Poet, essayist and teacher Kenneth White, born in Scotland and resident in France since the 1960s, died on August 11 in Brittany. “It is difficult to accept such a great loss for Scottish and French culture and for the International Institute of Geopoetics which he founded in 1989,” formalized the Scottish Center for Geopoetics on its website, hailing a “poet -thinker-teacher” whose work has “inspired people all over the world and will continue to do so”.
Born in 1936 in Glasgow, Kenneth White had lived and worked in France since 1959. Reserving his essays for French and his poems for English (whose main translator was his wife, Marie-CLaude White), his field of observation and d his inspiration went far beyond his two countries of birth and installation. From his childhood in Fairlie, on the west coast of Scotland, White wanted to be a beach comber. “I only know rhythm from the sea and the wind – and the flight of gulls,” he wrote in the preface to his first collection of poems, En tout candeur (Mercure de France, 1964).
A wandering poet, Kenneth White quickly defined himself as a “transcendent tramp”. Surveyor of the great spiritual roads of the planet, from the Far North to the Far East, he defended in 1979 at the Sorbonne a doctoral thesis on “intellectual nomadism”, before teaching at the University of Paris. -VII, then to occupy the chair of “poetics of the twentieth century” at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
“Reading the lines of the world”
After spending several years in Pau, he settled permanently in northern Brittany. Surveyor of the great spiritual roads of the planet, from the Far North to the Far East, in search of infinite spaces and mystical dazzling, Kenneth White has created places of reflection and inspiration in France.
After his farm in Gourgounel in Ardèche (giving the name of his famous Letters, Les Presses d’Aujourd’hui, 1966), “deserted place where to concentrate, at least for a time, [his] life and [his] thought”, it was in the Côtes-d’Armor, at Trébeurden, that he spent his last forty years. A space renamed “Gwenved”, “an old Breton word (…) literally meaning ‘white country’, it indicates a place of light and concentration” (La Maison destides, Albin Michel, 2005). And the address of its International Institute of Geopoetics, founded in 1989 and chaired until 2013.
Geopoetics? A concept, a stream of studies that combined his concern for an “earth obviously increasingly threatened” with the certainty that “the richest poetics came from contact with the earth, from an immersion in the biospheric space, an attempt to read the lines of the world”. Awarded for several works (foreign Medici prize for La Route bleue, Maurice Genevoix grand prize of the French Academy for Les Affinités Extrêmes), Kenneth White received for all of his work the Roger Caillois prize, the Edouard Glissant prize, the Grinzane-Biamonti prize and the grand prize for French influence from the French Academy.
