Tag: stéphane bouquet

Stéphane Bouquet: “One of Those Vibrations in the Air”

Photographers Unknown, One of Those Vibrations in the Air

His look and it took maybe 3
hello / 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 wil 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

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves I, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bed 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 slim desire
stretched out a 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 V, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born in Paris in October of 1967, Stéphane Bouquet was a French poet, author, actor, screenwriter, choreographer, film critic and an established translator of works from the New York School of Poets..

Born to a French nurse and an American soldier, Stéphane Bouquet studied at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris from which he graduated with his Master of Arts in Economics. After his studies, he was employed as a culture journalist and writer for the renowned “Cahiers du Cinéma”, the oldest French-language film magazine in publication. As a longtime film critic, Bouquet published books on such directors Gus Van Sant, Clint Eastwood and Sergei Eisenstein,  as well as a work on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 epic neorealist biblical drama “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”.

Bouquet published his first collection of poems, “Dand l’Année de cet Âge (In the Year of this Age)”, in 2001 through Champ Vallon Éditions. Taken from the inscription “in anno aetatis” engraved on Roman tombs, the series of poems follow the day to day life of a man as he ponders life and death. Bouquet wrote seven more collections of poetry among which are “Vie Commune” (2016) and “Les Amours Suivants” (2013). These two works, later translated into English by Lindsay Turner, were reprinted as “Common Life” and “The Next Loves”.

As a screenwriter, Stéphane Bouquet, in collaboration with French director Sébastien Lifshitz, wrote the screenplay for the 2001 autobiographical feature film “La Traversée (The Crossing)”. With Bouquet in the lead role, the film followed the real-life search for the father Bouquet never met. Continuing his collaboration with Lifshitz, he wrote several screenplays for both short and feature LBGTQ films; these include “Les Corps Ouverts (Open Bodies)”, “Les Vies de Thérèse (The Lives of Thérèse)”, “Presque Rien (Come Undone)”, and “Côté Sauvage (Wild Side)”, a winner of four film festival awards. Bouquet also wrote screenplays for French directors Valérie Mréjen, Yann Dedet, and Robert Cantarella.

Bouquet was awarded a 2002-2003 fellowship at the Villa Medici in Rome. During this time, he participated as a dancer in contemporary choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s 2002 production “Déroutes” at the Festival d’Automne de Paris. Bouquet served as both dancer and screenwriter for Monnier’s “Frère & Soeur” that premiered at the Centre Pompidou during the 2005 Avignon Festival. He also conducted workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris as well as workshops for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Stéphane Bouquet translated into French the works of such American poets as James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, and Peter Gizzi. He served as literary critic for the daily French newspaper “Libération” and contributed articles to the evening “Le Monde”. Bouquet was a featured speaker at international residencies and festivals including the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors and the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair. A recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, Stéphane Bouquet died at the age of fifty-seven in Paris on the twenty-fourth of August in 2025.

Notes: Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “Light of the Fig” can be found at the World Literature Today site: https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/light-fig-stephane-bouquet

The Poetry Society of America has an article on Stéphane Bouquet’s style of poetry in its Visiting Poet section by the University of Denver’s Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts Lindsay Turner: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

Top Insert Image:Photographer Unknown, “Stéphane Bouquet”, 2018, Color Print, Eon Magazine, Number 54, Association for the Promotion of Culture, Art, Education and Scientific Research, Sibiu, Romania

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves (Les Amours Suivants)”, English Translation Paperback, September 2019, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, January 2012, French Edition, Capricci Publishing Limited, London

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