Jean-Marie Gleize

Life & Legacy

Jean-Marie Gleize (2 April 1946 – 12 March 2026) was a French poet, essayist and literary critic who taught French literature at the University of Provence and then at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he directed the Centre for Poetic Studies (Centre d'études poétiques) from 1999 to 2009, and he edited the journal Nioques, which he founded in 1990. He died at Volx, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, aged 79.
His writing is associated with "post-poetry" and with littéralité ("literality"), a poetics that he developed from the 1990s in opposition to metaphor, imagery and representation. He put it into practice in his own books from Léman (1990) onwards, most of which appeared in the "Fiction & Cie" series at Éditions du Seuil, and he wrote critical studies of Francis Ponge and the poet Denis Roche. Two of his books, Tarnac (2009) and Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (2011), responded to the Tarnac affair.