André du Bouchet

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

Biography

Born in Paris, André du Bouchet lived in France until 1941 when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied comparative literature first at Amherst College and then at Harvard University. After teaching for a year, he returned to France. Here Du Bouchet became friends with the poets Pierre Reverdy, René Char, and Francis Ponge, and with 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 entitled Le Moteur blanc or "The White Motor". In 1966, he, along with (among others) Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts and Gaëtan Picon, founded 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 Prix de la critique (the Critic's Prize) for that year.

He also wrote art criticism, most notably about the works of 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 department of France.

Poetry

André du Bouchet's poetry—greatly and conflictually influenced by the poetic and interpretive 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 valuation of the page layout (with words erupting from the white of the page), by the use of free verse and, often, by difficult grammar and elusive meaning (he writes in "Notes on Translation" that sense "is not fixed"). As a result of these influences, his work evokes 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 confronts (that is to say, it touches with its front or forehead) external reality (mountains, wind, stones…) and the words describe, and are at the same time a part of, that reality. (How, then, could sense ever be fixed?, he asked.) 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

Interviews

Further reading

External links

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