https://jacket2.org/commentary/antonin-artaud’s-early-years
This post at Jacket2 covers Artaud’s birth in Marseilles in 1896 through his move to Paris in 1920.
“When biographers trace the trauma in Artaud’s early life, they’re attempting to explain the suffering that shows up in Artaud’s prose.”
The second installment in a three-month commentary column for Jacket2 is up. Here’s an excerpt:
“The poem ‘Cry,’ published in 1925, begins
The little celestial poet
Opens the shutters of his heart,
The skies collide. Lethe
Uproots the symphony.
Here, in some of his earliest work, Artaud introduces the idea of doubling. The skies are multiple; the poet is simultaneously within the sky, of the sky, and he collides with the sky. He is both contents and container. Or rather, the sky collides with what’s inside the celestial poet’s heart. The external sky crashes into his internal sky. Whatever lyric is left becomes uprooted, ungrounded, dislocated by oblivion. Artaud’s work documents his own void. His work is a hyper-negation. It’s full of paradox and contradiction because he’s attempting to communicate what cannot be put into words. The abyss is a negative property.”
The 46th issue of the Berkeley Poetry Review is out & the design is strikingly clean, with lots of space for the poems to breathe. I’m excited to have two poems there breathing alongside work by Monica Youn, Dan Beachy-Quick, and Timothy Liu. What’s most exciting about getting a journal in the mail is discovering poets whose work I didn’t know before. I’m going to start looking for more work by Clara B. Jones, whose “Green is the Space of Mindfulness” includes lines like, “God, but one from the underclass touched me, and my mother / cowered. Black girls smell yellow leaves falling in October, but / Autumn bypasses Harlem where black girls smell nothing since // negation is not a negative force but the ground to Harlem’s figure.” And work by Anca Roncea, who writes, “every nerve is ending / what they did. what / I’m not supposed to own. their stories. / what rests / a place in-land-scape-able / vibrating at sheets of glass.” Shakthi Shrima has crafted sentences I’ll be re-reading for some time. Her two poems stand out because of lines like, “the women’s bodies / slur, they press into each other / like thumbtacks and stay.” One of her poems is pictured above. Thanks to Samantha McNichols and the whole staff!
Nancy Spero, “All Writing is Pigshit,” Photo: courtesy of Sophie Kitching, www.sophiekitching.com
For the past two years I’ve been studying Antonin Artaud. I came to Artaud as a way to think more clearly about madness because I’m also writing poems about Pierre Rivière, a young man in the 1800s who killed his family and was or wasn’t crazy, depending on which medical expert/community member/version of Pierre you consult. Thinking about Rivière and madness took me to Artaud and nonsense—particularly the nonsense words in his translation of Lewis Carroll’s work and in some of his later poems. I have started publishing some of my thoughts about Artaud and his work at Jacket2 as a part of their Commentary series. You can read the first installment here. If there are folks out there who are thinking about Artaud, or have been influenced by Artaud, or who are thinking about the intersection between mental health and poetry, I’d love to hear from you.
Inge Bruggeman’s artist book re-composes the prose poem “no one wants to play the victim no one when there is a gun involved and blue.” The text in this accordion-style book stretches thirty-five feet. The event of reading becomes a physical experience. The book’ll be showing at the Holland Project in Reno next Wednesday, the 18th. There’s a reception from 6-7:30 with a reading at 6:30. Come wander the words & talk to Inge about her active reading series.
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