Given Giving : Selected Poems of Michel Deguy. Translated by Clayton Eshleman. With an introduction by Kenneth Koch.

by Michel Deguy, Clayton Eshleman (Translator)

English, French

Genres: Poetry

189 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Michel Deguy, born in Paris in 1930, is a French poet and philosopher. The ability to bring together poetic practice and theoretical reflection turned Michel Deguy into a major figure on the French intellectual scene in the 1970s. Michel Deguy is currently a professor of French literature at the Universite de Paris VII (Saint-Denis), the founder and editor-in-chief of Po&sie since 1972 (Editions Belin), and the editor of Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. He is the former president of the Collège international de philosophie and of the Maison des écrivains.

After graduating in Humanities and Philosophy, Michel Deguy attended lectures by Michel Alexandre and Jean Hyppolite. He remained very close to the deconstructionist movement, becoming friends with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. Michel DeGuy taught philosophy until 1968. Known for his immense generosity and energy, Michel Deguy has contributed to the development of many French literary and philosophical institutions (for instance, the review Critique, College international de philosophie, and Gallimard Editions). He is also active as a translator of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Gongora, Sappho, Dante Alighieri, and various American poets. Michel Deguy has written over thirty books published in France and translated into many languages, and he has received numerous awards, among them the 1998 Gran Prix National de la poésie, the 2000 Grand Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres, and the 2004 Grand Prix de poésie de l'Académie Française.

Michel Deguy prefers to be named a 'writer of poems' or 'the poet I am seeking to be' and his multiform work escapes the straitjacket of classification, combining philosophical thinking, poetry and literary culture. A trained philosopher, Michel Deguy is a thinker-poet able to mediate between the poetic tradition and radical shifts in thinking brought about by structuralism and poststructuralism. Always on the move, his thoughts and language take the reader to different places, constantly resisting the forces of inertia. His creativity is located between the impossibility and necessity of thinking, refusing to see poetry as a genre. Rather, poetry is a given, a critical dialogue of thought. Named by Jacques Derrida to be 'a poet of promised lands', Michel Deguy's attitude is not curiosity but concern, a painful attention to what is, to what happens to be. He is a poet at the forefront of experiment and change, and yet steeped in a warm sensitivity to the literature and aesthetics of the past.

Michel Deguy is a nomad poet, traversing all spaces and times, and his poems act as a space to bring interaction, rather than a fusion of disparate things. If his early collections were occupied with his constant exploration of the space outside the periphery of Being, his succeeding works gave a central stage to the language and role of metaphor. Famous for a lively style bursting with neologisms, rare words and coinages, his late works show the poet as a traveler, lover and mass media consumer, with his poetry bearing the signs and discourses of the reality of the modern world. According to Michel Deguy, the essence of any relation to that world is to be found in the element of desire.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crow cry the same cry under the closed eyelids where the pale
winter of memory dozes
*
How shall we name what sets the pitch?
Poetry like love risks everything on signs

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

At night when I enter the forest of my sleep, shadow glasses with
loaded eyes, parting thickets of gleams, traveling along obscure
paths toward the source of tears, the beams of the night precede
me. What persists of the day advances toward the unmoving eyes.
The game-filled night, doesn't it know how to tie the poem's
hands? And I would like to love you would become I love you . . .
But rather keep alert! for earth is the great vestige.
Unbury the origin that it guards, the wide trail where absence
congeals. The hope confides that you are awaited by a country
whose love of writing is the act of birth.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was attracted to this because of the two Americans' names on the cover - Clayton Eshleman & Kenneth Koch - two poets whose work seems diametrically opposed; Eshleman the hot-blooded man of myths, and Koch the emotionally rich but comic and cartoony and artificial. I wondered how they could both like the same poet so much, and Deguy's work does somehow reside in an overlap between the two Americans.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving it.