Rimbaud Research Articles

Le sujet poétique dans l’œuvre de Lǐ Hè et dans celle de Rimbaud

Abstract As an attempt to compare Lǐ Hè, a Chinese poet from the Táng Dynasty, and the French 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud (in spite of a total lack of any traceable historical, cultural and inter-textual connections), this paper focuses on linguistic and stylistic phenomena serving as a proof for a striking resemblance between the two authors. Thus the first part of the article deals with effects of focalization, a specific conception of the metaphor as well as the status of the lyrical subject, establishing a theoretical basis for the concrete comparison presented in the second part. The conclusion is concerned with the question if the poems of Lǐ Hè can be translated into French by ‛adopting‟ Rimbaud‟s poetic language.

Madness and Modernity in Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer

This paper sets out to examine in detail the structure and internal development of Une Saison en enfer, Arthur Rimbaud’s diary composed in prose poetry. The paper argues that the collection articulates the experience of madness as an integral part of the author’s sojourn in a psychological Hades. At the same time it sees a journey towards a personal definition and sense of modernity as the means by which the victim ultimately extracts himself from his hell. Drawing on some of the key work on Une Saison en enfer by important Rimbaldians, the article seeks to illuminate and explain the central artistic tension in the collection between assertiveness and hesitation, certainty and doubt. Placing Rimbaud in the context of other writers who have explored alternative visions of Hell, the paper examines Rimbaud’s engagement with and rejection of traditional Western systems of belief and his fascination with oriental philosophies. The statement “Il faut etre absolument moderne” thus represents a culmination, a point of arrival, an emergence from hell.

„Jest ja, ale mnie nie ma” – granica poetyckiego szaleństwa Rafała Wojaczka

In this article the author made an attempt at demarcating the limits of the poetic language of Rafał Wojaczek, the crossing of which – as the author of this study thinks – opens before the poet a possibility of achieving the perfectness of the subject of his poems, portending the specter of madness. This project is combined with the problems of the crisis of identity being both the reason and the consequence of the many renewed attempts at its realisation. The author claims that from this point of view, it was in the Dziennik [Diary] (the first of the analysed texts) Wojaczek as an author his desire of perfection and discovers that it is unattainable beyond madness. Dziennik is also a place of the first experience of the crisis in view of which the debut Sezon [Season], and in particular the poem which opens that book, and which has the same title as the whole (another text submitted to interpretaion), is only its poetic rewriting. Such a view allows the author to reveal the intertextual opening. In the course of analysis of the poem, difficulties connected with the realisation of the project, i.e. obtaining oneself as authentic in the language, just defining of identity, the source of which is Arthur Rimbaud’s philosophy, is exposed. Nevertheless Wojaczek’s subject is neither a repetition of the model of Rimbaud nor its denial, but a transfer of elusiveness of the changeable “I”, expressed by means of the formula “I is someone else”, into the area of absence. The considerations are capped with the interpretation of the work Piszę wiersz [I am writing a poem], which is a poetic verification of diagnoses made by Wojaczek in Sezon.

The bïrïllē man of Harer: the contribution of Arthur Rimbaud to the evolution of a uniquely Ethiopian drinking-vessel

Use of a narrow-necked, flask-shaped glass bottle, or ‘bïrïllé’, for drinking traditional honey-wine (ṭïj) is unique to the Ethiopians and can be traced at least as far back as the 14th century. By 1888, when Arthur Rimbaud was operating his own trading house in Harer, ṭïj had been further '' democratised'', fostering further growth in the demand for the plain bïrïllé-s, particularly in the expanding Kingdom of Shewa. Rimbaud spotted the growing market, and became Ethiopia’s first bulk supplier of bïrïllé-s. He introduced the first designer-bïrïllé which he made available in a range of colours, at a price comparable to that of the plain bïrïllé. In doing so, he brought market domination by the plain bïrïllé to an end. In terms of his contribution to the evolution of Ethiopian drinking-vessels, Rimbaud achieved a distinction that until now has gone largely unrecognised.

