The Poetry of Life

True poetry is not what we manufacture but what emerges, despite ourselves, from the naked truth of existence. Between raw art and aesthetic artifice, a reflection on what truly moves us.

The omnipresence of everyday poetry

Daily life overflows with poetic moments that escape any deliberate attempt at capture. A ray of sunlight that suddenly transforms the city, mountain, or sea into a living tableau; a child who, in their serious learning of language, creates unexpected sentences by confusing words, thus revealing new associations of meaning; a group of tourists whose clumsy movements and amazed gazes make us rediscover our own environment—all these moments constitute the poetic fabric of our existence. Beyond easy mockery, these moments reflect back to us an essential human truth.

This intrinsic poetry of the everyday aligns with what Jean-Pierre Siméon affirmed: « Poetry will save the world. » (2016) Not the poetry of dusty collections, but that which pulses in reality, what Rimbaud called « real life ». Our capacity to receive this poetry, our curiosity to taste its flavor in the intimacy of our consciousness, perhaps constitutes the very essence of what living means. It is in this openness, in this availability to wonder, that the grandeur of human existence resides.

As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space (1957), « Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. » But I would go further: poetry is the destiny of life itself when it allows itself to be perceived in its nakedness, without makeup or artifice. It is this poetry that saves us from indifference and habit, that restores to the world its original freshness.

I refer to the definition of poetry by poet Yves Bonnefoy, in my film What is poetry ?, here is what he says, in 2013:

What is poetry, at its deepest level?

“The radical questioning of all systems of representation of the world or existence, because as systems, precisely, these thoughts close in on networks of concepts, while these are abstractions that substitute simple schemes for really existing beings, and lose sight, therefore, of what is nevertheless essential: namely that, each of us, we will live only for a time and will live only once. It is in this field of our existences, under the sign of this essential finitude, that we must understand life and attempt to give it meaning, and thought by concepts, however useful it may be for arranging our place on earth, must therefore be recognized as dangerous, which poetry knows how to see, and undertakes to teach. Through rhythms that restore to words powers that their reduction to purely conceptual meaning deprives them of, it delivers speech from this situation of exile, it allows being in the world, or at least knowing that one is not really there, a lucidity already beneficial.”

The paradox of voluntary creation

Faced with this spontaneous poetry of life, what should we think of the approach of those who “decide to make poetry”? How often have I felt that profound boredom in front of creations that seek the right words, the right rhymes, the right emotion, but that ring false! This poetry is not a poetry of life; it is poetry for itself, narcissistic, listening to itself speak or watching itself paint. It produces the opposite effect of what it claims to accomplish: instead of opening onto the world, it distances us from it.

This paradox reminds me of the distinction Heidegger established between authentic artwork, which « opens a world », and simple aesthetic production. The true work does not seek to please or correspond to pre-established criteria; it springs from an interior necessity, from an urgency to speak that transcends any will to “make beautiful.” Aestheticism then becomes a mask, a protection against the vulnerability that true poetic expression implies. For true poetry exposes us, lays us bare. It is not comfortable; it is revelation, sometimes brutal, of what we are. This is why so many professional artists take refuge in technique, in form, thus avoiding confrontation with this disturbing truth.

I proposed in my screenwriting guide “Creating, thinking, writing screenplays today” a concrete method to understand and put into practice this “truth,” which may seem like a not very concrete concept: The « truth » of the screenplay.

The revealing case of social networks: between authenticity and artifice

I think of a young woman who has a TikTok channel. At twenty-five years old, with fifteen suicide attempts and twenty-one psychiatric hospitalizations in her existential baggage, she shares her life from her hospital room with an online community. Her approach is of overwhelming sincerity. When she simply tells her life, her difficulties, her traumas, without complacency but with disarming honesty, she creates connection—with others and with herself. Her life, sublimated by simple narrative, becomes pure poetry, life force against the powers of death that torment her.

