Where is Rimbaud?

  • Reading Newspaper (via)
    Rimbaud by David Wojnarowicz (artbook)

    Rimbaud in Java by Jamie James
    The Siren call where is Rimbaud:

    In ‘Rimbaud in Java,’ Jamie James seeks to fill in a mysterious six-month gap in the French poet’s life.

    JJ: Actually, you touch upon the greatest Rimbaud mystery of all. Somewhere right around the time of his Java adventure, most likely before it, Rimbaud stopped writing poetry. He was just 21. But what does it mean, to stop writing? Does a writer in a dry spell stop being a writer, even if the drought lasts the rest of his life? All we know is that he never again gave a poem to anyone to read, not that we know about. He might have written hundreds of pages of poetry that he burned. It is entirely possible that the lost journals of his voyage to the tropics may turn up someday in a moldering old trunk in a country house in Java. But the basic law of literary scholarship is: You have to go with what you’ve got.

    Arthur Rimbaud <> <> (Hide & Seek Gallery )
    Rimbaud by David Wojnarowicz

  • Ashbery and Rimbaud

    John Ashbery’s Arthur Illuminations

    . In his Preface to Illuminations Ashbery writes of “the simultaneity of all of life.” His maturity is not the weary illusion of having gone beyond all that. It’s what he already knew more than forty years ago when he wrote “Soonest Mended,” that:

    Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
    That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
    None of us ever graduates from college,
    For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
    Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.