Arthur Rimbaud News

Win Tickets: Rimbaud and Verlaine at Kings Place

Catherine — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:31:00 +0000

The lives of French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine sound like something from a Rick Mayall sitcom. Theirs is a tale of forbidden love, drunken rows and cross-channel debauchery, with knife fights, a shooting and even a fish-slapping incident thrown in for bad measure. During a particularly stormy period in 1873, the two Frenchmen lived together at 8 Royal College Street, Camden Town, and there wrote some of their most enduring poetry.

The house, complete with plaque, still exists, and was recently restored after falling into semi-dereliction. Plans are now afoot to turn the property into a lasting memorial and cultural centre, spearheaded by charity Poet in the City.

To find out more about the archetypal enfants terrible, head along to Kings Place on April 27th for a stimulating discussion about Rimbaud and Verlaine's time in Camden. The expert panel comprises historian and biographer Graham Robb, French Literature expert Dominique Comb, French professor and author Martin Sorrell, and author Yann Fremy. Alan Jenkins, Poetry and Deputy Editor of The Times Literary Supplement, will chair the event.

Thanks to Kings Place and Poet in the City, we have a pair of tickets to give away. To stand a chance of winning, simply fill in your details at the address below.

Winners will be selected at random at 5pm tomorrow (Thursday 23rd April) - so if you don't hear from us that evening, you'll need to buy tickets. Names and addresses are for competition purposes only and will not be passed on to third parties.

Rimbaud and Verlaine, curated by Poet in the City, at Kings Place on 27 April, 7pm. Tickets £9.50 (online, book here). This event is also part of the Slow Down London festival.

Source: Londonist

Poet in the city invites you to Rimbaud & Verlaine

Catherine — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:16:00 +0000

An event celebrating the life and works of two of France's greatest poets, chaired by Alan Jenkins, featuring Graham Robb, Dominique Combe, Martin Sorrell, Yann Frémy and the distinguished actors Bill Homewood and Estelle Kohler.

Arthur Rimbaud by Hervé Constant
Collection of The Arthur Rimbaud Museum France

In 1872 literary France was scandalized when Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French poetry, seduced Paul Verlaine, then a much more famous poet, away from his wife and child and ran away with him to London. Two of the greatest French poets of the Nineteenth century, they have been hailed as harbingers of the modern age, the inspiration for Rock Stars, and as pioneers for gay rights. This spectacular Poet in the City event will celebrate the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine and the stormy but creative period they spent together at No 8 Royal College Street in King's Cross in 1873.

Chaired by Alan Jenkins, Poetry and Deputy editor of the TLS. His most recent collections of poetry are A Shorter Life (2005) and a highly acclaimed translation of Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre": Drunken Boats, 2007.

Graham Robb, literary and cultural historian, formerly Fellow and Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford. Prize-winning biographer of Rimbaud, Balzac and Victor Hugo, his latest book is The Discovery of France.

Dominique Combe, Professor of French Literature at the Paris Sorbonne, also Visiting Professor and Fellow of Wadham College Oxford. A specialist in 19th-21st century poetry, his notable study of Rimbaud was published in 2004.

Martin Sorrell, Professor of French at Exeter University. His books include: Verlaine: Selected Poems and Rimbaud: Collected Poems. His last play, The Glass Man, won the Mental Health Media Award for Best Radio Drama, 2006.

Yann Frémy, currently author and co-editor of recognised Rimbaud and Verlaine studies, he organises the Annual "Verlaine/Rimbaud" Seminars at Paris Sorbonne, and is a member of Strasbourg University CERIEL group.

With readings by the distinguished actors: Bill Homewood and Estelle Kohler, leading players with the Royal Shakespeare Company Shakespeare's Lovers is their recent best-selling recording.

Poet in the City is delighted to be working with Kings Place in King's Cross, the new home of Guardian News and Media. This spectacular new building includes performance spaces, galleries, restaurants and a book shop. The charity will be holding a whole series of exciting events in Hall One at Kings Place during 2009.

From 6.30pm on Monday 27th April 2009 in Hall One at Kings place, the new home of Guardian News and Media, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG.

The event itself will start promptly at 7.00pm

How to buy tickets
Booking now open online, by phone or in person from the Kings Place box office:

Tickets cost £9.50 if booked online via www.kingsplace.co.uk

Otherwise tickets cost £11.50. Box Office 0844 264 0321 (local rate)

For enquiries relating to your booking please contact tickets@kingsplace.co.uk. To check ticket availability please use the online booking service.