Ross Chambers, On Inventing Unknownness. The Poetry of Disenchanted Reenchantment (Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Justice)

Il saggio di Chambers parte dall’affermazione di Rimbaud contenuta nella lettera a Demeny del 1871 – «Les inventions d’inconnu demandent des formes nouvelles» – e si interroga sulla natura di tali invenzioni che Rimbaud, e dopo di lui Mallarme, si sforzano di esprimere. L’accento e posto da Chambers sulla natura costruita e in qualche modo ingannatrice dell’espressione artistica, specie quando si tratti di espressione linguistica che cerca di dire l’«inexpressible». Due meccanismi, in partico...

MAKING AN ASS OF HIMSELF -- 'BOTTOM' BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD

This paper looks at Arthur Rimbaud's enigmatic little poem 'Bottom' from the prose poetry collection, the ILLUMINATIONS. It looks at some previous approaches to the poem and then proceeds to look at Rimbaud's self-presentation in the piece. Rimbaud's predilection for metamorphosis and changing identity as well as his tendency to portray aspects of his own failure in love and art come under examination. The sexual content of the text is also scrutinized and the conclusion is that in the poem Rimbaud sets out to make an ass of hiomself in every sense.

The Poetry of the Future; Or, Periodizing the Nineteenth Century

The question of poetry's future was asked with surprising frequency across various Western literary languages during the nineteenth century. In Walt Whitman's little-known essay “The Poetry of the Future” (1881), in Arthur Rimbaud's celebrated “Voyant” letter to Paul Demeny (1871), and in a famous passage near the beginning of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851–52), a future poetry was greeted as an original poetry. In each of these instances, however, breaking with the past entailed imitating it, which suggests that poetry's future looks much like its past, the way forward indistinguishable from the way back.

Voir – connaître : Optique, représentation, voyance

On the margin of the general problematic of the «synthesis of Arts» , the problem of vision definitely deserves particular attention in the framework of Silver Age studies. It is certainly possible to relate the painter Mixail Matjušin’s works on the «enlarged vision» to those by Jules Romain on the «extra-retinian vision» , and their further elaboration in the works by René Daumal. This constant interest, in France as well as in Russia (and certainly elsewhere) towards the functioning of the eye and its impact on the artistic creation is to be placed in a larger context of the 19th century scientific discoveries in optics, the works on the 4th dimension, and, finally, the theory of relativity. The objective of this article is to show how these purely scientific discoveries influenced artistic research and provided, at least partially, the theoretical foundation for it, even when the resulting theory itself gradually became fanciful, or at least unscientific. In a similar fashion, it is possible to relate the physiological notion of «peripheral vision» (Helmholtz) to the «enlarged vision» (Matjušin) and, a posteriori, to the discovery of abstraction. Furthermore, this problematic does not concern exclusively painting : vision theories have also had an important impact on poetry, which can be demonstrated by the experiments of Aleksandr Tufanov in the 1920s which followed the works by Matjušin or by the research of Daumal in the same years, which followed the works by Romain. All these elements allow to establish, in line with Arthur Rimbaud’s famous «Letter of the Clairvoyant» , a certain rapprochement of this problematic with the enthusiasm of certain representatives of the Silver Age for the phenomenon of clairvoyance.

Gest pośmiertnego pisania i inne „gesta” poetyckie (Verlaine, Rimbaud)

The essay undertakes to investigate the phenomenon of erotic friendship as an “intertextual friendship” and, at the same time, “somatic (mis) understanding” (German: Un-beziehung ). The following considerations include a discussion on the relationship between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, viewed first of all as bohemian characters of bohemian life and the protagonists of the mitologised homo-erotic relationship. Beside a hermeneutic attempt at describing the intimacy shared by both poets, or stages in the development of their intimate relations (with reference to French literature of the subject and texts that have not yet been translated into Polish), the author writes extensively on the reception of the relationship of the legendary pair of friends-lovers A -war period, Agnieszka Holland’s film Total eclipse and the most recent poetical texts by Ewa Sonnenberg. The essay is complemented by some considerations on similar cases, analogous to the instance of the relationship between the two French poets: epistolary romance between R.M. Rilke and M. Tsvetaeva and, important within the context of the reception of Rimbaud in Poland — love/friendship exhibited in the letters between Andrzej Czajkowski and Anita Janowska.

