Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
But where are the snows of last year? That was the greatest concern of Villon, the Parisian poet.
With 'Peradam', the nature of the project was such that it was deeply immersed in spiritual concepts in India and is based on the works of French poet Rene Daumal.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful.
And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.
Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !
The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