For general enquiries or comments, please use our online feedback form or email info@kingsplace.co.uk

Poet in the City is a registered charity committed to attracting new audiences to poetry, making new connections for poetry, and raising money to support poetry education, in particular the placing of poets in schools.

The Star Cried Rose

Catherine — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:48:00 +0000

The star cried rose into the core of your ears.
Infinity rolled white from your neck to your thighs.
The sea pearled red onto your crimson breast
and Man has bled black at your sovereign sides.

Arthur Rimbaud

(Translation by Niall McDevitt)

An Arthur Rimbaud Drift

Catherine — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Poet in the City, as an innovative poetry charity, is championing efforts to save 8 Royal College Street, the house in Camden formerly occupied by the celebrated French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

It was whilst living at No 8 in 1873 that both poets produced some of their most important work, probably including Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer and Illuminations. Rimbaud and Verlaine are as important to French poetry as Wordsworth and Coleridge are to English poetry, and like those poets have a continuing impact on culture worldwide, generating scholarly research, exhibitions, books, films, and theatrical and musical works.

A unique opportunity has arisen for the rebirth of this 4 storey Georgian house and its development as an important cultural centre, celebrating Anglo-French cultural connections. The house, which retains its original structure, is only a few hundred yards from the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras and could be a magnet for the millions of French visitors arriving there. Michael Corby, the new owner of No.8, has just completed a sympathetic restoration of the property and supports the idea of developing it as a cultural space, supporting poetry and valuable educational and social engagement work in schools and the local community.

Poet in the City is leading efforts to secure the future of the house as a cultural centre. It has joined forces with Gerry Harrison, the former Camden councillor, Aidan Andrew Dun, the poet of King's Cross, and the many artists, poets and supporters who have campaigned over a number of years to save the house and secure its recognition as an important Anglo-French literary landmark.

The charity has established a group known as the Friends of No 8 and is actively seeking a corporate sponsor or other entity willing to take a 10 year lease in the property with a view to its development as an important exhibition space, home for poetry, and community resource.

If you would like to know more about the Rimbaud and Verlaine house, receive details of sponsorship (in French or in English), or become a Friend of No 8, please contact Poet in the City, c/o Dechert LLP, 160 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4QQ, telephone 07908 367488 or info@poetinthecity.co.uk or visit the Poet in the City website at www.poetinthecity.co.uk

In the meantime, you may like to participate in a guided walk about Rimbaud being led by the distinguished poet Niall McDevitt :

Niall McDevitt leads a poetic walk following in the footsteps of the legendary Frenchman's 14 months in London with - and without - his fellow poet and sometime lover Paul Verlaine.

Sun 22 February meeting at 2pm by the Eleanor Cross in the forecourt of Charing Cross station. £5/£3(unwaged)

(Please note: this walk will take a few hours and cover a few miles on its course to the Rimbaud/Verlaine House in Royal College Street. No lightweights! Please bring ideal overcoats, ideal footwear, ideal sandwiches, ideal beverages etc. Treat it as pilgimage.)

"HERE IS THE HOLY CITY, SEATED IN THE WEST!"

In association with FRIENDS OF NO.8, a collective whose aim is to run the Rimbaud/Verlaine House as a cultural centre in honour of the poets.

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, by Edmund White

Catherine — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:19:00 +0000

Publisher: Atlas & Co. (October 9, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1934633151
ISBN-13: 978-1934633151

Yeats once said that the writer must decide between the life or the work, but Arthur Rimbaud - teen-age prodigy, archetypal rebel, African adventurer - chose both. Although White notes that "a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings," his own account is slim and skillfully blends action and analysis. White declares his personal infatuation - even speculating that an affair with a teacher as "an unhappy gay adolescent" may have been inspired by Rimbaud's example - but he is clearheaded about his idol's shortcomings. Rimbaud's contempt for bourgeois life certainly made him an impossible visitor: if he wasn't selling the guest-room furniture, he was using the magazine in which his host's poetry had just appeared as toilet paper. White ultimately agrees with those of Rimbaud's acquaintance who saw him not "as an angel or a devil but as an obnoxious boor."

Source: The New Yorker

Arthur Rimbaud: Insulting Beauty

Catherine — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:46:00 +0000

"As Rimbaud sought to reinvent love, he reinvented writing - and violently." A look at how an iconoclastic young writer revolutionized the poetic form. With readings by Rosanna Warren

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," John Keats had his Grecian Urn proclaim in 1819. Two generations later, across the English Channel, the young Arthur Rimbaud was readjusting truth to beauty within (and beyond) the conventions of French poetry. In doing so, he radically reinvented the idea of love, even as he pioneered two major experimental forms of poetry, the prose poem and free verse (vers libre).