INTERTEXTUALIDAD EN "VOCALES PARA HILDA" DE GONZALO ROJAS: UN DIÁLOGO ABIERTO CON RIMBAUD Y CÉSAR VALLEJO

The present work proposes to demonstrate the existence of an intertextuality between thepoem Vocales para Hilda of Gonzalo Rojas and the sonnets Voyelles and El dolor de las cinco vocales of Arthur Rimbaud and Cesar Vallejo respectively. To achieve this purpose a bibliographic recollection and a critical review of the texts has been done, and a register of the intertextual data present in the poem (phonic, grammatical, and semantic level) was also establihed. The results demostrated the presence of the above mentioned intertextual relationship, that is why it may be assumed that Gonzalo Rojas' text is not only a love poem; it also establishes a dialogue with the already mentioned Rimbaud and Vallejo, which means this poem has a much wider potential meaning.

Robert Southey difusor de la obra de Kirke White: “Clifton Grove”

Trabajo que se ocupa de la figura del escritor inglés Henry Kirke White, conocido por los lectores gracias al esfuerzo de uno de los tres poetas "lakistas", Robert Southey. Tras una breve referencia a la utópica comunidad que quisieron poner en marcha Coleridge y Southey, basada en el pensamiento de William Godwin y su obra An Enquiry Concerning Political justice (1793), unas breves líneas sobre Southey dan paso a uno de los casos más llamativos de precocidad en poesía, comparable en muchos aspectos a otros poetas famosos a pesar de su pronta desaparición (Thomas Chatterton, Arthur Rimbaud, Émile Nelligan, etc.). Se traduce del autor, por vez primera en castellano, uno de sus poemas más notables: "Clifton Grove: A Sketch in Verse".

A estética vertical e a ética do desaparecimento em Juarroz e Rimbaud

Fruto de uma pesquisa desenvolvida no âmbito do projeto Razão-Poesia a respeito da colocação dos poetas na sociedade e nos meios editorial e literário, este artigo tem por objetivo identificar posicionamentos éticos e estéticos de alguns poetas diante da visibilidade proporcinada pelos meios de comunicação. Fomos em busca de compreender a opção daqueles que qualificamos de “poetas da verticalidade” pela sua busca estética, e “poetas do desaparecimento” pelo seu posicionamento ético. Arthur Rimbaud e Roberto Juarroz tiveram duas maneiras diferentes de escolher o desaparecimento: a fuga para o estrangeiro e a discrição silenciosa. O primeiro transformou definitivamente a forma do verso pela intensidade da pulsação do seu dizer. O segundo não teve a mesma influência sobre a produção poética subsequente, mas compôs uma obra extensa e sistemática. A análise desses dois exemplos nos conduziu a pensar a liberdade do desprendimento como condição de possibilidade do exercício ético e estético.

Œuvres complètes, II: Œuvres diverses et lettres 1864/1865–1870 by Arthur Rimbaud, Steve Murphy

