THE SPACE BETWEEN: MOVEMENT AND LINGERING IN ANDRE DU BOUCHET'S POETRY

Few poets have marked tabular spacing as richly as Andre du Bouchet (19232001), yet existing studies of this aspect of his writing tend to interpret that space as mainly metaphorical, standing in for absence. I contend that the negative space inherent to metaphors of silence and void limit a reader's understanding of how these interstices render complex any reading and create tensions which play between the temporal-spatial continuum of the page. In a unique combination of both linear and tabular space, the visual impact of du Bouchet's poetry causes the reader to linger at the point where meaning and movement collide. This collision, I argue, originates in the particular use of a set of repeated terms combined with the white spaces of the page to determine both ease of movement and points of immobility. The words, then, rely on the spacing around them and the spaces between them. In this article, I propose a theoretical model of the structural function of the space between words and explain how white space, which is often overlooked or minimized, becomes a catalyst capable of acting upon meaning and movement in reading by virtue of the combined effects of both graphic and linguistic modes.