Dear Alison,
Who's the translator of Rimbaud's Illuminations, of which you posted the excerpt?
I think your point here of Rimbaud's "acidic intelligence" is apt. Which reminds me that, in answering Chris originally, I meant to suggest that one of the reasons the prose poem began among French writers was not so much some quality of the French language, but because in 17th century France, the Academie's strict, and stilted, rules of versification drove many of the best writers into prose. Rimbaud, who is perhaps unique among poets in that his best poems were prose poems, was in burning down those palaces of the lyric following an impulse that had begun perhaps two centuries earlier.
One of the forces of poetry along with the poetic line is the syntax, that, as you call it, "grammatical logic of prose." Rimbaud pushes the poetic toward syntax, until all that orders disorder is the logical and linear order of the sentence, a single breath or thought. Though I suppose one could say that he finally disappears into prose, as he disappears into Africa. It's a much different view than, for instance, Emily Dickinson who writing not much later, talks of having "been locked up in prose." In Rimbaud's case, rather the opposite, as the poetic seems to have been the confinement.
Oh, and thanks for the prose poems. I liked them both, particularly the way that they seem to wind up and unravel simultaneously.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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