Arthur Rimbaud Drift

AN ARTHUR RIMBAUD DRIFT is a poetic walk following the London trail of Arthur Rimbaud and his fellow poet Paul Verlaine, who first visited the English capital - which they called Leun Deun - in September 1872.

The route goes from Charing Cross Station, where the poets arrived, through French Soho, where they first lived, and ends up at the legendary 8 Royal College Street where they had a proto-surrealist bust-up over a fish.

Poet Niall McDevitt has gleaned the great biographies of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie, Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Charles Nicholls and Graham Robb, as well as Joanna Richardsons' excellent biography of Verlaine, and has mapped out many of the most significant Rimbaud/Verlaine sites.

It is worth remembering that of Rimbaud's meteorically brief literary career, 14 months were spent in London, that he wrote some of A Season in Hell in London, most of Illuminations, and that the latter is one of the city's outstanding literary landmarks, a modernist classic 50 years before modernism.

The walk traces the poets' doomed quest to 're-invent love' as well as Rimbaud's later sojourn with the poet Germain Nouveau, his falling ill, and his being rescued by his mother, the terrifying 'Shadow Mouth'. We also find out about Verlaine's truimphant return to London in the 1890s where he was feted as the prince of the Decadents.

For a preview of the tour, tune into the Robert Elms Show BBC LONDON on February 18 at 1.40.

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. Please bring ideal overcoats, ideal footwear, ideal sandwiches, ideal beverages etc. Treat it as pilgimage.)

The Stolen Heart

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
Yellowy with tobacco stains.
Now they're squirting their jets of soup!
My sad heart slobbers at the poop
As the ball-breaking of the troops
Has them guffawing on the main.
My sad heart slobbers at the poop
Yellowy with tobacco stains.

Ithyphallic and belligerent,
Their ball-breaking has depraved it.
The rudder's daubed in smutty paint,
Ithyphallic and belligerent.
Abracadabraesque waves are sent
To cleanse my heart and save it;
Ithyphallic and belligerent,
Their ball-breaking has depraved it.

When they have spat out their plugs,
Oh stolen heart, what can we do
To please these Rabelaisian slugs
When they have spat out their plugs?
My stomach will dredge up the glugs
Into the bilge-wells of this stew...
When they have spat out their plugs,
Oh stolen heart, what can we do?

poem by Arthur Rimbaud; version by Niall McDevitt

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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