I think I fell for Rimbaud’s works when I fell for a young poet the summer I turned 20. He was hipster before hipster was such a word…wearing Velvet Underground t-shirts and dating a dreadlocked girl. Through him, I was introduced to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. “Une Saison en Enfer” or “A Season in Hell” is probably the most famous. Wallace Fowlie most likely has the best translation of Rimbaud’s works. Lately, his Complete Works, Selected Letters has been my in-between-novels reading and take-to-the-bar reading.
“There are countless hallucinations. In truth it is what I have always had: no faith in history and the forgetting of principles. I will no speak of this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest a thousand times over. Let me be as avaricious as the ocean.
Why! the clock of life stopped just now. I am no longer in the world. — Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below — and heaven up above. — Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames..”
Damn….
folk // blues // roots