Photographers Unknown, That Type of Certainty Exists
If Yi Jui was the case
and Julio is still perhaps the case and it
will never again be the case that Bogdan despite a deep desire
to the contrary and thus if g
is true when B. (for example) puts his hand on me
with his proud smile for now being able to dictate
the events happening thus
it’s 99% certain that not-p if
that type of certainty exists let’s say it’s impossible
and the world makes itself scarce but we can
within 1% or so calculate the sadness beneath the CD
& empty January
on the return train
towards nothing and
finally a subtle outline waiting on the quay
Stéphane Bouquet, The Loves That Stay I, The Next Loves, Translated by Lindsay Turner, 2020, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
As the birthday party
mentally accompanied by yesterday’s videostore salesman
who wrapped the gift. . . .
then dancing endlessly
will that be enough to make a special sonnet
where all the order
gathered yesterday into the combed perfection
of his hair
. . . .all the messedup order might sweetly
spread
Stéphane Bouquet, The Loves That Stay III, The Next Loves, Translated by Lindsay Turner, 2020, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse
and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions.
Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara.
Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and
gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.
Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”. Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France .
As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by 
Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.
Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian.
Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.
Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext
For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet
The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/
An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/
Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York