Abstract: Following the success of the Rois mages, André Frénaud began to explore a trivial and scatological register in his Poèmes de dessous le plancher which, from 1949, allowed him to apply his position as refractory even to his poetry. He became attentive to the fertility of fustiness, to the bowels of great metropolises, and so-called “popular” festivals. The poetic experience is dialectic. It gets lost if it looks directly into the light and needs instead to pass through the backstreets.
