par Yasmine Getz
1996, in La Revue des revues no 22
L’Éphémère
In 1966, the poets André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, the criticist Gaëtan Picon, and the writer and painter Louis-René des Forêts established a quarterly journal with a baudlerian name, L’Éphémère. Twenty journal issues appeared through 1972, all with the support of the Maeght Foundation, but with editorial independance. One of the journal’s features consisted of assembling in the same lieu poets and artists (10-30 pages of visual art were appearing in the 130 pages of each issue on average). However, the main feature of the journal was its authors’ determination in the period of dominant structuralism, the authors refused both to reduce the work of art to an object (system, structure), and to consider it from a critical perspective separated from the creative act. But most of all, the journal was a place shared by all those – artists, philosophers, ethnologists – who continued to believe in the value of a personal poetic act, necessarily cut from the world as it exists. Therefore, L’Éphémère is less a place assembling the works of art and more that of a community of persons who went on the road of the art and overcame it (Paul Celan), persons who witnessed that creating sense belongs still and forever to mankind. Hence, L’Éphémère conceived poetry as the opening of another relationship to the world ; it conceived published works as meetings between persons, including the reader at the moment of his present and presence, live, volatile, éphémère.