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Tonight, Michel Deguy
will read his poems

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in the original French.

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The English translations
will be read by Reg McGinnis,

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an associate professor
of French literature

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at the U of A. McGinnis received
a PhD from Stanford University.

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And among his publications is
a critical essay on Baudelaire.

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Michel Deguy was born in
Paris in 1930, the same year

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as Jacques Derrida.

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This fact is important,
as deconstruction

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plays a significant
role in framing

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Deguy for the English
literati, i.e., you.

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In fact, Jacques
Derrida is the author

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of an essay, "How to
Name," on Deguy's poetry.

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This essay is
included in Recumbents

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a collection of Deguy's
poems, translated into English

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by Wilson Baldridge
and recently released

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by Wesleyan University Press.

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And as an aside, this
coming Wednesday,

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Reginald Gibbons,
an American poet,

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will lecture on
"Why there are cows

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in the Garden of Eden," which
is also a lecture exploring

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this problem of naming.

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In his foreword to
Recumbents, Baldrige

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says, "What Derrida
is to deconstruction,

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Deguy is to the history of
poetics in contemporary Europe.

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There's a lot here for
theorists to play with,

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but what appeals to
me in Deguy's work

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is neither decon-
nor post- structural.

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It's his passion for nothingness
and what underlies it.

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It's the sort of soul found
in both the lacuna of Sappho's

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fragments and the barely
being of Beckett's cast.

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Deguy drops his linguistic
hook into the pool

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beneath human
consciousness and snags

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what sets art apart from theory.

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That is, the
synesthetic pleasure

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of the search for truth, the
embodiment of that discourse."

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And here I quote Baldridge's
translation of Deguy--

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"I keep losing you since
the time in that hotel room,

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when naked and turned aside,
you shouted at me, 'Get out!'

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The still life of
daylight and the wardrobe.

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And my painless belief, uprisen.

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I would see you again."

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According to the Poetry
International website,

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Michel Deguy prefers the term
"writer of poems" to "poet."

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He is a winner of the Prix
Mallarme and the Grand Prix

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National dela Poesie.

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He is the director of Poesie,
the major French journal

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of poetry and poetics,
and the editor

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of Les Temps Moderne,
the journal founded

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by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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He is a translator of
Heidegger, Sappho, Dante,

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and various American poets.

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And he is someone we have
just begun to hear from.

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I assure you, the
English-speaking poets

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will spend the next 100
years on a daunting task

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of bringing Deguy's
work into our language

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in order to get it just right.

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We're lucky to have
him here tonight.

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Please welcome "Writer
of Poems" Michel Deguy.

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[APPLAUSE]

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