Le Jardin Ouvrier, from 1995 to 2003, was a poetic garden where the poet Ivar Ch'Vavar (a poet born in 1952 who lives in Amiens under 100 heteronyms) grew flowers that only grew in his étrange jardin picard. Flammarion, the french publisher, recently published an anthology of this adventure. Since one of the main characteristic of le Jardin was its extreme poverty (paper, design, distribution...), Yves Di Manno at Flammarion decided to keep intact la pauvreté de l'original. Page 365 and 366, two pages by G.W. Toog, a man searching for a pseudonym, instead of a heteronym... In this 400 pages anthology, many poems by Christophe Tarkos, Lucien Suel, Laurent Albarracin, Christophe Manon, Nathalie Quintane, Stéphane Batsal, Charles Pennequin, and many others, sometimes in other languages (picard dialect, scottish, german...).

I met Ivar Ch'Vavar with Florence a few years ago in Amiens, when we used to have a Dyane. We met in his house rue Gaultier de Rumilly, the same street where Jean-Jacques Perrey used to live as a very young man. But first, before having heard of him, I bought a book by Evelyne Salope Nourtier, a female poet who was mentally sick, poor and abandonned, about her inner conflicts between salvation/destruction/alienation. There was also souvenirs in this book, written by people who knew her closely. We published some of her poems with an english translation in TO. I really loved this pink poetry book and wanted to know more... Evelyne Salope Nourtier was one of the 100 heteronyms of Ivar Ch'Vavar. This is how we met the man. He gave me a pile of original Jardin Ouvrier non-mags, and a copy of his masterpiece, Hölderlin au Mirador, as an original auto-edition which came out before this confidential one.

So why do Flammarion publish an anthology of Le Jardin Ouvrier instead of Ivar's own poetry, which fills many of these garden pages? The same logic would create an Adam and Eve's religion instead of God, the periphery becoming the centre. Reversed french poetry history... Really, the world is upside down and I don't understand anything anymore.