Deguy, Michel (b. 1930). French poet, whose ability to find ever-renewed ways of fusing poetry and poetic theory accounts for his emergence in the 1970s as a major figure on the French intellectual scene, as well as a prominent poet. A trained philosopher, Deguy was well placed to mediate between the contemporary poetic tradition and the radical shake-up of ideas engendered by Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, a project which informs the influential review Po&esie he has edited since 1972.
His early collections—Fragments du cadastre (1960), Poémes de la presqu'île (1962), Biefs (1964)—centred on the poet's vigilant ‘auscultation de l'espace’, constantly anticipating those rare coincidences of moment and place which stake out the periphery of Being. But the emphasis placed on the cardinal role of metaphor paved the way for the new orientation perceptible in Actes and Ouï-dire (both 1966), where language takes centre stage: ‘la poésie comme l'amour risque tout sur les signes.’ Actes and its successors, which include Figurations (1969) and Tombeau de Du Bellay (1973), are remarkable fusions of poem and precept composed in an exceptionally lively style, bristling with neologisms, rare words, and coinages arrived at by hyphenation (‘la ruse du trait d'union’). Widening the angle again, subsequent collections, including Jumelages suivi de Made in USA (1978) and the admirable Gisants (1985), show us the poet at large—as traveller, lover, editor, consumer of mass media, intellectual—bringing the exigencies of poetry to bear on the signs and discourses of the modern world.
— Michael Sheringham
