Tonight, Michel Deguy will read his poems
in the original French.
The English translations will be read by Reg McGinnis,
an associate professor of French literature
at the U of A. McGinnis received a PhD from Stanford University.
And among his publications is a critical essay on Baudelaire.
Michel Deguy was born in Paris in 1930, the same year
as Jacques Derrida.
This fact is important, as deconstruction
plays a significant role in framing
Deguy for the English literati, i.e., you.
In fact, Jacques Derrida is the author
of an essay, "How to Name," on Deguy's poetry.
This essay is included in Recumbents
a collection of Deguy's poems, translated into English
by Wilson Baldridge and recently released
by Wesleyan University Press.
And as an aside, this coming Wednesday,
Reginald Gibbons, an American poet,
will lecture on "Why there are cows
in the Garden of Eden," which is also a lecture exploring
this problem of naming.
In his foreword to Recumbents, Baldrige
says, "What Derrida is to deconstruction,
Deguy is to the history of poetics in contemporary Europe.
There's a lot here for theorists to play with,
but what appeals to me in Deguy's work
is neither decon- nor post- structural.
It's his passion for nothingness and what underlies it.
It's the sort of soul found in both the lacuna of Sappho's
fragments and the barely being of Beckett's cast.
Deguy drops his linguistic hook into the pool
beneath human consciousness and snags
what sets art apart from theory.
That is, the synesthetic pleasure
of the search for truth, the embodiment of that discourse."
And here I quote Baldridge's translation of Deguy--
"I keep losing you since the time in that hotel room,
when naked and turned aside, you shouted at me, 'Get out!'
The still life of daylight and the wardrobe.
And my painless belief, uprisen.
I would see you again."
According to the Poetry International website,
Michel Deguy prefers the term "writer of poems" to "poet."
He is a winner of the Prix Mallarme and the Grand Prix
National dela Poesie.
He is the director of Poesie, the major French journal
of poetry and poetics, and the editor
of Les Temps Moderne, the journal founded
by Jean-Paul Sartre.
He is a translator of Heidegger, Sappho, Dante,
and various American poets.
And he is someone we have just begun to hear from.
I assure you, the English-speaking poets
will spend the next 100 years on a daunting task
of bringing Deguy's work into our language
in order to get it just right.
We're lucky to have him here tonight.
Please welcome "Writer of Poems" Michel Deguy.
[APPLAUSE]