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Presentations/Selections
Michel Deguy: Why poetry?

Jean‐Michel Maulpoix

To cite this article: Jean‐Michel Maulpoix (1999) Presentations/Selections, , 3:2, 417-429

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 Michel Deguy:
Why Poetry?

Jean-Michel Maulpoix

What hypothetical function may we still assign to the poet, in a time

when "poetry is no longer the governess of humanity?" Not a priest,
not a shepherd, neither messiah nor prophet, the poet is nonetheless
little disposed to tender his resignation and shows no taste for bitter
cursing: he must recover in his own "work", and in a single move-
ment, as much his uncertain identity as the sense of that indetermi-
nate task and the forms of its writing1. In all possible ways, the work
of Michel Deguy makes this modern necessity its own. Ceaselessly
borne up by the working of the poem, as much as by philosophic re-
flection and by a network of related actions converging upon lan-
guage (translation, publishing, direction of reviews, teaching,
lectures...), this questioning constitutes the essential axis of a body
of work which obstinately réévaluâtes the why and the how of poetry
in its "extreme contemporary" moment.
Having become an active part of poetic expression, it comes to
pass that critical reflection replenishes poetry's energies. It is no
longer simply a surveillance of, or a commentary upon poetry, but
poetry's end: writing comes down to engaging in research on poe-
tics, a pursuit of poetry, a meditation in "acts upon its conditions
of existence and its meaning. Having taken the measure of a lack or
of an absence, this critical orientation is in the first instance a means
of bringing things down to earth and of persistence in spite of eve-
rything. When there is no possible grasp of essence, nor any pleni-
tude of expression , poetry is encountered at the very heart of its
process of identification, a process which proves to be the only one

417
Michel Deguy

capable of integrating disappointment and of bringing about, out of

this disappointment, a positive reversal: it finds the necessity of the
poem in the movement which it develops to grasp that which re-
mains out of its reach.
This intensive dimension of the critical work is coupled with an
extensive dimension. Scrutiny is extended to the entirety of the
world: to history, to the social, to the cultural, to the political, to art,
to technique, to morality... Poetry becomes an unlimited power of
examination which functions not at all on the basis of chosen sub-
jects, but rather by vastly increasing its field. Deguy "makes a poem
of whatever is handy." His attitude is not curiosity, but concern, a
painful attention, even anguished, to what has grounds for being.
Insofar as "that which has grounds for being does not go without
saying", all things must be sifted through the word in order to exist.
By what means is this extension of the poetic to a kind of ge-
neralized anthropology of culture made possible without poetry
simply spilling over into the essay? Or rather, what is properly po-
etic in this very investigation? It is through the power of conjunc-
tion which belongs to it that poetry permits this extension: that
which defines poetry is precisely the aptitude that it has for putting
everything together, for making everything appear and testify in fig-
ures, its capacity for disfiguring and reconfiguring everything.
Tending then to form one body with thought, it becomes thought's
most active and reactive mode.
At the very same time, poetry identifies itself through the ob-
servation of what betrays it, denatures it or prevents it. By engaging
in the critique of "the cultural", Deguy defines the territory of the
poetic by means of its other, negative face4. He opposes a break-
down (a degraded imitation, a dispersion which no longer seeks after
the whole), at one and the same time as he opposes a lack of differ-
entiation. Concerned with defining the singular as an articulation
with difference, he defends and illustrates poetry as the very site
where any identification proceeds from a figurai relation to alterity.
With respect to the negative ground from which it is extracted,
the poetic work brings about both a focussing and a reestablishment.
It frames, it focuses, it confronts, it sets lucid anger against the real.
Poetry replies to the real through another rhythm, at another speed,
carrying with it a "new deal" of sense and of protest. That is just
what Char called "the dislocating energy of poetry." From which
comes a writing of highly tensed lyricism drawing its force from the
relations established among poetry, thought and revolt. Having to
do with the prose of history, and even with its most distressingly
prosaic dimensions, the poem takes form on the field of confronta-

