by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI
Hard Mast Deck “looks as if the horizon’s been multiplied” What multiplied the poets’ horizon? What took them both together far beyond Mere reality? What was the mizen Driving them past the little bourgeois pond That they had lived in till they crashed against...
by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI
Marked = Scarred “I shall gash myself all over. I shall tattoo myself. I want to become as hideous as a Mongol. You’ll see. I’ll go screaming through the streets.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud Admit it. Geniuses are scarred, as are Perverted men. If we combine...
by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI, VE
As on the Smoked Walls of Lascaux “To judge simply by their writings, Verlaine and Rimbaud had not an active political idea to juggle between them—‘I don’t read the French papers any more,’ Verlaine wrote to a friend in June 1873. ‘But what harm in that?’ If they were...
by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI, VE
Beyond Empire’s Docklands When Britain led the world in child abuse In factories and in prostitution streets, Two poets, lovers weaned from their chartreuse Addiction, had to settle for small treats Like beer. The two were starving, nearly, in The filthilopolis...
by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI, VE
The Beckoned Coming “Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.” ~ Paul Verlaine “vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy whom everyone is in raptures about.” The centuries previous to ours were full Of raptures, real, predicted, and absurd....
by phillipw | Oct 2, 2019 | RI
Nostalgia Ain’t Wot it Used to Be The adolescent brilliance finds itself Entrapped once more in Charleville. He finds His genius brusquely returned to the shelf Of mère and provincialisme. This blinds Him so much that he cannot see his way To anything...
