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Excerpts from a Manifesto (1924)
I put this post together last year, while writing my annual Adventures in Reading post. Then I forgot to post it! So, for your reading pleasure, a few excerpts from “Surrealism Manifesto,” by Yvan Goll (October 1, 1924), translated by Nan Watkins and published in full in The Inner Trees: Selected Poems of Yvan Goll, edited by Thomas Rain Crowe. Much wisdom here! Reality is the basis of all great art. Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the ground under our feet and sky over our head.Read More
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A Holiday Gift Idea
If you’ve got €60,000 lying around, consider bidding on the pistol that Paul Verlaine used in his attempt to murder Arthur Rimbaud.Read More
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Rimbaud in Java
It’s long been known that Rimbaud journeyed to Java in the spring of 1876, a few months after the death of his beloved sister Vitalie. That voyage hasn’t received much attention, though, until Jamie James turned his attention to it in 2011’s Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage. It’s a beautifully designed, brief but fascinating book, more about Rimbaud’s world in 1876 than about his journey, since the details of that are scarce. What James does is piece together likelihoods with a brilliant Sherlock Holmesian zeal.Read More
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Tin Ear
Rimbaud (who did nothave a tin ear) It’s statements like this that drive me nuts—at least when I’m in a certain mood: The poem [Paul Schmidt’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre”] starts with I drifted on a river I could not control. In the other of my most favorite translations, Samuel Beckett begins with Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly. Two magnificent and very different first lines, but rhythmically not that far apart. The statement is by Norma Cole, a widely-published poet and academic who teaches at the University of San Francisco.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.08.2011
“You have to make an about-face and leave the poem, [Char] said to me, and this you must do at the moment of deepest emotion, when you belong to it most entirely and you are at your weakest. Yet the turning-away is unavoidable, and you must find the strength to accomplish it.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.01.2011
For my birthday, 80 degrees.Light wind. Windy light. * “Develop your legitimate strangeness.” —René Char, “Formal Share,” XXII (trans. Mary Ann Caws) * “To be a poet is to have an appetite for discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of all things existing and foreseen, stirs up, at the moment of closure, happiness.” —Char, “Formal Share,” XLII * “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us, that keeps awake courage and silence.” —Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans.Read More
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Guillevic’s Geometries
Guillevic The great French poet Guillevic has been a personal favorite of mine ever since I came across Denise Levertov‘s translation of his Selected Poems in 1970 or ’71. I’ve read Englished volume of his, I think, and only one failed to capture my imagination, the sequence published by Unicorn Press under the title Euclidians; as translated by Teo Savory, the poems struck me as a bit loose-jointed, somehow overly relaxed. Besides, I’m terrible at math, and each poem either addresses or is written in the voice of a particular geometrical figure—so the collection felt like an exercise.Read More
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Char Contra Conceptual Writing*
René Char “The poet is that part of man rebellious to calculated projects.” —René Char, from his preface to Furor and Mystery (1948). _____________________________*Viz., con artists like Kenneth Goldsmith: “I will refer to the kind of writing in which I am involved as conceptual writing. In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.Read More
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Library Adventures 1
Philippe Jaccottet Distances Swifts turn in the heights of the air;higher still turn the invisible stars.When day withdraws to the ends of the earththeir fires shine on a dark expanse of sand. We live in a world of motion and distance.The heart flies from tree to bird,from bird to distant star,from star to love; and love growsin the quiet house, turning and working,servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand. —Philippe Jaccottet, Selected Poemstr.Read More
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Time Concentrating On Itself
I have little to say about Guillevic’s The Sea & Other Poems (translated by Patricia Terry, introduction by Monique Chefdor, foreword by the poet’s daughter Lucie Albertini Guillevic) except: Buy it. Buy it now. This is a desert island book. I feel bound to quote from it, but nothing as brief as I have time for can do justice to Guillevic’s extended sequences in which menhirs, a canal, salt flats, and the sea speak.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
