The poet Jacques Réda, lover of Paris and jazz, died at the age of 95

He has definitively left the streets of Butte-aux-Cailles, Belleville, Montmartre and even Saint-Ouen. The poet Jacques Réda, former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Nouvelle revue française, died this Monday at the age of 95, the Gallimard publishing house announced.

Passionate about jazz and cycling, the flâneur writer sang in particular of the beauties of Paris, the suburbs and the side roads, notably in “Les ruines de Paris” (1977), one of his most popular collections of poetic prose. achieved. In 186, in the “Castles of the air currents”, he led into the folds of the “magical 15th century” of his district of Vaugirard. At 94, he still sang about the lime trees of Port-Royal or the Parisian blackbirds in “Lessons of the Tree and the Wind” (2023).

In the great tradition of rhythm and rhyme

But the bucolic simplicity of his writings – an ode to drying laundry, to the spider running across a white sheet, to the mechanic leaning on a bar in Belleville – is only apparent. To the anguish of the ephemeral nature of life, Jacques Réda responds in the language of yesterday, reconnecting with the great tradition of rhythm and rhyme, once neglected by French poetry.

“Who still cares about the silent, chewed or sonorous e, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, the hiatus and the diéresis? », he says, ironically, in his reflections on poetry recorded in 1986 in “She who comes with light steps”. “Despair does not exist for the man who walks”, writes the tender and harsh poet, “a little crazy, too sensitive”, who describes himself as a pigeon in “All Sorts of People” (2007), ironic counterpart to Baudelaire’s haughty albatross. He received the Goncourt for poetry in 1999 for all of his work.

Jazz, “a musical addiction”

On January 24, 1929, Jacques Réda was born in Lunéville in Lorraine in an old workshop house that smelled of rubber. In “Aller aux mirabelles” (1991), the man with a square build and blue eyes revisits the old store of his grandfather from Piedmont, who manufactured Réda bicycles there until the First World War.

In this garrison town, the brass bands opened his ears to music, then it was the turn of plainsong heard in a Jesuit college in Évreux where he studied during the war. In 1944, he discovered jazz on the radio, the only music “made for his heart and his nerves”.

A scholarly columnist, he collaborated for more than 50 years with “Jazz magazine”. He confessed in Le Monde in 2017 to “a musical addiction” and a “passion for beats”. In “A Civilization of Rhythm” (2017), a tribute he pays to the “big bands” of the 1930s and 40s, he continues the parallel he had already established between the musician and the poet in “Autobiographie du jazz” ( 2002).