JACQUES CEGESTE

Poems

in Nudisme 

(Editions de Minuit?, ca. 1950) 

Annotated by John Bloomberg-Rissman from No Medium by Craig Dworkin (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013)

Jacques Cégeste, poems, in the journal Nudisme (Paris?: Editions de Minuit?, ca. 1950) These poems, and this journal, have only been seen on one known occasion; luckily that occasion has been preserved on film.

“In the opening scene of Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950), amid the bustle of the Café des Poètes, Orpheus is shown a copy of the journal in which the poems of his new rival, the enfant terrible Jacques Cégeste, were first published. [Orpheus says] ‘Je ne vois que de pages blanches [I only see blank pages].’” (Craig Dworkin, No Medium, p.5). 

Dworkin notes that a later edition was created by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin, but he goes on to say that this edition is not in fact an edition of Cégeste’s work, but, rather, “a reference [to it].” (Dworkin, p. 11) See Dworkin for further ruminations on the work of Jacques Cégeste, and the journal in which it appears.