David Baptiste Chirot wrote:
> 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
Dave
Your defense of Rimbaud is well-taken. I've only recently read him. My only view
was to learn something from it. To try it out. I mean what the hell IS required
reading these days. Damned if I know! I just hobble along from reference to
reference hoping I'm following some path with my reading. I probably shouldn't read
at all considering that I'm writing at the same time. Having been a musician for
most of my life (completely self taught and never learned how to read music) I am
very attentive to the sounds of words and now this is what appeals to me as
material for poetry. I've just read Postface/Jefferson's Birthday by Dick Higgins
which has some wonderful information about intermedia and poetry in it.
It's plain I am out of my depth though in this thread so I am signing off.
RA
