Every Minute Is First: Poems

About Marie-Claire Bancquart

Marie-Claire Bancquart (19322019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes including the Prix Supervielle the Prix Max Jacob and the Prix Robert Ganzo. Bancquart was also president of the French arts council La Maison de la Poésie and a professor emerita of the Université Paris-Sorbonne where she taught French literature until her retirement in 1994. She lived in Paris for most of her life with her husband Alain Bancquart a musician and composer.Jody Gladding is a poet and translator with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Roland Barthes Jean Giono Julia Kristeva and Pierre Michon. She has published three previous books with Milkweed Editions including her own poetry in the books Rooms and Their Airs and Translations from Bark Beetle as well as a translation of Geneviève Damass novel If You Cross the River which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She has won the Whiting Award Yale Younger Poets Award and numerous others for her poetry and was a finalist for the 2004 French-American Foundation Translation Prize with Jean Gionos The Serpent of Stars. Gladding has taught in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has lived in France for extended periods over the last twenty-five years. Her most recent poetry collection is I entered without words. She lives and works in East Calais Vermont.