in den Kranzarterien,
unumschnürt:
Ziw, jenes Licht.

Which is also an excuse for me to post gratuitously an image to Paul Celan (Jessica! I changed my mind, I want to be Paul Celan when I grow up).

But actually, in spite of all my gratuitousness, Celan poses the problem of the mother tongue, he being a Rumanian whose mother's tongue was German. And Joris and I are both from Strasbourg, in a region that has always been somewhat trilingual (Alsatian, French, German). Moreover, Joris has lived most of his adolescence in a country (Luxembourg) that has three official languages (Luxembourgian, German, French), while I ... well, let's not even get there.

Somewhere in here, I think I wanted to talk about Levinas and my usual attempts to articulate some form of poetics around him the way Krzysztof Ziarek has done with Celan in his book Inflected Language.

But then I started babbling, getting distracted and well, there was Celan and how can you not love Paul Celan?