MLR, 104.3, 2009 873 principal claim to scholarly interest,on the other hand, is the inclusion ofvariants to the text of 'Le roman', the theoretical essay which Maupassant published alongside his novel, but whose prefatory status he always refuted. Themanuscript of this essay has previously eluded scholars, but the numerous small divergences between itand the published version are now made available to the curious researcher by editor Antonia Fonyi. (Only a selection of significant variants is given for the novel itself, exhaustive listshaving been compiled elsewhere.) Fonyi's introduction, meanwhile, is stimulating and elegantly written, acquainting the reader with the lineaments of critical opinion on the novel with laudable economy. Fonyi makes some interesting critical observations of her own, though her assertion thatVouloir etre' and Vouloir avoir' are, ifnot incompatible, then at least antagonistic forceswithin thenovel, with differentcharacters being driven by one or the other (pp. 14-15), seems to preclude the rathermore Maupassantian notion that in Third Republic France etre and avoir are somutually implicated as tobe synonymous. Yet Fonyi's successful combining of psychoanalytically informed close reading with literary-historical contextualization works well to situate and illuminate thispolished and poignant novel. St John's College, Cambridge Andrew J.Counter CEuvres completes, :CEuvres diverses et lettres1864/1865-1870. By Arthur Rim baud. Ed. by Steve Murphy and others. Paris: Champion. 2007. 608 pp. 90. ISBN 978-2-7453-1688-2. In this elegantly presented volume SteveMurphy and his collaborators deal meticu louslywith early and largely neglected works by Rimbaud?'Le carnet de dix ans', Latin compositions and translations,Charles d'Orleans ? Louis , 'Un coeur sous une soutane', and various documents and items of correspondence. Not only do Murphy and his team dissect and annotate all these texts in themost punctilious manner, they also justify the entire exercise as more than an admirable work of scholarship. They frequently draw attention to features of these early textswhich prefigure characteristics of themore famous verse and prose poetry. Thus, while one might initially feel that this volume must necessarily be targeted at the Rimbaud specialist, it can also provide pointers for anyone beginning tomake his or her way through the canon. The authors underline that theirmission is to 'redefinir les contours de l'oeuvre rimbaldienne' and that in this context it ispossible to appreciate the underrated significance of these earlyworks. In his assessment of 'Le carnet de dix ans' Bruno Claisse analyses this 'texte troue' (p. 16) as an illustration of schoolboy exercises in France in the nineteenth century. In his 'notes philologiques' Claisse sets the very high standard for the rest of the volume?the greatest attention to detail goes hand in hand with themost scholarly interpretation ofwords, styles, and punctuation. In particular, Rimbaud's use of Latin is placed under themicroscope. George Hugo Tucker examines the compositions de Rimbaud latiniste' and productively explores Rimbaud's interest inGreek and Roman culture in the process. Like other contributors, Tucker points 874 Reviews out that Rimbaud often makes errors in his translations but, crucially, stresses that ces pretendus exercices "scolaires" font partie integrante de l'oeuvre poetique de Rimbaud' (p. 209). Danielle Bandelier and Denis Hue concern themselves with 'Charles d'Orleans ? Louis ,emphasizing that this early textrepresents an example of Rimbaud's political satire and also reveals the influential role of Villon while acting as an antecedent to 'Bai des pendus'. The final contribution comes from Steve Murphy himself in the form of a study of TJn cceur sous une soutane' and items of correspondence. Characteristically, Murphy dissects TJn coeur sous une soutane' in all itsminutiae such as capital letters, italics, and pointilUs. He does this to equal effect with the lettersand documents under review from 1870. In summary, thevolume not only represents a key component in theChampion series byMurphy on Rimbaud but also validates these early works as an integral part of the canon. University of Ulster Gerald Macklin Jean Cocteau. By James S.Williams. (Critical Lives) London: Reaktion. 2008. 253 pp. ?10.95. ISBN 978-1-86189-354-3. Following relatively shortly after his not dissimilarly entitled Jean Cocteau in the French Film Directors series (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), James S.Williams's new biography of...

Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility by Scott Slovic

> w P?' Z l-H w D H < w H ? *j c* O 5? iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimii Scott Slovic. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocriti cal Responsibility. Reno. University of Nevada Press. 2008. xv + 245 pages. $24.95. isbn978-0-87417-756-5 In this collection of occasional essays, several published else where, ecocritic Scott Slovic gath ers, under the poles of savoring and saving, the thoughts resulting from more than a decade's worth ofworld travel.The tension he feels between "the responsibility (shared by every living organism) tobe fully present in this lifeand the responsi bility (of a privileged, empowered human citizen) tobe involved with the transgressions and opportuni ties of my community" provides the connective tissue between these disparate essays. While the concept of contemplation in retreat certainly provides a foundation for Slovic's choices here for inclusion, it raises questions about intellectual work that Slovic seems unprepared to analyze with the acuity ofwhich he is capable. In concept, all essays serve his thesis?in practice, some far more successfully than others. In the weakest of the essays, such as "Going Away to Think" and "Eco criticism," Slovic presents the aca demic critic as a "man in a gray flannel suit," an ineffectual "third wheel" whose job is to serve as a kind of sportscaster who describes and contextualizes the work of creative writers and scientists. But elsewhere, Slovic knows better and shows himself to be a much more adept and important thinker.One suspects such lapses could have been avoided with a better round of editing for the collection as a book, rather than as a series of discreet essays. Critics who don't feel the iiiiiiiii.iiiii.iiii.ii.iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii tension between savoring and sav ing (and not necessarily because we are first-world wastrels) will have to search a little harder in these essays forwhat is useful to them, but it ishere. The strongest essays in the col lection give us the truest sense of the critical human at work. In "Be Prepared for the Worst," the most illuminating and challenging essay, Slovic reveals the way a critic's mind works, almost compulsive ly and regardless of the situation at hand, which in this case is the death of a child and the subse quent family-breaking grief.Here, Slovic writes at the height of his intellectual and stylisticpowers. In other standout essays, Slovic gets beyond theutilitarian bibliographi cal essays and offers close readings of literary texts, such as in his chap ter on Rick Bass. I'm not sure who the intended audience is for this collection. Sea soned ecocritics will find the sim plification annoying, or will have encountered some of these essays already, and those new to the field may be put off by the dismissive references to a general audience. Both sets of readers will findmuch to engage in Going Away toThink, but a stronger introduction could have helped us tease out much more. Nancy Cook University of Montana, Missoula Philippe Sollers. Les voyageurs du temps. Paris. Gallimard. 2009. 244 pages. 17.90. isbn978-2-07-077977 2 Philippe Sollers has been a fixture of the Parisian literary establish ment for nearly a half-century as thedirector of the influential review iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.iiiiiii.iiiiii Tel Quel (which became LTnfini in 1982), as a member of the edito rial board of the prestigious Gal limard publishing house, and as the author of an impressive list of books. Through his marriage to the psychoanalyst and literary theorist JuliaKristeva, Sollers also created the image of a latter-day version of the Sartre/Beauvoir couple that once occupied a central place in French intellectual life. Les voya geurs du temps (Time travelers) is fairly representative of theway in which his writing has evolved over the years. In this amalgamation of autobiography, poeticized narra tion, and literary essay, a nameless narrator uses a tone reminiscent of thedistanced irony thathas become the trademark of Sollers in order to recount, not only some of the events in his daily life,but main ly his musings on art, music, and literature. In the process, Sollers reminds us constantly of the con trast that he perceives between the excellence of his aesthetic outlook and thedecadence that is spreading over theworld lying outside of his increasingly lonely literarybubble: "On a pu parier autrefois de 'deca dence' . . . mais lemot qui convient desormais est celui de deliquescence" (While "decadence" may once have been the appropriate term, today it is decay). For Sollers, traveling through time mainly means roaming through literaryhistory, or rather through an accumulation of literary anecdotes. In no particular order, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Michel Houellebecq, T. E. Law rence, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, and Arthur Rimbaud are all invoked and briefly commented on (and this is of course only a partial list). It 78 i World Literature Today ...

