It’s Rimbaud’s Week — With Cameos by Charlie Parker, Patti Smith, and Dohm Alley
By Stuart Mitchner
One thing to be said for living in a country led by a deranged narcissicist is how it heightens your appreciation for explosive poets; it also exposes your stressed senses to outrageous fantasies. For days now I’ve been reading Rimbaud’s Season in Hell with special pleasure (“Alas! there were days when all active men seemed to him playthings of grotesque madness”) while enjoying a twisted vision out of Disney’s Snow White where an evil queen with an orange pompadour is staring in the mirror shouting, “Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest ruler of them all?” and being told time after time in an icky sweet sugar-plum fairy voice, “Snobama! Snobama! Snobama!” And when Snobama’s face actually appears in the mirror grinning that ear to ear grin, the queen begins screaming. Once she’s calmed down she sends a troupe of rogues and jesters out to destroy everything Snobama created, a futile task because the documents of destruction have no substance, it’s like writing in water.
Keats’s Hand
It’s safe to say that Princeton is the only town on the planet where the disembodied hand of John Keats (1795-1821) is suspended above an alley dedicated to Romantic poets, the fluid of his deathbed epitaph flowing uphill from the tip of his pen to a stonework representation of the last resting place of one “whose name was writ in water.” You can see that and other “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” in Dohm Alley, Nassau Street’s “portal of poetry, art, and music.”
Keats’s hand is as delicately sculpted as a bird in flight while Rimbaud’s is the far side of delicate, a hand befitting his future as a gun runner in the Horn of Africa. You can see it on the cover of Princeton Professor Emeritus Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (Atlas 2008), which is taken from Coin de Table, a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, who, in White’s words, “did manage to make Rimbaud look suitably ethereal and angelic.” But only after “he’d had to order the boy to wash his hands before posing. Rimbaud’s hands, large and red and covered with chilblains, made their immediate impression on everyone who met him — as if they had a raw, menacing, peasant-like existence of their own.”
Usually I feel more comfortable with Keats’s Vale of Soul-Making than in the habitat of the 17-year-old poet who was born this week, October 20, in 1854. Given the state of the nation, I’m in a mood for Rimbaud’s riffs on “a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses.” In the land of the mad queen, Rimbaud’s rational derangement feels closer to the time than Keats’s negative capability.
The Face On the Pavement
With Rimbaud’s birthday approaching, I take my devastated New Directions paperback of Illuminations to read in the waiting room at Robert Wood Johnson. But as I sign in, I notice the side pocket of my jacket is empty. Somewhere between the parking deck and RWJ, Rimbaud has gone missing. When I get back to my car hours later, I find the book spread open on the pavement where it fell as I moved clumsily out of the car. Rimbaud’s schoolboy face is peering up at me from the detached cover, his head as if severed from the body of his book, which lay nearby. It looks like the scene of an accident, the poet of disorder left to die until I put him together again and drive off with Charlie Parker playing “Star Eyes” on the stereo.
Parker and Rimbaud
I’d never explored the connection before but it seemed worth some thought, so I brought along a Parker CD for the drive to New Brunswick. I also consulted a saxophonist friend in England who knows both artists better than I do, having spent a recent weekend studying a particular Charlie Parker solo; he’s also the author of Storming Heaven: A Story of Arthur Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Bloomdido Books 2016). According to my friend, “they both remade the artform they used in a way that was at first seen as destructive,” using “tight structures of traditional verse and advanced harmonics” to create “a collision between structural form and rhetorical chaos,” with Rimbaud “getting beyond meaning and Bird getting beyond melodic sense.”
Biographies of Rimbaud like Edmund White’s offer accounts of the teenage poet’s unseemly behavior — standing naked in the illuminated window of his host’s house, smashing the china, soiling the bedsheets with his muddy boots, selling the furniture, getting wasted on hashish and absinthe — not unlike some of the anecdotes collected in Robert Reisner’s Bird, where the self-destructive heroin addict demigod comes off as charming, unscrupulous, and never to be trusted when he’s in pursuit of a score. One story that made me think of Rimbaud is told by drummer Art Blakely. When the owner of a St. Louis nightclub insisted that the musicians enter through the rear and forbade them from fraternizing with the white clientele, Parker had the band enter by the front door and hang out at the tables during intermission. As people looked on, he asked each of his musicians, “Did you drink out of this glass?” and being told yes, each time he said, “Then it’s contaminated,” smashing glass after glass after glass.
I had this anecdote in mind driving back from RWJ listening to Charlie Parker soar above the nightclub noise in live sessions at the Open Door and Birdland in the early 1950s. While he’s channeling the chaotic atmosphere, playing it, improvising on it, I think of phrases from Rimbaud like “harmonic ecstasy,/And the heroism of discovery.”
Patti and Arthur
Probably Rimbaud’s most devoted fan is singer/songwriter/poet Patti Smith, who paid eloquent tribute to him in her memoir Just Kids. Reading the paperback Illuminations changed her life; she took the book with her like a pocket Bible when she boarded the bus in Camden, New Jersey for Manhattan. She describes the relationship more playfully in a 1996 interview: “I devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.” Earlier this year she purchased the reassembled version of his childhood home in France.
Another of Smith’s inspirations was William Blake and the song most expressive of her life’s journey may be “My Blakean Year”: “Fortune breathed in my ear/Mouthed a simple ode/One road is paved in gold/One road is just a road.”
Princeton’s Pleasure Dohm
Dohm Alley in Princeton is no longer “just an alley.” From Keat’s overhanging hand to the reimagined chimneys of Blake’s chimney sweeper poems, this passage through the heart of downtown has been turned into an art installation celebrating Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, whose poem “Kubla Khan” was to my adolescence what Rimbaud was to Patti’s, with its “deep romantic chasm,” “woman wailing for her demon lover” “sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice” and, above all, the Abyssinian maid playing her dulcimer and “singing of Mt. Abora.”
The grim last year of Rimbaud’s life described in Edmund White’s biography has one cheerful sequence. In July of 1891, with only months to live, he returned home from the hospital in Marseilles and for the first few days “surprised his mother and sister by cracking jokes all the time and reducing them to tears of merriment.” He’d also brought back an Abyssinian harp, “which he played in the evenings.”
Although you should see the Dohm Alley installation in person as soon as possible, you can get a preview at dohmalley.org/summer2017. Also see Will Uhl’s story in the August 2, 2017, Town Topics, where one of the creative minds behind the project, landscape designer and installation artist Peter Soderman says of the alley: “It’s a place you don’t want to hang out, but a place you need to go through. And we’re changing that.”