-
More Serendipity… [UPDATED]
By email Annie Wyndham (see her blog here) sent me this link—another instance of serendipity, this time spinning out from my previous post about Talking Gourd South. Asemic writing! Who knew…? Henri Michaux, Narration (excerpt), 1927 UPDATE: Don’t miss the link in William Michaelian’s comment below.Read More
-
The Deeper Layers of Integration
The U. S. publisher (Archipelago Books) of Breyten Bretenbach’s All One Horse calls it a collection of “lyrical and satirical dream-fables,” which is an accurate a description. These pieces recall Michaux in their strangeness, and yet they don’t feel as hermetic; if you looked at your everyday life just slightly askew, you might glimpse some of these characters brooding away in their alternate universe of anxious but beautiful obsessions. Since Breytenbach is a poet, an adventurous and challenging poet, he has some things to say here about the art that deserve meditation.Read More
-
Closed Histories
I’m too harried with work to write a thorough review of Sara Veglahn’s extraordinary chapbook Closed Histories, but I want to take a moment to recommend it. To the extent that comparisons are useful in describing a distinctive new voice, I would say that her work has similarities to writers as diverse as Karen Volkman, Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons. Needless to say, I hope, these associations are subjective, and Ms. Veglahn herself might disavow them all! So I should let her speak for herself, if briefly: From the window, light.Read More
-
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
-
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