Les voyageurs du temps by Philippe Sollers

Les voyageurs du temps by Philippe Sollers

For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema

To start off, I disagree entirely with the premise: not only was 1968 filmed, considerably and well, but the period unleashed some of the most magnificent initiatives in the history of cinema in relation both to form and practical organization. For ten years at the Cinematheque Francaise I have devoted one part of my programs to the exploration of filming by Collectives, of engaged films, and all of 2008 has been dedicated to a series May 68 International (Mexico, Argentina, Japan, USA, UK, Italy . . . ), rich in discovery. period 1965-1974 is probably the most fertile and most exciting in the history of forms and cinematic propositions, a veritable aesthetic volcano. This does not make the questions you pose for the present any less pertinent, since what the most interesting contemporary cinephilia picks up in part are the critical gestures that led the revolutionary explosions of the 1960s everywhere in the world: collective work, critical examination, emergence of alternative and autonomous cultures. sites of exchange, of pirating, the blogs, in the work of some, extend the values defended by what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino had theorized under the term third essentially for what concerns counterinformation: think of the work of Indymedia. But it is necessary also to develop a cinephilic counter-information. principal battle concerns the present: the production of valuable images is such that no critic, even the indefatigable Jonathan Rosenbaum, no historian, no director of festival can take account of the cinematic production of a given time. Everywhere in the real and virtual worlds leap out propositions about the cinema, even as the history of past cinema remains largely to establish. I believe that there has never been as much work for cinephiles as today: work on the corpus of the past and present, work on the methods of observation, of collecting, of conservation, of analysis, and so on and on. We can cite several examples. In terms of corpus, an important initiative has been that of Alexis Tioseco in 2005 with the site www.criticine.com, which charts day after day the contours of cinemas of southeast Asia, beginning with the Philippines. In terms of analytic methods, one can only salute still and forever the magnificent site directed by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis, and Grant McDonald, www.rouge.com.au, which maintains a permanent concern for the internationalization of critical paths/approaches. In terms of conservation/patrimony, the site www.ubu.com/film, specializing in the avant-gardes, represents a cinephile's dream. And then there are all the blogs, the sites of artists or individual cinephiles. I will cite only two, both exciting: that of the very independent and solitary Marcel Hanoun, who, in a unique move, has placed all his films online: www.marcel-hanoun.com; and that of the great stylist Peter Whitehead, www.nohzone.net, which is an art object in itself and presents the electronic material from which will come his next film, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The phenomenal pimping of cinema by capitalism since its birth has formed four to six generations of spectators and we find ourselves before a Himalaya of images which constitutes without doubt the greatest modern collection of banalities.1 A generation later, no visible improvement: a certain number of poorly informed spectators believe still that Titanic (US, 1997) by James Cameron is a more important film than A Luta Continua (MZ, 1976), an amazing short film shot by Asdrubal Rebelo and Bruno Muel with the Angolan people in struggle, which amounts more or less to believing that some samples of wallpaper are more important that the writings of Arthur Rimbaud. Since the books and accounts of Guy Hennebelle, the history of cinema of armed struggles, guerrillas, and revolutionary combats is no more than just isolated initiatives, like those for example of Alain Weber2 or yours on the films of fighters in the Spanish Civil War or the Sandinistas. …

Tactical reading: the ideology of form in David Antin's ‘Novel Poem’

Postmodern procedural poetry has received quite a bit of attention in the last several years. In her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004), Marjorie Perloff devotes a chapter to the ...

The Prose Poem as Puzzle: Letter Patterns in Rimbaud's "Mystique"

