Michel Bulteau


Michel Bulteau is a French poet, essayist, occasional musician and experimental filmmaker, born on 8 October 1949 in Arcueil.

Biography

When he was twenty-two, he contributed with seventeen other young poets, including Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jacques Ferry, Patrick Geoffrois and Thierry Lamarre to a poetry bundle entitled 'Manifeste Électrique aux paupières de jupes', which was published in 1971 by Le Soleil Noir. The poetry bundle entitled 'Manifeste Électrique aux paupières de jupes' was a literary manifest that caused a stir in the literary world. Encouraged by the Belgian-French poet and writer, Henri Michaux, he continued his quest as a rebellious poet.
In 1976, he moved to New York where he became friends with beat writers, painters and pop punk musicians. Bulteau is, in the words of William S. Burroughs, an "explorer of untouched psychic areas."

Work

Michel Bulteau was only twenty-one years when '7, Retomba des nuits' , his first book of poetry, was published. The poems in this collection are dark, tragic and desperate and are a reflection of the violence and freedom of the Beat Generation as well as the generation of black surrealism. He would publish many more poetry collections which are all characterised by a hypersensibility. This places him firmly in the tradition of great French writers such as Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud. Bulteau has written that "Being modern is the most dangerous artistic route. Being modern means refusing to be untrue, unreal.".
Michel Bulteau has written more than sixty books including poetry books, biographies of famous persons associated with the beat generation and avant-garde art scene as well as journals and essays. He has been an editor of the Nouvelle Revue de Paris in which he published Houellebecq's early poems.
Michel Bulteau is also active as a musician. He was the lead singer of Mahogany Brain, a band with which he aimed to realise his ideal of a marriage between poetry and rock'n roll. The band played pre-punk music that was influenced by drugs. Their music was a crossing of Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. The band was quite short-lived: they played their only concert in the summer of 1970 at the Lucemarie during which Bulteau threw bricks at the few members of the audience. After that they became a studio band recording two records. In December 1970 Mahogany Brain recorded the album With When released by the Futura label early the next year and they also provided the soundtrack to a short film of Bulteau's, Main Line. Another record, Smooth Sick Lights, was recorded on a single day in June 1972, but only released several years in 1976 later by the Pole label. Mahogony Brain issued a new record under the title With/Without in 2004 on Mello Records. Michel Bulteau has recorded a maxi 45 with Elliott Murphy and a further three solo albums during the nineties and in 2004.
Michel Bulteau has directed and contributed to a number of avant-garde movies which place him in the tradition of experimental directors such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brackage and Jean Cocteau.

In Fiction

Michel Bulteau appears as a character in the novel The Savage Detectives by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. In the novel Michel Bulteau meets Ulises Lima, one of the main characters of the novel, in Paris circa 1976. Later, a Peruvian poet, Roberto Rosas, becomes obsessed with his poem "Sang de Satin" as he is trying to translate it into Spanish.

Filmography