2023-08-14 12:05:49
INFO LE FIGARO – Kenneth White left us at the age of 87, on August 11, at his home in Trébeurden, in Brittany, where he had lived for forty years.
Author of a rich body of work, made up of poems, stories and essays, he was the father of the concept of “geopoetics», term coined at the end of the 1980s, which proposed, through writing, «to re-establish and enrich the long-severed Man-Earth relationship.»
Born in Glasgow in 1936, this son of a trade unionist railway worker developed a passion for reading at a very young age (Conrad, Kipling, Hugo, Whitman, and later André Breton and Nietzsche) and accumulated odd jobs while beginning a life of wandering through Europe, especially near Munich where he lives in a cabin, already with the desire to be a “beachcomber“, and “shore skimmer».
At the beginning of the 1960s, he settled with his wife and faithful translator Marie-Claude, in an old farm lost in the Ardèche, while he was still looking for a “kind of mental alchemywhich will feed his intellectual nomadism. He will draw the Letters from Gourgonel. In 1964, appears In all candorwhere he states:The world is a challenge to me. Against it, I affirm my own world, which is the real world. Poetry is an affirmation of reality. No more no less.We find him later between Pau and Paris where he teaches, while being interested in Buddhism, Taoism and classical Japanese poetry.
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“Gay Nihilist”
Of his many travels, the one that has been called the “gay nihilist» brought back many works, in particular the meditative Face of the East Wind, subtitle “Asian wanderings», published in 1980, The Dream Archipelago, on the Caribbean, or Diamond Rock on Martinique and The Lurker of the Borders. This is also the publication of his Canadian story, The Blue Route, awarded the Prix Médicis Etranger in 1983, four years after obtaining French nationality, and which made him known to the general public. That same year, he was appointed holder of the Chair of 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne, a position he held until 1996. Also in 1983, he moved with his wife to Trégor, near Trébeurden, in a stone’s throw from the Pink Granite Coast, in an old fisherman’s house which he calls “Gwenved“, be the “white territory“, which will become his corner of paradise, his “energy field“. She will be at the center of her house of the tides, published in 2005 (Albin Michel). This is also where Kenneth White will write his Cultural Resistance Testwhere one can read:My predilection goes to a pre or post-humanist world where everything that lives in me is in contact with what is powerful and alive in the universe – forces, a life much more than personal.»
At the same time, this academic tempted by the wide will publish numerous studies, relating to Victor Segalen, Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Emil Cioran, Thoreau, the Buddhist Gary Synder the last survivor of the Beat Generation, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Bashô, Hokusaï , Van Gogh, and even Richard Texier.
“Between contemplative and expressive”
His retreat as a Breton hermit would later inspire him ocean earth memorial (Mercure de France), his last published collection (in a bilingual edition), where he remains attentive to “what resounds / when the sea / with its lyrical wavelengths / and its rough white murmur / rises with force / punctuated / by a multitude of excited cries.»
In 2007, the pocket collection “Poetry/Gallimardhad devoted an important anthology to him, An open world, taking up most of his poetic production.
We met him at his home, on the heights of Trébeurden, in the fall of 2021, when he published, concerned about his posterity, his voluminous autobiography, Between two worlds. He told us:I like the expression between two, which defines me well: between Scotland and France, between material and existential, past and present, East and West, between contemplative and expressive.»
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