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY THE PROSE POEM AS PUZZLE: LETTER PATTERNS IN RIMBAUD’S “MYSTIQUE” CATHERINE BORDEAU ARTHUR Rimbaud casts the Illuminations as puzzles. He ends “H” by directing the reader to decipher clues as to the identity of “Hortense.” He also employs the language of cryptography in “Parade,” referring to a “key” that is inaccessible to the reader. Atle Kittang notes as well that the poem “Génie” “exhibe. . . des similarités frappantes avec la structure sémiologique propre aux mots croisés et aux énigmes” (227). The theme of the poem as puzzle provides an interpretative framework potentially applicable to all the Illuminations given their obscurity. Paul Valéry describes the collection as a whole as “un cryptogramme d’un genre singulier ” (qtd. in Little, Rimbaud 18-19) and Pierre Brunel suggests that “H” articulates a “poétique de l’énigme” applicable to all the Illuminations (“Poétique” 197). The question is to what extent the notion of the prose poem as puzzle informs the Illuminations. If Rimbaud frames the prose poems as puzzles, does he inscribe “solutions”? Many critics have considered whether the prose poems can be “decoded,” some debating whether they are even readable.1 Kittang argues that the Illuminations are not intended to deliver a meaning, but simply represent “une combinaison d’éléments signifiants” (192), and Tzvetan Todorov declares that one should not and in many cases cannot interpret the Illuminations (17). In opposition to Todorov’s position (Duplicités 108), André Guyaux endorses and develops Robert Faurisson ’s identification of “Hortense” with “l’Habitude,” masturbation, in “H” (143-64). More recently, Seth Whidden proposes a solution to the 1 See Pomet, Ascione and Chambon, Kingma-Eijgendaal, and Claes. YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 157 puzzle in “H,” while suggesting that his interpretation is only one of many that are possible (185). Although critics discuss the prose poem as puzzle most often in analyzing “H” and “Parade,” many have observed phonetic patterns resembling verbal play throughout the Illuminations.2 Kittang notes such phonetic repetition, including an anagram-like structure in “Mouvement” (254), but conceives of the Illuminations as “games” only metaphorically , as language freed from the need to communicate (190-92). Stamos Metzidakis has theorized the existence of meaningful letter repetition, which in some cases produces an anagram embedded in a sentence in prose poems (Repetition 85-86). He points out, for example, an anagram in the first sentence of Rimbaud’s “Ouvriers”: “O cette chaude matinée de février.” The word “ouvrier” is present in the o and u and the end of the word “février” (Repetition 87). However, he does not characterize such anagrams as intentionally produced (Repetition 87). Antoine Raybaud similarly observes anagrams appearing in a scattered fashion across sentences in the Illuminations, but leaves open the question of whether they are a “marque d’auteur, ou mode de travail, ou inconscient du texte” (105). Thorsten Greiner provides a particularly persuasive example of wordplay in “Antique”: he identifies the phonetic presence of the “satyre” within the word “cithare” (105). This wordplay is meaningful because it corresponds to the prose poem’s themes, in keeping with Susan Wirth Fusco’s observation that the Illuminations’ coherence emerges through the “reciprocal interpenetration of . . . semantic, syntactic , phonological and rhythmic factors” (167). Although it is impossible to prove Rimbaud’s intentions, verbal play that relates to a number of other features of the prose poem points to deliberate crafting.3 “Mystique” contains such an example of verbal play. In “Mystique,” palindromic and anagrammatic letter patterns correspond to other structures and imagery in the poem, suggesting that their presence is not merely accidental. “Mystique” thus speaks to the nature and significance of the puzzle in the Illuminations. 158 ROMANCE NOTES 2 For discussions of phonetic patterns in the Illuminations, see also Guyaux, Poétique du fragment 169-175, Bivort, “Pour une lecture textuelle des Illuminations” 43-44, and Metzidakis, “Visionner Rimbaud” 77. 3 Many critics have hesitated to attribute intentionality to a given structure in the Illuminations . However, Murat has emphasized that formal effects such as rhyme “ne sont pas des soubresauts d’un ‘marteau sans maître’, mais des procédés porteurs d’intentions et d’enjeux esthétiques” (371...

Mapping the desert: Arthur Rimbaud, Charles de Foucauld, and the Société de Géographie, 1884–85

This article focuses on two disparate figures in the French colonial period in Africa, the ex-poet Arthur Rimbaud and the ex-soldier Charles de Foucauld. Between 1883 and 1884, each lived in Africa in self-imposed exile of a sort, and undertook rigorous exploration of the region to which he had relocated himself. Both composed reports on their regions of the ‘dark continent,’ and both reports were submitted to, and recognized by, the Société de Géographie back in Paris. The two geographical texts – Rimbaud's Rapport sur l'Ogadine and de Foucauld's Reconnaissance au Maroc – are watersheds of life-writing, as much as they are representations of colonial Africa observed by Frenchmen. Through comparing the two desert narratives, and considering the two authors' African lives, I argue that the process of writing about the desert actually evokes the essential character of each writer's voice, a voice to which he only found access in the desert. Finally, these voices in turn provide valuable information about the relationship between France and Africa, colonial force and colony, and about the various forms of resistance to each of those roles.

