Jacques Dupin

Jacques Dupin Poems

Jacques Dupin Biography

Jacques Dupin (4 March 1927, Privas, Ardèche – 27 October 2012, Paris) was a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère. Dupin was born in the town of Privas in the South of France, where his father was a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital. In 1944, the family moved to Paris, where, in 1950, the poet René Char helped him publish his first collection of poems. In 1966, he co-founded the poetry quarterly L’Éphémère, with poets including André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan. He was the director of publication at Galerie Maeght, which represented Joan Miró, a close friend. The gallery also represented Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Wassily Kandinsky.Giacometti and Bacon both painted his portrait. Dupin wrote Miró's biography, numerous monographs on the artist's work, and was empowered by Miró's family to be the sole authenticating authority of the artist's work; a role that made him much sought after by collectors. In 1987, Dupin was the curator of a retrospective of Miró's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the first such retrospective in New York since 1959.)

The Best Poem Of Jacques Dupin

Excerpt

...I draw my bad breath
from the arrears of fear

I draw the snake's egg
and the plague of its glosses

from the blood of monkey
and fly legs

and of the toppled enigma
in the fissure of the slag heap

in the streaming
of the voice

an instumental transit
with the pus sack broken

in at the turning angle of seas
and cycles

blind fly dead tongue
monkey mother

whose lipless laugh
I irrigate...

trns. by John Taylor

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