Category Archives: poetry

Rimbaud’s Sensation

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Arthur Rimbaud was a French Decadent poet who produced his best known works in his late teens and gave up creative writing before he reached 21. This recently discovered photo is of the poet, second from the right, at around 30 years of age. Known as a libertine and a restless soul, he traveled extensively before his death from cancer shortly his 37th birthday.

Sensation

On blue summer evenings, I’ll go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the wheat, walking on thin grass:
Dreamer, I’ll feel its freshness at my feet:
I’ll let the wind bathe my bare head.

I won’t speak, I won’t think about anything:
But infinite love will rise in my soul;
And I’ll go far, very far, as a bohemian,
Into Nature, — blessed as if with a woman.


Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (and my) bleak shore

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I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.


I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.


But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.


Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets remain favorites of mine for their dense, explosive quality that manage to retain such poise and attitude. On a bleak morning after rain, I woke up early and came to this deserted, rickity old platform to watch the clouds part. Millay’s words started running through my head. Remembering a line like “I will go back again to the bleak shore” is like finding a word on the tip of your tongue–it helps verbalize what I lack words for.

Livre d’Matisse

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“I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex.” -Henri Matisse, 1946

Le Cygne
Livre d’artiste, or Artist’s Book, were common at the turn of the 20th c. in France, and Henri Matisse produced more than a dozen illustrated books in his lifetime. Lucky folks in Atlanta will be able to see some of Matisse’s most successful book illustrations on display at the Museum of Art at Oglethorpe University from January 17 until May 9. This exhibition looks lovely, and I enjoy the convergence of the simple lines of the lithographs and the poetry.

Matisse especially loved poetry, and he produced dozens of drawings and etchings to illustrate the work of French poets Stephane Mallarme and Pierre Ronsard that are on view. Initially he created a 30 lithograph portfolio in 1941, but seven years later Matisse had transformed it into a 128 page volume entitled Florilege des Amours de Ronsard. Matisse’s drawings accompany the lyric poetry with flowers, nudes, dancers, and music.

I wasn’t familiar with this part of Matisse’s ouerve, and in looking for more information, found the artist had also illustrated James Joyce’s Ulysses and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal!, which leads me down another path of exploration…

Florilege des Amours de Ronsard