Author's posts
May 08 2010
Shake It Up a Little
That’s Rimbaud, Arthur (or is it Artur? I dunno) Rimbaud.
I read some of his poems and they were good, and I found him through reading about Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs and how they liked Rimbaud during one or the other of their wild chapters of life.
Then I read a biography of Rimbaud that I don’t remember much from, though I liked it, his crowd reminded me of the backward children I hung out with in the Midwest in my salad days. He came to Paris in 1871 during the aftermath, I think, of the Battle of Paris (about which I know very little, except that he was on the side of the insurrectionists).
He buddied up with Verlaine, another poet, and they scandalized the already terrorized Paris with their crazy living, woo woo. After splitting with Verlaine, Rimbaud continued his crazy ways.
He didn’t write poetry for long — he ended up a merchant travelling all over the place, didn’t make much of a success of it.
