Joshua Cody's setting of Michel Deguy's poem La Rose des Langues de Paris will be performed by Sospeso on the December 12 concert this season, with soloists Lucy Shelton and Andre Solomon-Glover.

Michel Deguy is among the outstanding figures in modern French literature. He has become known as a writer who brings together poetic practice and a theoretical reflexion on “the things of poetry and the cultural affair” (a 1986 title). Since the publication of his first collection, Les Meutrieres (1959), he has been considered one of the major poets of his generation. Demanding, multiform, philosophical, and lyrical, Mr. Deguy’s work escapes the straightjacket of classification. Always refusing the name of the poet, he prefers to evoke “le poète que je cherche à être,” “the poet I am seeking to be.” His work exists in the continual tension between poetry and the “becoming cultural of all.” 

Mr. Deguy is also known for his tremendous generosity. His abilities and energy have contributed to the development of many French literary and philosophical institutions from the review Critique to the College international de philosophie, of which he is one of the co-founders (with Jacques Derrida and others); from the prestigious Gallimard Editions to the unique and irreplaceable journal Po&Sie. Mr. Deguy is currently Professor of French literature at the Université de Paris VII (Saint-Denis); the Director of Po&Sie (Editions Belin), the major French journal of poetry and poetics; the Editor of Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Sartre; and the former president of the Collège International de Philosophie. He is also active as a translator of, among others, Heidegger, Gongora, Sappho, Dante, and various American poets. For his poetry, Michel Deguy has been awarded the Prix Mallarmé and the Grand Prix National de la Poésie.