By the time he was nineteen, this astonishing adolescent had mastered and then assaulted the classical beauty of the Alexandrine line - the central building block of French verse - and he had broken through into realms of erotic and psychic experience for which his culture scarcely had a language. So he invented one...

The whole article can be found at The Athlantic.

An Arthur Rimbaud Drift

Catherine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Niall McDevitt leads a poetic walk tracing the steps of the legendary Frenchman and his fellow communard/poet/homosexual/alcoholic Paul Verlaine.

Sunday 19 Oct meeting at the Eleanor Cross in the forecourt of Charing Cross station. 1pm. £5/3 (unwaged). Info: 07722163823

Please note: this walk is lengthy and will take about four hours in its course to Royal College Street. Bring ideal overcoats, boots, solids and liquids. At the end of the journey Friends OF No 8 have agreed to allow the participants into the Rimbaud/Verlaine House AT THEIR OWN RISK.

New look for the site

Catherine — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:55:00 +0000

The site has changed, still a blue layout, but a new banner. I colorized a black and white drawing of Arthur Rimbaud by Ernest Pignon-Ernest and used the colours of the poem "Vowels". I spent a lot of time on Arthur's blue eyes. The text in transparency is coming from the poem "Genie", one of my favourites.

The site should now fit any screen resolution. It was tested with the last versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. I hope other browsers will have no problems.

Something new is the blog, both in French and English. Compared to the forum, you will be able to let public comments. You will now find old news in the Archives section.

If you find some bugs, be nice to report them. Have a nice visit !

"The Poem of the Sea" now on the web

Catherine — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:45:00 +0000

Erwan Le Gal's short animated movie, released in 2004 for the 150th anniversary of Rimbaud's birth, is now available online on Dailymotion website, with English subtitles.

It was inspired by "The Drunken Boat", Arthur Rimbaud's famous poem, and by Captain Nemo, the character created by Jules Verne. You will find all the details on that page. Narrator: Richard Bohringer, Piano: Helene Grimaud (Courtesy of Denon Records).

The Poem of the Sea Part 1
sent by Erwan Le Gal

The Poem of the Sea Part 2
sent by Erwan Le Gal

Bismarck's Dream (a fantasy)

Catherine — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:49:00 +0000

Here is a translation of Bismarck's Dream by Niall McDevitt. Many thanks to him.

Bismarck's Dream
(a fantasy)

It's evening. Inside his tent, silent and dreamy, Bismarck ponders, a finger on the map of France. A blue wisp of smoke billows from his huge pipe.
Bismarck ponders. His small claw-like index finger strolls - along the vellum - from the Rhine to the Moselle, from the Moselle to the Seine. Imperceptibly, at Strasbourg, his nail makes a scratch on the paper; he carries on regardless.
At Saarbrucken, at Wissembourg, at Woerth, at Sedan, the small claw-like index finger quivers with excitement; it caresses Nancy, tickles Bitche and Phalsbourg, scratches Metz, plots a route along the borders of the little broken lines, and stops...
Triumphantly, Bismarck covers Alsace and Lorraine with his index. Ah! what frenzies of avarice inside that yellow skull! And what perfumed clouds gushing from his pipe!...

Bismarck ponders. Ooh! a fat black dot seems to halt his fidgeting index. It is Paris.
Then, the nasty little nail, it scratches, it scratches along the paper, angrily, and finally it stops... There the finger rests, half-twisted, motionless.
Paris, Paris! But alas, the good man's been dreaming so much with his eyes open that, gradually, he's overcome by drowsiness. His brow tilts down towards the paper. Mechanically, his pipe falls from his lips, the bowl thudding onto the ugly black dot...
Poor sod! Abandoning the unfortunate head, his nose, the nose of Mr. Otto von Bismarck plunges into the burning bowl... Poor bugger! - right into the glowing bowl of the pipe... Poor sod! He had his finger on Paris... but now it's over, the dream of glory!

It was so delicate, so spiritual, so blessed, the nose of this venerable high-ranking diplomat - Hide it, hide the nose!... Ah yes, my dear sir, when you return to the palace to divide up the royal sauerkraut (...)* the proceeds of your crimes (...)* with your women in history books, you'll be carrying the incinerated nose between your dimwitted eyeballs.
There you go! Shouldn't have been daydreaming!
Jean Baudry

*(...) damaged lines.