The worn out ideas of old-fashioned poetry, wrote Rimbaud in his feverish Season in Hell, played an important part in my alchemy of the word. Before all that, he says he’ll tell us the story, yeah, of ONE of his insanities. He tells us what he liked, including pictures over doorways, old-fashioned lit, erotic books, fairy tales, silly songs, on and on. What he dreamed of: crusades and moral revolutions. What he invented: colors for vowels. E was white, for instance, and O, blue. He penned the unutterable and then saw gold, wept, but couldn’t drink its liquid shimmer.
© 2024 Emmalea Russo
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