Arthur Rimbaud

He hated authority.

Which is funny because he ended up taking his stage name from the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, right?

Exactly.

Arthur Rimbaud famously shocked the whole literary world with his brilliance and then just suddenly quit.

He just walked away to reject societal norms.

That's quite the namesake to live up to.

And because it was so big and so important and so precious, I kept on putting it off.

Until, as I say, this moment of crystallisation, writing the thing for the other end of Rimbaud.

But I still need it, like it is in every sense of the word, in every undertaking.

And there's always the doubts and the daunting.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, the "To hell with my suffering" is kind of a recurring one in my work, and it's from a Rimbaud poem, May Banners.

Um, that's kind of about, like, honestly just enjoying the small things in life.

[laughs]

one more reference that completes the weave I have sought, quite modestly, to accomplish in this book in my indicative way.

I'm thinking here of Heidegger's very late remarks on the poetry of Rimbaud.

Commenting on Rimbaud's phrase, La poésie ne rythmera plus l'action, elle sera en avant, Heidegger offers a series of questions.

Is Rimbaud referring to human beings? What she gives in German is das Handeln

und

Wirken des Menschen.

Or is he speaking of the real in its totality? Is en avant meant temporarily, or does it evoke some priority of poetry or precedence with respect to a world defined by industry, a precedence that is perhaps without prospect, given that what is at stake is relation to an unknown? Heidegger then offers, in the mode of a perhaps, a kind of translation of the poet's thinking.

I quote, "...the nearness of the inaccessible remains the region, the Gegend, to which the now unwanted poets retreat, to which only they first point.

Acts 1.18.19 says, And falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out, inasmuch as that field is called in their proper tongue Assel Dhamma, that is to say, the Field of Blood.

The book imitates poetry in the style of the French decadent poets, a literary group which included such poets as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, influenced by Gothic novels and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

In one poem, Corley wrote, I was in the death struggle with self.

God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours.

In those big, gooky rainforest ferns among lightning-struck conifers, right beside sudden black vine cliff faces, rising right at your side as you walk the peaceful path.

And as I say that, ocean coming at you higher than you are like the harbors of old woodcuts, always higher than the towns, as Rimbaud pointed out shuddering.

So many evil combinations, even unto the bat, who would come at me later while I slept on the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo's cabin.

Come circle my head, coming real low sometimes, filling me with the traditional fear it'll get tangled in my hair.

You actually love people, and you're glad Pat is here.

Pat is one if not the most handsome man I've ever seen.

Strange that he's announced in a preface to his poems that his heroes, his triumvirate, are Gene Harlow, Rimbaud, and Billy the Kid, because he himself is handsome enough to play Billy the Kid in the movies.

That same dark-haired, handsome, slightly slit-eyed look you expect from the myth appearance of Billy the Kid.

I was a loner.

Uh, it took many years of, um, what Rimbaud would call disordering the senses through various drugs and alcohol to get, come out of my shell.

Hmm.

But there was an incident, uh, when I was in my teens where, uh, just becoming te- a teen, where we had moved out of the Fifth Ward into Meyerland, uh, predominantly a Jewish American neighborhood in Texas, and, and I suffered a, a mental breakdown.

I mean, both of us were transformed by books when we were younger.

So I have like a whole like shelf of Otto and Alfred Jarry and Rimbaud and all these like crazy French people that, that were everything to me when I was like a teenager.

So it was really to put something, to make a contribution to that, to like the library as this like special salvation from insanity.

And that was before the internet became so all devouring.