Discovering Rimbaud at age thirteen colored all my teen age years
--back then, the barricades of 1968 seemed like Rimbuad's 1870 baricades
revisited--
as i got older, thought Rimbaud one of the few truly great poets
of childhood--
his poetry is not seperate from "Rimbuad 2"--the life--yet
prefigures it--
the life reenacted much of the poetry--
Rimbuad, like his father, had a sense of miiitary discipline in
all he did--"a long reasoned dergangement of the senses" not so much
different from his later fanatical attempts at science, discovery,
exploration, commerce, asceticism--in "exotic lands"--
Sol is right that the dramatic impact of reading changes with
getting older--
Reading Rimbaud now, after thirty years of doing so, i find him
actually more "realist" than "romantic"--
His vision of Revolution in all senses: "Christmas on
Earth"--"it has to be reinvented"--his ideas on the social, the role of
women, the idea of progress and technology, the use of language, of
altered states--etc--the mix of the "primitive" and the "modern"--are all
ever relevant--
The power of Rimbaud's work is the sense of "first time
seeing"--the wonder & violence of a child's seeing--and the attempt to
bring this energy into language, no matter how worn out--
For me, Rimbaud's work continues to be explosive--both the writing
and the life, which are not seperate, but equal parts of a tension among
art and action, anarchy & self discipline, which Rimbaud posed in a more
radical sense than most--
A very interesting book on Rimbaud's life "after poetry" is
SOMEBODY ELSE by Charles Nicholl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997)
reverie & revolution--the small child dreaming of Mississippis
while gazing at a gray puddle in a street in Europe--
Rimbaud is one of the great documentary writers--and his
documentation included all states of being that he could embrace--
he attempted facts in areas most often left to fabulists and his
realism was not to be deluded by his own fabulsms--
though his own facts were often outdone, in "later life"--by those
of others--(is Rimbaud a moral--or a moralist--or the two?--as ever, he
poses questions . . . )
Rimbaud is read differently when one is a teen ager--as most books
are--it takes time to be aware of his questions--
Few ever posed them as harshly--
or presented childhood as realistically--
--dave baptiste chirot
On Sun, 23 Apr 2000, S.E. Nte wrote:
> I wrote:
> > > to have much more power or maybe just a different power. Maybe one is more
> > > romantic/idealistic at that stage of life...
> >
>
> Heiko wrote:
> > I dont understand what you mean by that or why you write this. A text is a
> > text is a text. Do you think reading is just for teenagers ? Certainly
> > not.
> >
> >
>
> Heiko, maybe I didn't make myself clear. What I meant was that what you
> personally get from a text changes as you get older. When I read certain
> poems as a teenager I didn't always understand some of the more subtle
> meanings which I understand when I read them now as an adult. I think that
> as a teenager I often interpreted things in terms of what I hoped they meant
> rather than what they really meant....which is why I say that as a teenager
> one often reads things in a more romantic/idealistic manner.
>
>
> Hope this makes sense.
>
> cheers,
>
> Sol.
>
