André du Bouchet

André du Bouchet (April 7, 1924 – April 19, 2001) was a French poet.

Biography

Born in Paris, he lived in France until 1941, when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied at Amherst College and then at Harvard University (in comparative literature). After teaching for a year, he returned to France. He became friends with the poets Pierre Reverdy, René Char, Francis Ponge and the painters Pierre Tal-Coat and Alberto Giacometti.

Du Bouchet was one of the precursors of what would come to be called "poésie blanche" or "white poetry" (in 1956 he published a collection of poems intitled Le Moteur blanc or "The White Motor"). He was one of the founders, in 1966, with (among others) Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts and Gaëtan Picon, of the poetry revue L'Ephémère (twenty issues were published from 1966 to 1973).

In 1961, Du Bouchet's first major poetry collection, Dans la chaleur vacante, was published to critical acclaim and he won the Critic's prize for that year.

He also wrote art criticism, most notably on Nicolas Poussin, Hercules Seghers, Tal-Coat, Bram van Velde and Giacometti, and translated works by Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Laura Riding, William Faulkner, Shakespeare and James Joyce.

In 1983, he won the National Poetry Prize or "Prix national de la poésie".

André du Bouchet died in 2001 at the age of 76, in Truinas, Drôme.

Poetry

André du Bouchet's poetry — greatly and conflictually influenced by the poetic and hermeneutical preoccupations of Stéphane Mallarmé, the "banality" of Pierre Reverdy's images, Arthur Rimbaud's "abrasive/coarse reality", the work of Henri Michaux, as well as the philosophical work of Heidegger — is characterized by a valorization of the "mise en page" (with words erupting from the white of the page), by the use of free verse (absence of rhyme or metrical conventions) and often by difficult grammar and elusive, if not "absent", meaning (since, as he writes in "Notes on Translation", sense "is not fixed"), all of which evoke a sense of an existential, if not elemental, Heraclitian present. The natural elements of earth and air reappear constantly in his poems. The world, as he has written, will not end up in a book, as Mallarmé had claimed, since for du Bouchet the world has no end.

Du Bouchet's poetry "con-fronts" (that is to say, it touches with its "front" or "forehead") external reality (mountains, wind, stones...) and the words say and are at the same time a part of that reality (how, then, could sense ever be fixed?, he queried). This confrontation provokes a sense of otherness (not in a purely Heideggerian manner, as Du Bouchet's being is revealed as an object of flesh in its nudity and poverty) and a realization of the presence of objects and elements in the world and of the self as such an object, a "thing among things", as he frequently writes, echoing the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

List of works

• Published by Mercure de France :
  • Dans la chaleur vacante
  • Ou le soleil
  • Qui n'est pas tourné vers nous
  • Ici en deux
  • ... Désaccordée comme par de la neige
  • Axiales
  • Poèmes et proses
  • Poèmes
  • Poems of Paul Celan
  • Voyage in Armenia by Osip Mandelstam
  • The Tempest by Shakespeare
  • L’Emportement du muet

• Published by Fata Morgana :
  • Air suivi de défets 1950-1953
  • Laisses
  • L'incohérence
  • Rapides
  • Peinture
  • Aujourd'hui c'est
  • Une tache
  • Matière Carnet (l et 2)
  • Pourquoi si calmes
  • D'un trait qui figure et défigure
  • Annotations sur l'espace non datées
  • Tumulte

• Published by other publishing houses :
  • De plusieurs déchirements, éditions Unes
  • Dans la chaleur vacante suivi de Ou le soleil, Poésie-Gallimard
  • L'ajour, Poésie-Gallimard
  • Alberto Giacometti — dessin, éditions Maeght.
  • Where Heat Looms, Sun & Moon
  • The Uninhabited, Living Hand

Further reading

• P. Chappuis, André du Bouchet, Seghers, "Poètes d'aujourd'hui", 1979.
• M. Collot, "André du Bouchet et le pouvoir du fond", in L'Horizon fabuleux, tome II, José Corti, 1988.
• J. Depreux, André du Bouchet ou la parole traversée, Seyssel, Champ vallon, "Champ poétique", 1988.
• Jean-Pierre Richard, André du Bouchet, Onze études sur la poésie moderne, Paris, Seuil, 1964.

External links

• (in French) An overview on André Du Bouchet and other contemporary poets

Poetry portal