I thought that all the questions relating to the poet were obsolete, but I was wrong. Jean-Michel Maulpoix is writing clever books about these dangerous notions. I have just written: Le Poete perplexe, Jose Corti (2002). He is also a poet himself, and a teacher at Nanterre University.

He's extremely close to Simone Weil's spirit when he writes that poetry is a form of attention. What is attention? Attention is expensive: I do pay attention. The reason why I have to pay attention is because attention isn't free. Attention is something rare and rarety makes the value.

I went to visit Simone Weil's confident, the very old blind priest Pere Perrin in Marseille, in 1993. I wanted to know more about Simone Weil's doctrine of attention. The very old Pere Perrin didn't want to talk about Simone anymore. He did it all his life, in many books and conferences. He spoke as if he wanted to become my directeur de conscience. But I couldn't pretend to be Simone, even by faking my voice.