| Sumario: | Patrick Chamoiseau's inter-generational fascination with the writing of Saint-John Perse (SJP) is sustained, intense, sentient, and highly generative. The focus on SJP amplifies the connective timbre of Chamoiseau's own writing, confirming the relation to the "pays natal" and to the "tout-monde" as central to both writers' poetics. Five moves constitute the high points of this particular realization of a Glissantian "poetics of Relation": the SJP intertext in Chamoiseau's childhood memoirs and fiction; the two-hander construction of SJP's poetic persona in Lettres créoles (1991); the sentimenthèque disseminated across Écrire en pays dominé (1997); and, most crucially, the "Méditations à Saint-John Perse", an oral presentation from 1995 which was eventually integrated into Chamoiseau's 2013 book-length account of his "Magnetic Liaisons" with Césaire, Saint-John Perse and Glissant. The Méditations articulate a critique of criticism in favor of a demiurgic poetics of self-reflexive magnification and esteem even as they perform a dance of ethno-social and intergenerational convergence.
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