A Java evening at the Maison de la Poésie to mark the publication of a comprehensive collection featuring over eighty writers and numerous documents.
In 1989, Jean-Michel Espitallier and Jacques Sivan (1955–2016), soon joined by Vannina Maestri, embarked on what they could not have imagined would be a long-running venture that would leave its mark on the history of contemporary poetry: Java would go on to publish 28 issues over a good fifteen years.
As Jean-Michel Espitallier mischievously states in ‘Après les avant-gardes’ (No. 16), this ‘organised chaos’ aims to ‘invent today the invention of the post-invention that lies within today’. A way of setting itself apart from the Tel quel and TXT years (1960–1990), whilst remaining firmly in the tradition of Dadaist détournement and the cut-up technique…