When it comes to bad-boy cultural icons, you’ve got trigger-happy Rambo, and then you’ve got Rimbaud.
But only one was a poet. Only one shook and shaped poets and performers from Burroughs and Kerouac to Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and punk rock.
Arthur Rimbaud was the rebel, vagabond and drop-out dreamer who tore up centuries of French poetry and threw Paris on its ear — and did it with poetry written by the time he was nineteen. Then he dropped the pen and took off for Africa.
This hour, On Point: Biographer Edmund White on the wild-child poet rebel, Rimbaud.
You can join the conversation. Can you quote “The Drunken Boat”? The lines from Burroughs to Kerouac to Patti Smith and Jim Morrison that bow to Rimbaud?
-Tom Ashbrook
Guest:
Joining us from New York is Edmund White, novelist, critic, and biographer. He wrote “A Boy’s Own Story,” lived for years in Paris, and won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for his biography of Jean Genet. His latest novel is “Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel.” His new biography is “Rimbaud: the Double Life of a Rebel.”
Tags: books, literature, poetry, Rimbaud
Yawn…
Posted by Kash Haffa, on December 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am ESTI’m interested in hearing Mr. White’s thoughts on the similarities–both literary and biographical–between Rimbaud and Rimbaud’s near contemporary, Stephen Crane, given that Mr. White’s recent other book takes up the life of Crane.
Posted by Michael, on December 15th, 2008 at 11:36 am ESTIn re adolescence, using this Rimbaud hour to shed some light on the American argument on whether homosexuality is a “choice,” I’m left to hope others have the time with a tail of thread left hanging.
Posted by Ellen Dibble, on December 15th, 2008 at 12:32 pm ESTI’ve felt immune from confusion on that front with the idea that everyone probably has elements ot the other sexual disposition, and that those who see homosexuality as a choice are probably those whose “elements of the other” are rather high, sort of ambidextrous sexually. This explains the lack of undertanding among people, I tell myself.
With Rimbaud, especially the poem that was read about apparently an early homosexual rape, leaving him tainted and helpless to escape from the taint (or at least resonating with that as objectification of something else): there is a kernel to ponder.
What I come up with is this: Say a young person is tangled up in stultifying convention (and defiled thereby), and say that person sees that conventionalism (or certain religious persuasions, for instance) personified in a parent, a priest, or simply the given heroes of the day, the older teens one finds heaped with glory (sexual abuse could codify that into a moment in time, into a person, a place). Such a young person might be tangled in a sort of Gordian knot, inextricably unwhole, unwholesome.
That knot is where we got the ’60s push to offload the whole mess of civilization via LSD or other drugs, and apparently the same for Rimbaud. For both, the Status Quo is the abusive elder “taking advantage” of the young one, who is trying to fledge on its own.
It seems to me if one solves this by using drugs, one might also solve it by finding a sexual partner who is some ways parallels the knot one is in. Hence if a young male sees a male as symbolizing the stultifying knot, one finds a male to physically engage with, all the better to DISengage from, as a way to gain control, to obtain an objective correlative in some way to the shackles civilization and education have wrought.
A young person could achieve this extrication via some relationship/s and move on to sexual attractions and involvements that are no longer a part of the dynamics of nascent adolescent selfhood.
Such is a tale as old as Greek mythology (the little I know of it), and I suppose you skipped around it in the show on purpose because of its capacity to gobble up all the attention), but it seems a reader of Edmund Wilson’s book might find some psychological truths in the book’s focus on one articulated life, just as Rimbaud was putting some superfocus on that into his poems.
As Poetry Editor of Open Letters Monthly, I thought I’d sneak Gaston Frontenac’s wonderful review of Edmund White’s new Rimbaud book into these comments. It’s highly relevant and — if you don’t mind taking it’s editor’s opinion with a grain of salt — really well written:
http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/january-2009-rimbaud/
Posted by John Cotter, on December 15th, 2008 at 3:54 pm ESTMs Dibble:
May I consider your post and respond responsibly in twenty-four hours?
Posted by Tiger, on December 15th, 2008 at 8:33 pm EST“The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long and deliberate derangement of all the senses.” -A. Rimbaud… the first voyant, the first seer. it’s about the mind and what’s beyond it. it’s about transcending reality. it’s an exploration… nto an escape. LSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSDLSD
Posted by le voyant, on December 17th, 2008 at 9:15 pm ESTthis nigga smoked mad hash son. that’s my nigga g. get on the ganja bus! #12&35 (multiply n youll understand bobby dylan)
Posted by tokeabigspliff, on December 17th, 2008 at 9:21 pm ESTthere are far better translations of Rimbaud’s poetry than what Ed White reads here. i suggest J. Norman Cameron. these poems can actually have a good rhyme sheme in english if translated well, jst the meaning is a little more obscure, but if youre familiar wit hhis shit, its great. o seasons! o chateaus!
Posted by tokeabigspliff, on December 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pm ESTI find that Americans over value a lot of things that is French,including the
Posted by I.Kiraly, on December 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm ESTFrench language,and most of its poets.
Stef
It was inevitable that Edmund White would write a bio of Rimbaud. Hasn’t he spent his entire life chasing Rimbauds?
Posted by Leon Freilich, on January 5th, 2009 at 9:09 pm EST