Abstract: Taking a line from “Le crapaud” as its starting point, this article shows how Corbière constructs a poetics based on fragmenting norms or figures of the law, a poetics which works essentially through oxymoron. Whether in their metre or images, acoustically or visually, Corbière’s poems play on inversion, inverting meaning or sound, leading to a kind of equivalence between emptiness and plenitude, true and false, which is a way of acknowledging that any work of art is rooted in pipe dreams.
