I met Michel Deguy once. My PhD advisor knew someone who knew him, got his email address to me, and I sent him my manuscript. As French editors often say, he told me he “could not” publish it, but he invited me to meet with him. It may have been an idle invitation – him being kind to a… young poet from Saskatoon is it?, from Canada. But as I was going to Paris once a year at the time to take part in activities at my university there and do research, I wrote him again ahead of my next trip, called him once I was there as he had asked, and we met at Le Rostand, a café beside the Luxembourg gardens. He told me to have a Merleau-Ponty book with me and to sit at a table. I had a Patocka book instead (I didn’t bring my books with me and this one felt close enough) and sat at the entrance because I was completely overwhelmed with the place. I knew him from pictures so I introduced myself when he walked in.
We went to his usual table, and I don’t remember much from the conversation we had. A few things about philosophy, his preference for Claude Lefort over my supervisor (well, ok, what am I to do with that?), his disregard for the OULIPO as overly formal but Jacques Roubaud standing apart. But one thing stuck. He told me that to make it as a poet I had to find a group of other poets and publish with them, start a journal or join one. Poetry takes place in community, in exchange with others, with people publishing one another. Poets create their own means of publication, help each other create – poets not only create their work, they create what allows them to create.
Meeting me was an act of generosity on his part. My writing at the time was at the antipodes of his, an entirely different genre. I’m grateful that my manuscript was published soon after as what ended up being my first two books, but I can see that these books exist in a different poetic universe than his. Not to mention that he would have noticed the skills I really hadn’t honed, the understanding I hadn’t developed. It was humbling without being humiliated. I saw how much work I needed to put into my writing to match the ambition of what I already knew I had to say. So I did. And I also knew I didn’t want to write like him.
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Yet there’s much to be taken on, much I still hope to learn from reading him. Deguy’s poetry is formless, or formful. He moves through forms, sometimes in a single poem, sometimes over time. He has used prose poetry, and reflected upon it, often in prose poetry itself, blurring the barriers between poetry and philosophy, playing on those limits. Body, room, other bodies, light, animated beings, non-animated beings, everything moves into everything else. Poetry is a way to sink into things, others, the world, into our relationship with them; a way to emerge, transformed and more whole.
I like this sentence: “Here I publish poems in poems, here poems in prose and here, pensive prose or philosophical poems that belong to the field of poetics.” Poetry is against identity. It looks for difference rather than what is the same, it compares what is incomparable, it augments difference.
In an article that also contains excerpts in translation, Leon Lewis explains how Deguy, like Derrida, looks at how language creates what we experience. Since this brief enough article already explains the intricacies of Deguy’s poetic style, I won’t offer a study. Lewis shows just how much Deguy leans into French, a specific, Parisian, version of French, moves through the possibilities a specific languages opens. Lewis’ own translations here lose some of the depth and mystery perhaps, which the published translation maintains, but begins with the same effort in English.
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Before I went to meet Deguy, I read as much of his poetry and essays as I could get my hands on, whatever the University of Saskatchewan library had, really. I had been aware of him, perhaps I had read him in an anthology. His poetry is difficult. I hadn’t read poetry like that, except for Paul Celan. And reading Celan at the time, in my very early twenties or maybe late teens, when I worked at the Librairie du Soleil in Ottawa, felt like I had stared at pages for a few hours and seen some images, but entirely missed what was happening. I got that sense again reading Deguy – but the more I read, the more I saw, the more I caught. Even now I don’t spend a lot of time on hermetic poetry – poetry for the initiated, poetry that operates behind a veil, poetry that makes itself as difficult as the world can be dense and impossible to parse out.
But I have a need for this kind of writing too. It allows for meditation, demands it even. Not the kind of meditation where thoughts are supposed to pass through me, through the moment (something else I need). The kind of meditation where thoughts are deepened until they get to the most essential dimension of our presence in the world and to the world, to the unbreakable bond that ties us to other people.
