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Cluster index: André du Bouchet

The apophatic poetry of André du Bouchet.

Peter Riley: ”Modernist’ seems a good category for du Bouchet, placing him in such wildly disparate company as Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan and many others, all arguably united in spite of everything, by some kind of prioritising of the word which disrupts articulation. The main trouble is that that prioritisation is taken as more than descriptive but also prescriptive, and poets not committed to it wholeheartedly become ‘compromised.’

A portfolio from ‘Openwork’.

André du Bouchet: ‘and so the most beautiful poems have led to some blank texts
like a sheet of blank paper—are available: that is,
they have not ceased to act. Like everything that has begun
to act.

‘I always write to make myself worthy of the poem that is not
yet written.’