the mAdness of A

My only method for reading poetry is to follow the trail. Artistic lineages, like linguistic and genetic lineages, are endless. There is an unbroken line of communications from the first people to the present. But as the lineages diverge and mutate some lines are lost, some are obscured, some are absorbed and some are purged. Others remain dormant like a retrovirus, or spread underground like the giant fungus of Michigan. There is apparently no concrete evidence that Rimbaud ever read Whitman. He read and wrote English fluently and lived in London with Verlaine before abandoning poetry and Leaves of Grass was a gay cult favorite in the 1870’s. In any event, Mayakovsky certainly read both Whitman and Rimbaud. And O’Hara was sired by all three. And certainly Joyce must have read Rimbaud’s letters.

from Rimbaud’s letter to Douai, May 15, 1871

Universal mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men would pick up part of these fruits of the brain; they acted through, wrote books with them: and so things went along, since man did not work upon himself, not being awake yet, or not yet in the fullness of his dream….

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it…

*******

So then the poet is truly a thief of fire.

Humanity is his responsibility, even the animals; he must see to it that his inventions can be smelled, felt, heard. If what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form, if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found; as a matter of fact, all speech being an idea, the time of universal language will come! One has to be an academician–deader than a fossil-to finish a dictionary of any language at all. The weak-minded, beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, would soon be raving mad!

 Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud, Louise Varese trans. NDP 1946, 1957