Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s a rad radio production of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell which was published 145 years ago this year. Even though it might not be immediately evident Arthur Rimbaud had a lot in common with William Blake: both saw the benefits of altered states on literary vision and both were natural born rebels who couldn’t seem to help but attack the mores and codes of their contemporaneous cultures. Both poets were also visionaries whose words went on to influence the rock ‘n’ roll music of the 1960s and 70s. Bands like The Doors and artssts like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith quoted and name-checked both of these poets, and quotes like “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake), and ““A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses” (Rimbaud), seem as if they emerged from the American postwar underground.

Started in London in April 1873, and finished in France that August.
It draws on his stifling – often violent – relationship with Verlaine, and
his discovery that poetry was not enough. He was the great poet of
the age, and he didn’t have a pot to p*ss in. He wanted more.

Listen to A Season in Hell here…

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So I found an interesting article at Please Kill Me yesterday. It seems that poet/rocker Patti Smith may have bought the childhood home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Along with Jim Morrison and William S. Burroughs, Rimbaud is one of Smith’s great heroes — her song “Land” from her classic album, Horses, features the singalong lines “Go, Rimbaud!” Here’s the word about Smith’s recent purchase, and the neverending allure of Arthur Rimbaud…

Perhaps no performer in rock music has been more influenced by Rimbaud than Patti Smith – early on with her own poem “Rimbaud Dead” from “Babel” (1978), and in her music – the song “Land” on her first album “Horses” (1975) – her incandescent chanting of “Go Rimbaud”…

In 1976, Smith told Rolling Stone, “I saw the cover of ‘Illuminations’ with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaud became my favorite poet.”

In an interview with Thurston Moore in BOMB Magazine in 1996, Smith talked about her youthful influences: “I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.”

It came as no surprise then, when I read in Architectural Digest that Patti Smith recently purchased “a reassembled version” of Arthur Rimbaud’s childhood home in Roche, a small French village near the Belgian border. Like Bob Dylan (who famously went on a public tour of John Lennon’s boyhood home and in 2008, showed up by himself at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, asking to see Neil’s old bedroom), Patti Smith has an affinity for visiting the important places of the heroes and inspirational figures in her life. It was at his farmhouse in Roche where Rimbaud spent much of his childhood at age 19, wrote his most famous work, “A Season In Hell.”

The farmhouse has a long history. According to the 1987 biography “Rimbaud” by Pierre Petitfil, the farmhouse was acquired in 1789 by the poet’s great-grandfather. In 1918, it was destroyed by the Germans in World War I. It was rebuilt in 1933, only to be destroyed again in 1940, during World War II. The current farmhouse is said to be in a state of reconstruction.

Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s Smith talking about Rimbaud’s last written work, and offering a recitation of her own “People Have the Power”…

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I was checking out our Flipboard project for a scary Halloween post, and what’s more scary than an out of control romantic relationship? I don’t mean out of control in a way that challenges your maybe-irrational ideas about control, and might make you grow as a person if you treated the situation as a challenge instead of a threat. I mean the somebody gets shot kind. Here’s the Art News announcement of a grisly autumn auction…

It’s not often that a press release from an auction house has you racing through a dog-eared copy of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud before 9 a.m., but here I am, flipping to the poet’s immortal words about his tortured relationship with Paul Verlaine from A Season in Hell: “I forgot all my human duty to follow him. What a life! The true life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I must. And often he flares up at me, me, poor soul. The Demon!—he is a demon, you know, he is not a man.”

And that’s because Christie’s announced that this November, in Paris, it’s going to be selling the gun that poet Verlaine used to shoot Rimbuad twice in the wrist at the Hotel Liege in Brussels in July 1873.

I’m immediately reminded of the Verlaine and Rimbaud line in the Bob Dylan song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”…

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

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