418
 Michel Degtty

tion. Syntactical abruptness and discordance go along with a bias to-

ward speed, rhythmic pulsation, and even undoing or discontinuity.
Deguy writes: "A poem haunts us that might be the host of differ-
ences and so compelled to pulverize genres. Through the kinetic-
ism that is proper to it, the poem mobilizes and surmounts fragmen-
tation. In its highly energetic forms, it presents itself to us as a sur-
prised body. The very expression of that surprise is the figure:
surprised sense, or sense through surprise, the disconcerted and dis-
concerting experience of language.
Michel Deguy's poetry never ceases then striding about and
surveying in every direction the site of human dwelling. "Measuring
the universe", such was, already, the project of Fragment du cadastre
which appeared in 1960. In this initial moment, the poet was seeking
to express "the modulation of a unison which comes from the uni-
verse itself. But this was in order to become aware that the "holding
together" of words takes on the "holding together" of things. It is up
to writing to repair the ragged system of appearances. The task of
the poet is that of establishing or reestablishing relationships, pro-
portions between things: the invention of images may allow us to find
once again the world's marvelous dimension.
In Poèmes de la presqu'île, published in 1962, the poet appeared
as a "fundamental ghostly visitor" and a "robust ferryman"6. To the
necessity of displacement as quest and desire for understanding the
world was added a more acute poetics of attention: "poetry, piercing
empiricism, captures the tempo of the world, irrefutable proof."
On the lookout for what comes forth, the poet has as his task "keep-
ing audible the very faint beating of a very distant coming." He
waits, he hopes, and his apprehension justifies metaphoricity and the
link: he who waits, this we know, takes one thing for another...
But it seems that Deguy quickly became aware of the fact that if
this waiting possessed in itself a value, it did not result in any com-
ing: no hope will be fulfilled. The last poem of the first part of La
presqu'île repeats already as a kind of refrain "Poem with the sound
of a tired hand on the obstinate window": "the earth hides the
earth", "shadow never becomes prey", for "the time of Nature Py-
thia is closed. For our age of the world, shouldn't another book be
opened, as we change schools?"
It is as a "nostalgic", then a "survivor of a catastrophe" that the
portrait of the poet is rendered: how to get oriented, how to pre-
serve the phrase in this time of technological modernity when we
hear only "the noise of acceleration which sustains itself in its haste
toward nowhere", and when "here" is only ever accorded, fleetingly,
as "crossing of discontinuous winds, intersection of gusts?" For the

419
Michel Deguy

past thirty years, from one book to another, Deguy has been relent-
lessly inscribing the answer to these questions within the work of
"figuration" specific to the poem. In effect, the only "true place"8 to
which the poet accedes is the adjoining site of the like/as: the space
of the figure and of the belonging-together, where the scattered ele-
ments of a disjointed world appear together and are conjoined.9 The
loss of meaning has given free reign to generalized figuration. It is
no longer the subject, or nature, which serves as a centre, but lan-
guage itself insofar as it constitutes the site of a new visibility of what
is: "Deep within itself, poetry, as a measure of the fortuitous, is at once
comparison and testimony."10 Poetry replies to the loss of unity
through the establishment of the common (comm-owe), it opens us
to the space of what Deguy calls the common mortal [le comme-un
des mortels].
The world is not what is already there, but what comes to pass
in the poem: an immense contingent of possibilities. Since any real-
ity might be joined to any other, "the world is infinitely combinato-
rial of possibilities which the poem reveals, in some sense, to itself,
for it is the place where the figures open up and trace themselves
out."11 The poem gives the 'there' [le là], goes more deeply into it
and extends it by tying together here and its elsewheres. In this work
of generalized figuration, all identity passes through alterity and
finds itself in some manner suspendedfrom. It remains in suspension.
In the same way, the self, any self of any poet, is only, after all, that
crossroads at which figures open up their passage and seek to adjoin
themselves. "Not one of us is Orpheus, but our song is Orpheus,"
writes Deguy in Biefs. Linkage and gathering-together subsist
through the song. Understood as "the milieu of being-like-or-as
measured and sheltered in language,"12 poetry maintains, through
this singular work of language that it accomplishes, a "phenomeno-
logical scale;" it preserves an understanding of the world, a measure.
The poet is he who, through his writing, keeps watch over
difference13, and "neutralizes totalitarian views."14 He helps to rec-
ognize or to find the proportions between life and death, joy and
• pain, agony and horror: "It is still necessary that the duration of a
life be proportioned to its nothingness-necessary that the living be
for each one of us a work.
Thus recovered and revalued in his "function", the poet refutes
"the imprudent assimilations, the intolerant and murderous identi-
fications, and the cutting exclusions which draw blood." Deguy con-
fers or confides three aspects to his poetic word: "the refusal of
slander, the refusal of separation, and the protection of the institu-
tion of difference." Not so long ago threatened by the philosopher

420
 Michel Deguy

with exclusion from the city, now we see that the poet can rejoin the
community, bringing with him a thought, a concern and a singular
capacity for measure: his "poethics."

