PIERRE REVERDY
These tokens of love in black horsehair
The sky smoother than your eye
The neck twisted with pride
My life in the corridor
From which I see the undulating harvest of death
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- Reverdy, Live Flesh (fragment)
translated from French by Lydia Davis
Pierre Reverdy (1889 – 1960) is a French modernist poet widely known and admired in his day but somewhat forgotten after his death. The forgetting took place for a variety of reasons, not the least impactful of which was Reverdy burning his works, disavowing writing poetry, rejecting demands of social life in the capitol, and moving out of Paris to lead a life of recollection close to the famous Benedictine monastery in Solesmes.
Solesmes is known for the austerity of its practice and exemplary quality of Gregorian chant – even today it remains one of the few living centers of Medieval monastic prayer, music, and singing. Together with his wife, Reverdy lived close by Solesmes for the rest of his days enjoying the proximity of Monastery's religious ambiance and high art. Sadly, moving away from the hustle and distractions of Paris did not stop him from becoming progressively more alienated, bitter, and disenchanted. It is debatable whether Reverdy suffered from depression, but it seems to have been highly probable.
Reverdy’s writing was always strong, both his experimental verse and prose poems, before and after his Paris days. He remained partially faithful to his self-made vows because while he continued to write privately, he did not publish. Not until France was occupied by the Germans during WW II, the poet in him reacted and composed raw and violent poetry collected under the title Songs of the Dead. This collection was published in 1948 and includes visual contributions by Pablo Picasso.
Reverdy was somewhat eccentric (you don’t say!) and kept close company with Cubist painters – Picasso, Braque, Gris and others. He was also close with Breton and Breton’s surrealist group of artists and intellectuals. While he never fully embraced the label ‘cubist’ for his own poetry, historically Reverdy was instrumental in developing Cubist and Surrealist literary genres.
During his Paris years, Reverdy also founded a magazine North South (Nord – Sud) devoted to avant-garde writings of his day where most up and coming Cubist and Surrealist writers published poetry and criticism.
Despite falling into a soft oblivion, Reverdy was also important to a number of American poets, especially those of the New York School where French influence was at its most impactful: John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Rexroth, etc.
“Reverdy succeeds in giving back to things their true name, in abolishing the eternal dead weight of Symbolism and allegory so excessive in Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Joyce.” Notice that John Ashberry does not mention Rimbaud or any French writers in that group. Perhaps French Symbolism is less offensive to his poetic palate than the Anglo one. I can see that being the case. Can you think of the difference between the two?
Writing practice akin to Reverdy’s poetics:
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Take objects or scenes from the world and juxtapose them within a traditional or open form that resonates with your sense of what is real.
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Write from a perspective of an impersonal subject and mostly ahistorical perspective.
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This poem should be a composition establishing new internal relationships between scenes or objects.
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Those new relationships should also convey a sense of the unexpected and a sense of mystery.
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Such a composition will resist being anecdotal / narrative.