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A Gift
I’ve been reading with immense pleasure a translation of the great French poet Guillevic’s Art Poétique (scroll down for the publisher’s description), brought over into crisp English by Maureen Smith. As the cover description says, this book “is a highly personal account of the process and experience of writing poetry,” which makes it sound like a dry business. It isn’t. Guillevic’s poems amount to a subtle and varied meditation on the nature of poetry and the nature of the poet. He is sometimes tentative, sometimes assertive, and never doctrinaire.Read More
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The Visible and the Invisible
Over at Issa’s Untidy Hut this quote appeared this morning, from the introduction to a new translation of poems by the great imaginal poet René Char. The introduction and translations were done by Gustaf Sobin, who essentially apprenticed with Char while living in France in the 1960s. Sobin remarks: René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary.Read More
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Rimbaud par Ernest Pignon-Ernest
I ran across this image of Rimbaud on Al Filreis’s blog… … and thanks to the image’s filename was able to track down the artist, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, whom I’d never heard of. What a gap in my awareness! I highly recommend a visit to his site.Read More
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Michaux On Style
I’ve been reading a wonderful book of … what, exactly? Aphorisms? Maybe. Brief, concentrated meditations, some a sentence long, some a page or more, by the great French poet Henri Michaux, as translated by Lynn Hoggard. The book is Tent Posts, and was one of the books published by Green Integer in its first year of existence. What a gift this book is! For writers especially.Read More
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Gleanings from Bonnefoy’s Rimbaud
In the post just previous I mentioned Yves Bonnefoy’s wonderful study Rimbaud, and while it’s far too concentrated to comment on in detail, I thought I’d offer a few quotes from it related to poetry in general: Genius, at least where poetry is concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom. * It will suffice that words refuse to be concepts; that they keep themselves from serving; that they disappoint man’s propensity towards empirical observation in order to remain as much as possible in the light of the unnamed.Read More
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A Rimbaud Stratagem
What is it about certain books that we buy and then leave untouched on the shelf? Or books we open now and then, sample a few paragraphs, then close and reshelve, temporizing: “Not in the mood”; “Too serious for summer”; “I need to read more about the period before trying this one”; “I need to learn French first.” But you never learn French. And yet finally—many years after buying the book—a strategem comes to mind, and a few days later you’ve read it, enjoyed it, been somehow awakened by it.Read More
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The Protestant Canoe
This post is a thank-you to Linh Dinh’s blog posting of Henri Michaux’s poem “Future” (which I encourage you all to read)…. From Henri Michaux’s sequence “Ravaged People”: On a vast expanse of liquid plain, in a colossal, ponderous, Protestant canoe that has come down from the North, he stands, stiff and alone, alone as a man can be when he is not on the path to salvation, when, in the dark zone, he has forced his way through the forbidden passage.Read More