Translated by Chris Elson

421
 p oemes choisis/
Selected Poems

Michel Deguy

Fragment du cadastre/Fragment of the cadastre

La Vigie/The Lookout
En cette futaie : la seule chose qu'elle me dise, cJest que bien avant
ma venue déjà elle accueillait de vieux marcheurs, et bien longtemps
après d'autres y diront je.
Nul ne fut hanteur plus obstiné ; qui mît plus de ruse, plus de ré-
solution au service d'une hantise vaine; nul plus insistant à imiter le
flux et le reflux de l'élément; à devenir élément-homme, d'uni-
verselle hantise; à revenir buter, blesser obstinément contre les ar-
bres, contre le ciel, contre la mer; à se dresser comme obstacle,
érigeant la douane de silence à toutes les limites où reviennent finir
l'inlassable vague et l'inlassable oiseau et l'inlassable vent; interposé
entre le sable et l'écume, entre la falaise et l'orage, entre la lisière et
le blé, lui le revenant, partout pour se substituer à l'élément que
heurte un autre, et pour y devenir capable de bénédiction; lui l'être
des confins, élevant sa maison au confluent du val et de la plaine,
battu, broyé par les moraines d'alluvions ou de laves; coincé, écrasé
au carrefour des moraines de nuages et des moraines de forêts; mais
renaissant, ressuscité de jour en jour et de fils en fils, sans haine pour
les choses violentes, et plutôt reconnaissant envers la mine et le ty-
phon, l'avalanche et le puits, qui s'effondrent pour l'ensevelir.

422
 Michel Deguy

The Lookout
In this wood: the only thing it tells me is that well before my coming
it already welcomed old walkers and well afterwards others here will
sayT.
None a more obstinate haunter; who put more cleverness,
more resolution in the service of a vain obsession; none more insist-
ent in imitating the flux and reflux of the element; in becoming ele-
ment-man, of universal obsession; in coming back to collide, to
wound stubbornly up against the trees, against the sky, against the
sea, to draw himself up as an obstacle, erecting the customs post of
silence at all of the limits where the tireless wave and the tireless bird
and the tireless wind return to die; interposed between the sand and
the foam, between the cliff and the storm, between the field's edge
and the wheat, he the returning spectre, everywhere substituting
himself for the element which another strikes, and becoming there
capable of blessing; he the being of the bounds, raising his house at
the confluence of the valley and the plain, beaten, ground by the
moraines of alluvium or of lava; cornered, crushed at the crossroads
of the moraines of cloud and the moraines of forests; but aborning,
resurrected from day to day and from son to son, without hate for
the violent things, and actually rather grateful to the mine and the
typhoon, the avalanche and the well which collapse to bury him.

Biefs/Millraces

Lyre infestée de ressemblances Lear/Lyre infested with

resemblances Lear
Sur la page emigrant à la proue
un dernier combattant qui vire avec douceur à la folie
trébuche parmi les ruines

Un fou il refuse d'attendre il précipite

le cours du vent dans le corridor des pins sculpte la catastrophe
Mais le plexus du poète l'avertit
solaire

Lyre infested with resemblances Lear

On the page emigrant at the prow
one last combatant who swerves with sweetness toward madness
stumbles among the ruins

423
Michel Deguy

A madman he refuses to wait he hastens

the course of the wind in the corridor of pines sculpts the
catastrophe
But the plexus of the poet warns him
solar

Donnant Donnant/Given giving

L'amour est plus fort que la mort disiez-vous
Mais la vie est plus forte que l'amour et
L'indifférente plus forte que la vie-La vie
Mienne ou tienne et nôtre en quelque manière
Est ensemble la seule séquence de métamorphoses
(Le néoténique se mue en héros à sexe
Plus tard en ventru chauve pourrissant comme un dieu)
Et bains-douches au Léthé tous les mois
Deuils laqués, renaissances frêles, amnèses
Et un vieillard muet en nous depuis longtemps
Survit sans douleur au charnier des enfants