But here is the paradox that strikes me every time: as soon as she begins to recite a poem she has consciously written and constructed, I feel profound boredom and move on to the next video. How can the same person be so captivating in one moment and so boring the next? It is because in the first case, she is traversed by her truth; in the second, she tries to capture it, to domesticate it. She is a poet when she doesn’t know it, when she simply lets what is be.

This young woman perfectly embodies what Jean Dubuffet called art brut: a creation that springs from interior necessity rather than artistic intention. Dubuffet wrote in 1967: « Art does not come to sleep in the beds we have made for it. » This raw authenticity, unmediated by aesthetic conventions, directly touches our common humanity. It reminds us that poetry is not a matter of technical mastery but of existential truth.

Raw art and the vital necessity of expression

The authentic poetic requirement, when one chooses to transmit something to others, is never the requirement of a preconceived form but that of a subject that imposes itself. It is a vital, imperious necessity, which can certainly intersect with an aesthetic project, but whose aesthetics invents itself organically through the very necessity of being transmitted. Raw art shows us this forcefully: these creators who have never learned the “rules” often produce works of incomparable expressive power.

Children, in their unconscious poetry, touch us for the same reason. Pablo Picasso, who was a monster, but also a very great artist, didn’t he say in 1946: « It took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child »? This spontaneity, this absence of calculation, this direct connection between interiority and expression—this is what those who professionalize often lose. Paradoxically, those who have the most obstacles to finding their poetry are precisely those who wish to be professionals at it. The very idea of becoming a “professional poet” becomes the main obstacle to authentic poetic realization.

Having taught extensively in art schools, film schools, and universities, I have been able to observe this phenomenon closely. How many students arrive with an inner flame that gradually finds itself extinguished under the weight of references, techniques, theories! The artistic project then becomes a sophisticated mask to avoid confrontation with the poetry of life, with one’s own truth. It is a fear of being alive that disguises itself as artistic ambition, a simulacrum that replaces authenticity.

Social networks as new space for raw art

Social networks today constitute a vast space for raw art, a territory where creation still partially escapes the traditional mediators of the art world. We observe phenomenal audience successes of people who are not “art professionals” but who, nevertheless, create art much more alive than many certified artists. Viewers are not mistaken: they are passionate about this raw authenticity, these unfiltered expressions of human experience.

These platforms thus become spaces for taste formation, and create a new requirement: that of the poetry of life rather than that of aesthetic criteria transmitted by what Bourdieu called the “little masters” who believe they master creation. This democratization of artistic expression reveals a fundamental truth: the public seeks above all authenticity, human connection, naked truth rather than learned artifice.

Marina Abramović, in her performances where she puts her body and vulnerability at stake, has understood this requirement: “The artist must be present.” This presence is not a technique one learns; it is a risk one takes, that of showing oneself as one is, with one’s flaws, contradictions, imperfect beauty. Social network creators who touch millions of people or a few dozen have understood this intuitively: they do not perform art, they publicly live their truth. It is not about narcissism, contrary to what we believe, because someone who only looks at themselves is, precisely, uninteresting to watch.

Toward a reinvented poetry of life

We must move beyond aestheticism to invent and reinvent the poetry of life in our daily gestures. This truth that always surpasses us, that always escapes us, asks not that we capture it but that we let ourselves be traversed by it. It is in this traversal, in this permeability to what exceeds us, that lies the possibility of mutual enrichment of potentially immense proportions.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet (1929): « Works of art are of infinite solitude; nothing is worse than criticism for approaching them. Only love can grasp them, keep them, be just toward them. » This love that Rilke speaks of is perhaps also the openness to the poetry of life, this capacity to recognize the sublime in the ordinary, the universal in the particular, the eternal in the ephemeral.

The true poetic revolution of our era will not come from academies or literary cenacles, but from this collective recognition that poetry is not a literary genre but a way of being in the world. It is in the gaze of the child who discovers, in the raw testimony of one who survives, in the daily gesture transfigured by attention. It is this poetry that, as Siméon intuited, could well save the world, not by aestheticizing it, but by revealing it in its naked truth, terrible and magnificent at once.