Pierre
Alféri (France)
1963-2023
Pierre
Alféri was a French novelist, poet, and essayist, born in 1963 in France living in Paris. His father was the noted French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his
mother psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier.
He earned a degree in Philosophy at the
University of Paris and published his thesis on William of Ockham (Guillaume
d'Ockham) in 1989. In 1991, he published another philosophical essay on questions
of language and literature, Chercher une phrase. Nevertheless, Alféri
did not pursue an academic career in philosophy; instead, he became one of the
most innovative French poets of today. He has since published several books of
poetry, including Les Allures naturelles (1991), Le Chemin familier
du poisson combatif (1992), Kub Or (1994), Sentimentale journée
(1997), La Voie des airs (2004) as well as the novels Fmn (1994)
and Le cinéma des familles (1999).
Alféri nurtured collaboration with other
artists and often performs with musicians, painters and other poets. With
Suzanne Doppelt, a photographer and professor at the European Graduate School,
he co-founded the literary review Détail, and with Olivier Cadiot La Revue de
Littérature Générale. His collaboration with the sculptor Jacques Julien led to
the production of the DVD Ca commence à Séoul (2007). Alféri has also written
lyrics for the actress and singer Jeanne Balibar. He wrote two of the songs for
Balibar's 2003 album, Slalom Dame ("Cinéma" and "Ton
Diable"), in collaboration with Rodolphe Burger, who composed the music.
Alféri is well-known for his translations of works by John Donne, Giorgio
Agamben and Meyer Schapiro into French.
His creativity on film was edited and
published as a DVD, Cinépoèmes & films parlants (2003).
In several books, Alféri experimented with
language formulas and reflexive writing, without falling into the trap of empty
lyricism. At the same time, he did not want to abandon the idea of the
possibility to compose a poem with a distance. For Alféri, prose was not a genre
nor the opposite of poetry. Instead, in his writing, all categories merged and
stretched to compose a form that is constantly reinvented and connected to the
surrounding world in a critical manner. Alféri's verse seemed pleased to be
irregular, often short with fast cuts and breaks, as if to signify the
difficulty of achievement and the refusal of being chained up.
In Alféri's poetry, language played a very
important role. One of his widely praised collections of poems, Kub Or
(translated into English as Oxo), used the concept of the bouillon cube,
with each poem two-dimensionally reflecting a side of the cube. The book
consisted of seven poems, each poem made up of seven lines and each line
composed of seven syllables. Being not only a propitiatory number, a good omen
and the number of daily life, the number seven also challenges the dominant
prosody in French poetry and the use of even-numbered syllabic lines. This asymmetric
meter produces surprises, cuts and overlapping, with each poem describing some
aspect of modern Paris in seven short lines. Being interested in the minutiae
of modern life, it comes as no surprise that the media occupy the center of
attention in these poems – cinema, TV, advertising – as well as the artifacts
of low and high culture. Alféri takes the reader on a journey through the
streets, commercial life, politics, music, and the questions of how much the
figures from the past inhabit the consciousness of the present. As a poet, he
is not alienated, but always prepared to engage actively with the variety of
experiences he encounters. In the same way, this engagement is expected from
the reader as well – if the poems are bouillon cubes, the mind of the reader is
the boiling water in which to dissolve them and fully taste the modern life.
Every collection of Alféri's poems took a
form of a particular story. In that sense, Sentimental Journey can be
read as a mélange of paths, routes, and activities with seemingly no effect.
Anglo-Saxon inversion in the title makes one imagine an American road movie
from the '70s – neon lights, flashes and LSD. On the other side, the
construction of verses resembles the editing of a film, underlining Alféri's
permanent inspiration with moving images. Expressive and diaphanous, this
journey seems to be in search of its map. Under the ironic titles of each poem,
the events are being described and clashed with blocs of displaced thoughts,
creating language that is breathless and quick. At the end, it can all feel as
a memory of an unusual journey "into the history of the present, into the
archeology of intimacy."
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In 1996, with his friend and fellow-poet
Olivier Cadiot, Alféri founded the Revue de Littérature Générale, each of
whose two issues was a thick book: a "digest," as he and Cadiot
diffidently put it, of poetic methods, mechanisms, ideas and techniques, all
aiming at a lively new conception of lyricism. With Cadiot and Anne Portugal,
and in a different manner Emmanuel Hocquard or Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Alféri
is leaving behind the divide that has characterized French poetry since around
1980 between "poetry that sings" to an appreciable public and on the
other hand an austere, abstruse, negative poetic sensibility (represented, for
example, by Denis Roche or Jean-Marie Gleize). Pierre Alféri and his fellow
poets, rather than deferring to a polemical style, are vibrantly creating new,
humorous, startling, stirring lyric energies, which a reader can easily feel in
Alféri's nightingale poems, for example (in the collection La Voie de l'air,
2004), as well as in the "grunge ideas" active in his 1994 collection
Kub Or (translated by Cole Swensen as OXO).
Throughout his career Alféri had been an
active translator of John Donne and of the American objectivist poets George
Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. He earns his living as a teacher in art schools in
Lyon and Paris (L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, L'Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de
Paris, and L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris).
Most recently he had published two more fictions,
Les Jumelles (Paris: P.O.L, 2009) and Après vous (Paris: P.O.L, 2010).
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Les
Allures naturelles
(Paris: P.O.L, 1991); Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif (Paris:
P.O.L, 1992); Kub Or (Paris: P.O.L., 1994); Sentimentale journée (Paris:
P.O.L, 1997); Personal Pong [with Jacques Julien] (Villa Saint-Clair,
France: Sète, 1997); Hadicap [with Jacques Julien] (Rroz, 2000); petit,
petit (Rup et rud, 2001); La Voie des airs (Paris: P.O.L, 2004)
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
Natural
Gaits,
trans. by Cole Swensen (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995); OXO
[with photographs by Suzanne Doppelt], trans. by Cole Swensen (Providence,
Rhode Island: Burning Deck, 2004); Night and Day, trans. by Kate
Lermitte Campbell (Iowa City and Paris: La Presse, 2012)
For
a video reading by Pierre Alféri in English, click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVa6H0j50Nw
For
a video reading in French from Sentimentale journée, click below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FwRmJXTCoo&feature=related
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