45° Ouest 60° Nord

Love is stronger than death you were saying

But life is stronger than love and
The indifferent is stronger than life - Life
Mine or yours and ours in some way
Is together the only sequence of metamorphoses
(The neotenic changes into a sexed hero
Later into a pot-bellied bald one rotting like a god)
And public baths in the Lethe every month
Glossy griefs, frail renaissances, amneses
And a mute old man in us for a long time
Survives without pain the slaughter of the children

45° West 60° North

Arrêts fréquents/Fréquent Stops

La lune des Lumières
En noir et blanc repasse
Sur Beaubourg
Sa version en muet
Les sous-titres analphabète
Font de la traduction en désesperanto

424
 Michel Deguy

Burger Burgerking et Macdo

C'est la bastringue de la nuit Rétro
Dis-moi Guillaume où donc en sommes-nous
L'horrible sentence chronométrique
Compte à rebours le Millénaire
3500572757
Mais elle sans chevaux sans chiens sans Euménides
Aucun navire aucun pierrot ne guide
Mais comment peut-on être
Aussi brillante et aussi grise
Elle aussi vierge et aussi pleine gonfle
Irrésistiblement défonce l'antenne des antennes
Rien ne peut l'empêcher de plaquer
La commémo son & lumière.
Et sur sa tronche de miroir
En haut l'archiaïeule
Réverbère ce temps d'avant les temps quand l'A-
Frique n'avait pas dérivé du Brésil
L'Atlantique lentement s'élargit
La Fontaine qui fut des Innocents
Parque ses arrivages
Et changeant ses culottes d'eau milieu des touristes
Elle « ferme » soudain comme le Centre Culturel

Paris, frimaire

To B.D.

The Lumières' moon

In black and white is showing again
over Beaubourg
Its silent version
The subtitles analphabetico
Do translation in Despairanto
Burger Burgerking and Macdo
It's the tavern din of the night turned Retro
Tell me Guillaume where then have we got
The horrible chronometrical sentence
Counts down the Millenium
3500572757

425
Michel Deguy

But she with no horses with no hounds with no Eumenides

No ship no Pierrot guides
But how can one be
So brilliant and so grey
She so virginal and so full swells
Irresistibly bursting through the antenna of the antennae
Nothing can keep her from laying low
The sound & light commemo.
And on her mirror face
On high the archiancestor
Reflects this time before the times when A-
Frica hadn't drifted away from Brazil
The Atlantic slowly widens
The Fountain that was of the Innocents
Parks its shipments
And changing its water undies under tourists' eyes
It "closes" sudden as the Cultural Centre

Paris, frimaire

Aux heures d'affluence/At the Thronging Hours

Le sujet du poème, sujet à poèmes

Le poème, synoptique au présent de son indicatif, rassemble des
choses — ou en disjoint-dans le à-la-fois de son il-y-a, comme si son
sujet, son JE, qu'il soit lyriquement shifté ou non, était un relateur
dans un moment de survol, très ailleurs très près, au pseudoprésent
(construit) d'une vision ou conception
Lui, le relateur, ce narrateur, conduit un
orchestre de monde à ce moment-là, qui
n'existe pas, si on veut, mais c'est comme s'il
le faisait jouer.
The subject of the poem, subject to poems
The poem, synoptic in the present of its indicative, gathers
things together — or disconnects them-in the at-once of its there-is,
as if its subject, its I, be it lyrically shifted or not, was a relator in a
moment of overview, very much elsewhere very near, in the (con-
structed) pseudopresent of a vision or conception
He, the relator, this narrator, conducts an
orchestra of world at that moment, which
does not exist, if you wish, but it is as though he
was making it play.

426
 Michel Deguy

A ce qui n'en finit pas/To that which is never ending

« L'amour plus fort que la mort », qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?
C'est lui, l'atome de réalité, l'articulation, le fracassable noyau de
jour, le principe d'individuation, le triangle médiateur, le plus-un de
deux, l'entre-eux des enfants frères-soeurs, des parents-enfants, des
amants, des époux. C'est lui le seul témoin qu'il y a de l'existence. Il
n'y en a pas, sinon par cette relation qui précède les termes, qui fait
les générations, les préférés, les proches; c'est lui le sujet, et non l'in-
dividuum refermé, l'auto qui se préfère, le self qui se sert, cet indi-
vidu désertifié dont la terreur a besoin pour augmenter son règne.
C'est lui le sujet, le sujet de ce dont il s'agit; l'histoire est histoire
d'amour-ou rien.

