Stéphane Bouquet: “Because the Rain is Stopping”

Photographers Unknown, Because the Rain is Stopping

from The Next Loves: I

His look and it took maybe 3
hellos / seconds
only his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets will be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

from The Next Loves: V

Red t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slime desire
stretched out 2 meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves, 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, 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

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981.

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny.

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism.

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year.

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

Barry Webster: “The Whole Forest Goes Silent. . “

Photographers Unknown, The Whole forest Goes Silent

In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.

Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones, 2012, Arsenal Pulp Press

Born in Toronto in 1961, Barry Webster is a Canadian musician, translator, and writer of fiction, short stories, and non-fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Toronto and his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Webster is a classically trained pianist with two Associate Diplomas, ARCTs, from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Fluent in French, English and some German, he has translated some of his novels into French.

Webster’s first book of stories, “The Sound of All Flesh”, published by Porcupine’s Quill, won the 2005 ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction; it was also a finalist for that year’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation. This magic-realist collection of stories follows the lives of such people as a hydrophobic competitive swimmer, an opera singer who bathes in tubs of margarine for inspiration, and a travel writer whose terrified of having his photo taken. Webster’s stories from “The Sound of All Flesh” were short-listed for the National Magazine Award and the Canadian Broadcast Company-Quebec Prize.

Barry Webster’s 2012 novel entitled “The Lava in My Bones” is an ecologically-based novel, written in a magic-realist style, that is narrated from various perspectives. The storyline, divided into elemental sections such as rock, air, and water, follows Sam, a Canadian geologist, who attends an academic conference in Switzerland. There he meets the young, sexually active Franz, a swinger who awakens Sam’s nascent homosexuality. “The Lava in My Bones” is a fantasy story through which the connection between lovers, the dysfunction of families, and personal links to the planet we inhabit are examined. Webster’s novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Foundation and Publishing Triangle’s annual Literary Award, and the 2013 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ Emerging Writers presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Barry Webster has participated at numerous literary series, among which were the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Berlin’s Takl Galerie Series, the National Gallery of Ottawa, Vancouver’s Raw Exchange, and muliple literary programs on CBC Radio. Webster’s work has appeared in various publications including The Toronto Star Event, The Washington Post, Fiddlehead Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost news media company. After periods in various European cities, Barry Webster currently resides in East Montreal.

“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humor as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the erotic trysts between the narrator, his lover ‘F,’ and the ghost of saint Catherine Tekakwitha changed my understanding of fiction. I realized that thinking outside traditional heterosexual binaries requires a new template and so-called ‘realism’ can simply reinforce the status quo. Beautiful Losers showed me that literature could re-imagine what sexuality can be rather than merely slavishly reproducing the surface of life.”

—-Barry Webster, Montreal, The Query Project, September 2015, Plenitude Magazine

Note: Barry Webster’s website, which include a list of his published work, can be found at: http://www.barrywebster.ca/index.html

Plenitude Magazine is Canada’s only queer literary magazine. It promotes the development and growth of LGBTQ+ literature through online publication. The magazine can be found at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca

Top Insert Image: Camille Martin, “Barry Webster”, 2018, Color Print, Rogue Embryo Website

Header Photo Set: Fifth Image: Francesco Merlini, “Hua Hin”, The Farang Series, Gelatin Silver Print