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I’m not familiar with Deguy’s more recent work, in great part because universities in Western Canada seem to have had stronger literature departments as well as bigger acquisition budgets for their libraries in the 1990s and 2000s. I often read what’s available in this way. There’s so much to read already. But here’s what I’m finding out: there’s an entire period of his writing life, the most recent, devoted to the ongoing ecological catastrophe and to finding out how we can remain on this Earth, even as it burns, even as we practice a hominicide and a geocide, as we murder humanity and the Earth – how we can invent a new way of being on Earth. To that end, he brings together a poetic, ethical, political, and philosophical reflection.
Deguy is calling for something like degrowth and is looking for ways to transform our relationship to one another and to the world so that we may welcome another society. But in the last days of his eighties he was taking part in the willful misrepresentation of the politics of mutual care and decolonization as demanding political correctness, as a form of ideological censorship. All this righteous complaining while our attempt to take care of one another, of being full of care around the crossing of social positions – all this is meant to be a deeper, more involved interrogation of the world and passage between cultures, for instance; a more fundamental, less violent relationality. A more thorough translation, beginning with the remembrance that there are mouths and bodies and hopes speaking and writing poetry. More translation, not less. Yes, each voice translates everything, all the time. All the more reason. We are trying to go deeper even than he did in thinking this translation, by recognizing that there is no social position whence it is not necessary. I don’t know what this we is exactly, but I would count this difference as fundamental between Deguy’s vision for dialogue and translation and mine.
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I have too many tabs open, PDFs, articles he wrote, short pieces for Po&sie, interviews. I keep moving Donnant donnant, the only book of his I own, from room to room in my house, barely opening it. Reading a poem now and then, not finding the one to allude to, to talk about, perhaps to translate from. I’m moving sideways through it (and through the bombardment of information about war in Ukraine, which we are usually spared unless it has to do with Europe). At the time of Deguy’s death, what is staying with me is not his poetry – it was there before and it will remain – but that meeting, everything I learned from it and after it, with some resentment, some bewilderment, some gratitude, some renewal, a sense of purpose.
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Deguy is far from the poets usually featured in periodicities, and not only because of his style. He very much was part of the French poetic establishment. Not one for small presses, not one for the corporate conglomerate presses either, although he was on the “reading committee” for Gallimard for a long period of time. He was close friends with Jacques Derrida and with Claude Lanzmann, he took part in Tel Quel, he was on the editorial committee for Les Temps modernes (which had been founded by Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty). He translated Celan, Hölderlin (great) – and Martin Heidegger (oh no, but that gives you an idea of the kind of work he has done, as well as being another part of his manner of being and thinking I can only reject). He prefaced Valéry’s Cahiers. He had founded and continued to run the highly influential and constantly well-regarded journal Po&sie. This journal has notably been a hub for poetry in translation and for a reflection on poetry and on translation. If you read French at all, I encourage you to look at its archives, which are freely available online
Through these engagements and communities, Michel Deguy has created and maintained room for poetry that most non-poets, and many poets (including myself depending on my mood and capacity for attention), might find unreadable, poetry that does not and cannot sell. Poetry that everyone ought to be able to read, despite the great difficulty reading it represents for everyone. There is a utopian aspect to this approach to poetry. Write as if everyone was a poet. Write as if your culture approved of poetry, cherished it. Write so that anyone might get their hands on this book and become the reader they need to be to read it. There’s no need to write like Deguy to have this kind of approach. Only an understanding of the forces that prevent us from having the time to deepen our practice in something that requires no commercialization and allows for no profit. I do not forget that there are enough of us doing that. Not to pretend that Deguy wasn’t extremely privileged – I know where his apartment was, I know where he worked. But he put into motion a belief in every person’s capacity to interrogate the most obscure parts of being and language that remains. And he never once commented on my writing when we met, he only encouraged me to continue.