"Love stronger than death," what does that mean? This is the
atom of reality, the joint, the breakable core of day, the principle of
individuation, the mediating triangle, the more-than-one of two,
the between-them of children brothers-sisters, of parents-children,
of lovers, of spouses. This is the only witness that there is existence.
There is none, except through this relation which precedes the
terms, which makes the generations, the favorites, the near and
dear; this is the subject, and not the closed off individuum, theauto-
which prefers itself, therc^fwhich serves itself, this drained dry indi-
vidual which Terror needs to increase its reign. This is the subject,
the subject of that which is really happening; the story is a love sto-
ry-or nothing.

L'énergie du désespoir/The Energy of Despair

Quoi que ce soit, cet art qui le porte à la nécessité : comme
d'être à deux plutôt que seul en arrivant dans la ville, et c'est pour-
quoi je décidai de ne plus voyager seul. x
J'arrive, même à New York, tout est frappé de contingence dé-
courageante quelconque; nulle cour de Guermantes, nulle poursuite
de Nadja... tout est imbu de « ça ou autre chose », superflu, inepte.
Mais cela même, quelconque, si je le fixe et qu'après coup j'en re-
garde le photogramme, je dis : c'était cela, cela même - cela qui
était, ce que c'était. Essence, quiddité : comme quand, si nous som-
mes à deux, n'importe quoi d'urbain au croisement de nos regards
(« Regarde, bien aimée lui dis-je ») s'objective; la ville est dite, elle
ne sombre pas à mon gré, ne se ruine pas avec ma contingence.

Whatever it might be, it is art that brings it to necessity: like be-

ing two people arriving in the city rather than one alone, and that is
why I decided to travel by myself no more.

427
Michel Deguy

I arrive, even in New York, everything is struck with some sort

of discouraging contingency; no Guermantes' court, no pursuit of
Nadja... everything is imbued with "that or something else," super-
fluous, inept. But that very thing, not much at all, if I stare at it, and
after the fact look at its photogram, I say: that was it, that was really
it-that which was, what was. Essence, quiddity: as when, if there are
two of us, anything urban at the crossing of our gazes ("Look, my
beloved I said to her") is objectivized ; the city is said, it does not col-
lapse depending on my taste, it is not ruined along with my contin-
gency.

Translated by Chris Elson

Notes
1 Born in Paris in 1930, Michel Deguy is Professor of French Literature at l'Université
Paris VIII. He began publishing his poetic work at the end of the nineteen-fifties, at a
time when (in parallel with developments in the social sciences) a suspicion concerning
the very possibility of conducting any truly "poetic" enterprise in the modern age was
growing more radical.
2 Actes, title of a book published by Michel Deguy with Gallimard editions in 1966.
3 Deguy's first "models", his major references, were Hölderlin, Saint-John Perse or
Claudel.
4 See, for example, "Rencontre culturelle de poésie" in Brevets (Champ Vallon, 1986)
p.139.
5 Ouï-dire (Gallimard, 1966) p.81.
6 We have moved from the "obstinate haunter," whose figure had opened the preceding
volume, to the "robust ferryman," at the same time that the consciousness of the tran-
sitivity proper to poetry has increased.
7 Poèmes de la presqu'île (Gallimard, 1961) p. 34.
8 "Le vrai lieu" is an expression of Yves Bonnefoy.
9 When Michel Deguy, in order to baptize the review which he directs with Belin Edi-
tions, inscribes at the heart of the word "poésie" an ampersand-Po&Sie which conveys
the 'et' (and) implicit in 'é' he situates his review under the sign of conjunction/dis-
junction. Poetry as Deguy understands and practices it "is the generalized metaphori-
cal status". My life, he says, is the mystery of like-or as (Ouï-dire, p. 47). Yet this like/
as, which "summons to appear by comparing" (Actes, p. 194) paradoxically renders the
thing unique, incomparable.
10 Biefi (Gallimard, 1964) p . 120.
11 Max Loreau, Michel Deguy la poursuite de la poésie tout entière. (Gallimard, 1980) p. 47.
12 M. Deguy, Choses de la poésie et affaire culturelle (Hachette, 1986) p. 199.
13 See La poésie n'est pas seule (Seuil, 1987) p. 23.
14 Biefi, p. 106.
15 Gisants (Gallimard 1985) p. 7.

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