Rope Bridges

Page 18 American Book Review Rope Bridges Laurel Blossom Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds Angela Ball University of Pittsburgh Press http://www.upress.pitt.edu 72 pages; paper, $14.00 In her fifth collection, winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), Angela Ball clowns around with the language (“branches— / Willow, olive, 1st National”) while at the same time exploring serious questions concerning the dualism of the world: “reality and appearance…subject and object, I and thou, being and nothingness, / Jean-Paul Sartre and John Stuart Mill, tractor and trailer, oyster /And pearl.” Ball’s aim appears to be to bridge these gaps, to render separation “[n]onexistent.” “MyAudition” puts the case directly: “I want to be you” (“your audacious frugality / And steamy existentialism, your resemblance / To a first-growth forest”). Ironically, these highly self-conscious poems reinforce the distance between things and our language for things, thereby undermining, deliberately or otherwise, their own risky enterprise. Ball makes her aesthetic antecedents clear: poems dedicated to French surrealists Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire ; poems addressed to British romantics Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth; references to Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, André Breton, and other twentieth-century (and earlier) artists and writers (“the marvelous troublemakers”) with whom she feels an affinity. One might say these colleagues, also, represent two different worlds, but Ball takes up the challenge of reconciling them in a quirky, rich poetic blend that works, in the surrealist tradition, to “abandon the pursuit of sense” precisely because, to the romantic imagination, “sense” turns “revelations into laundry.” Ball’s usually engaging wit ranges from wordplay (“The sewing arrives / But the needles have gone back into their haystacks”) to visual puns (“WAITRESS CAPS / Which have transmigrated… / To taxi roofs”), from the slantwise political (“Achilles’legs were sweet, and almost completely insured”) to the paradoxical profound (“We live honest lives / Of deception. If you’re together, don’t come”). Readers whose sympathies do not run to the Dadaesque may balk at super-conscious metaphors like the ones that appear, for instance, in “My Conference with Guillaume Apollinaire”: “A rhinoceros treasured her three-ring binder, a sax /Wanted to mate with a swan, a swan wanted to mate with saffron,” etc.; nor may they favor illogical juxtapositions like those in “Less-than-Stylish Ennui.” Arch conceits like “The Dress with Books on It Is Too Small” simply do not work. But, even without “getting” certain of these poems, willing readers will be carried along by the inventiveness of Ball’s language and imagination, especially in such poems as “Closet of Desserts,” “High-Rise,” or “My Boyfriend: A Confession.” Ball’s poems are anything but Confessional. Her “I” is a construct hovering somewhere between a recognizable persona and an abstract Ashberian “eye.” Presumably, Angela Ball has, or had, sisters; presumably, she has, or had, a mother and a father, though not necessarily this mother and father, not necessarily these sisters. However, an occasional piece of what might be the poet’s very female emotional or erotic biography does crop up. Such expressions of apparently personal experience can serve as entry points into the poems as a whole. In “What to Wear for Divorce,” for instance, she advises a sheepish deception: “Wear something worn first / By a wolf.” In “Once” she reveals, “Once I imagined a daughter named Maeve, / Not a clinic, a handful of Kleenex, / And an uncomfortable ride home.” And in “Boathouse” she describes a romantic moment as “The day I heard masculine laughter / From behind a door, and the cinnamon stick / In my tea began its unwrapping.” Reading this line, it’s difficult not to feel one’s own damp clothes coming off. These highly self-conscious poems reinforce the distance between things and our language for things. Gradually, recurring images attract attention: how often, for instance, the word “bridge” appears; how often Ball refers to modes of transportation, especially cars and trains; how the ordinary (the “real”) and the unexpected (the “surreal”) live side by side, like the carnival in the Kmart lot or...