34 Comments
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Fu Manchu's avatar

i don’t know how much of this works but i do know what i like and when something kicks the dirt up inside my tired soul. this did it. excellent

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Corie Feiner's avatar

"the pollution of the cities

mixed with the odor of rotting souls"

This part is particularly Rimbaud-esque.

I love the personification of poetry with the essence of Rimbaud's take on life. Also, the repetition works particularly well. The debunking of the industrialized version of the professional poet career path was also... awesome.

It reminds me of when Galway Kinnell was my professor and he told me to not follow the MFA to professor path... he said to explore, love poetry, life my life, and see how it all goes.

"Hard hitting" is a right on way to describe Lerner's work!

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Andrine's avatar

I like my poetry fierce and David delivers

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Sheri Handel's avatar

I love this so much. So many demented lines that work so beautifully. Perfect for the day I am having. Thank you!

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Corie Feiner's avatar

demented lines! love that!

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Alexandra Dodd's avatar

Yes. This is a poem that speaks to me. I appreciate its plainspokenness.

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Corie Feiner's avatar

but it is sooo... right on!

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Mary Engel's avatar

Thanks so much for another well-timed poem/lifesaver. I’m with Ziggy’s comment and also soul weary. Grateful for your time and breadth of knowledge 🙏

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Scott Mesh's avatar

Great piece. Love the thoughts and the flow.

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Peter Shukie's avatar

Needed that this morning, cheers!

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Linda Collison's avatar

Comments on poetry are like weights on wings. And there, I just added my own unnecessarily heavy stone

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Joshua Bond's avatar

Maybe the wings of poetry can handle it o.k -- the wings of poetry are very strong and will still be flying when all else has crashed.

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Marco & Sabrina's avatar

Chilling

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BB Borne's avatar

Scripture!

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Corie Feiner's avatar

That is a great way to describe it!

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Brett Gillen's avatar

Lovely

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Of aestival's avatar

😂

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Hirço's avatar

I’ve thought a lot about this and I feel most intellectually similar to Rimbaud, but I think the reality is he couldn’t complete his project. He realized what his project was and what it would entail in it. He was staring into the abyss and he turned away from it. He had been.abandoned by all of his friends, his mother he had no sort of support whatsoever and that’s you know incredibly Lonely situation to be in when you’re attempting to live at the upmost limit of experience self annihilation was the only way to complete the project

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Poetic Outlaws's avatar

"In the folly and self-torture of trying to say what cannot be said lies nothing but ruin. This is why the greatest of writers have in the end always forsaken words for silence. As George Steiner said: 'The true masters are those who relinquish their vocation.' ...

It was Rimbaud who saw the light earliest, quitting the racket six days before his twenty-first birthday, to run guns and coffee in Africa. But it was Pound who put it best, after fifty-seven years’ work on his Cantos:

'I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move

Let the wind speak

that is paradise.'"

-- Nick Tosches, Me and the Devil: A Novel

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Hirço's avatar

I’m really not sure I buy this. He only intended to go to Africa to make his fortune, and then he was going to return. I think his mother was constantly pushing him toward some kind of bourgeois existence—same with his sister. There’s this pressure to provide. He lived in a very henpecked house, where there was a constant emphasis on sustenance and stability.

Rimbaud relied on Paul to support him financially. And when Paul came out of jail and turned religious, he abandoned Rimbaud. He tried to convert him, but Rimbaud was left utterly alone in the world.

I think the anxiety around becoming a businessman starts to take hold here. I’ve been rereading A Season in Hell over and over, and that’s where I really see him grappling with his project. I think of his project as similar to others—Nietzsche in some aspects, or even Renzo Novatore, who took his project to its final conclusion: his own annihilation.

It makes me wonder what might’ve happened if Rimbaud hadn’t gotten his leg infected and everything hadn’t gone to hell. I would’ve loved to see what he might’ve written later in life. There are a lot of authors who took long breaks and returned to the work. I think what you sent is the mythologization of that story. It’s a great one—I’d like to believe it too, that he just mic-dropped poetry and had nothing more to say. But the story doesn’t sit with me, not fully—not as much as I’d like it to.

I’m the end his project could only be completed if he went towards the creative nothing.

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BarkingTreesBite's avatar

It would be nice if "poets" ever in search of the "muse" would simply read this

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Gavin Long's avatar

That’s brilliant. I almost felt I wrote it. But I didn’t:)

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