my-blackout.com/2019/03/03/arthur-rimbaud-letters-1870-18719-sean-bonney-letter-on-poetics-after-rimbaud/TO GEORGES IZAMBARD
Charleville, 13 May 1871
And so you’re a professor again. You’ve said before that we owe something to Society; you’re a member of the brotherhood of teachers; you’re on track. —I’m all for your principles: I cynically keep myself alive; I dig up old dolts from school: I throw anything stupid, dirty, or plain wrong at them I can come up with: beer and wine are my reward. Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet filius. I owe society something, doubtless—and I’m right. You are too, for now. Fundamentally, you see your principles as an argument for subjective poetry: your will to return to the university trough— sorry!—proves it! But you will end up an accomplished complacent who accomplishes nothing of any worth. That’s without even beginning to discuss your dry-as-dust subjective poetry. One day, I hope—as do countless others—I’ll see the possibility for objective poetry in your principles, said with more sincerity than you can imagine! I will be a worker: it’s this idea that keeps me alive, when my mad fury would have me leap into the midst of Paris’s battles—where how many other workers die as I write these words? To work now? Never, never: I’m on strike. Right now, I’m encrapulating myself as much as possible. Why?
I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you.
It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought. Forgive the pun.
I is someone else. Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin, and to hell with the unaware who quibble over what they’re completely missing anyway!
You aren’t my teacher. I’ll give you this much: is it satire, as you’d say? Is it poetry? It’s fantasy, always. —But, I beg you, don’t underline any of this, either with pencil, or—at least not too much—with thought.
TORTURED HEART
My sad heart drools on deck,
A heart splattered with chaw:
A target for bowls of soup,
My sad heart drools on deck:
Soldiers jeer and guffaw.
My sad heart drools on deck,
A heart splattered with chaw!
Ithyphallic and soldierly,
Their jeers have soiled me!
Painted on the tiller
Ithyphallic and soldierly.
Abracadabric seas,
Cleanse my heart of this disease.
Ithyphallic and soldierly,
Their jeers have soiled me!
When they’ve shot their wads,
How will my stolen heart react?
Bacchic fits and bacchic starts
When they’ve shot their wads:
I’ll retch to see my heart
Trampled by these clods.
What will my stolen heart do
When they’ve shot their wads?
Which isn’t to say it means nothing. —WRITE BACK.
With affection,
Ar. Rimbaud