This is John Tranter’s Main Site at: johntranter.com
Reviews, interviews, photos, poems, prose pieces: over 1,000 printed pages of free reading matter. This site has had over 50,000 visits.
“John Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet.” — US Publishers’ Weekly, 2007
My Email: My usual email address is déltá «át» jóhntrántér [dót] nét
Here’s some of what I wrote for Jacket2 in Philadelphia from October 2012 to February 2013 — Check it out here. John Ashbery in Jacket — Calendar of Poets and Days: poems for holiday cards, compiled by Elaine Equi — The Elephant has Left the Room — «Jacket» magazine and the Internet, 1997-2010 — Veronica Forrest-Thomson, British poet and critic, dead in 1975 at the age of 27 — items in «Jacket» magazine on US poet Barbara Guest — Noah Eli Gordon interviews US poet Jennifer Moxley — When and where a major ripple on the the new wave of poetry began: Angel Hair magazine, Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman, 1966 to 1978 — The New Russian Poetry: Over 70 items, poems and articles, in Jacket 36 — and lots more… — something new every few days… forty posts, links to hundreds of items…
My Journal: This Main Site is gigantic and detailed, and to the excitable visitor, it can seem slow to change. For snappier and more highly caffeinated action, please visit my other site, my Journal, a free journal of gossip, meretricious opinions, strange photographs, eccentric research and thoughtful insights.
My Notebook: When you’ve done that, return to this Main Site, sit back, open a fresh jug of Mother’s Ruin, and visit my Notebook, a Contents Page page of links to the best pages on this Main Site, including an exegesis of the 2012 University of Auckland, NZ, seminar on “Short Takes on the Long Poem”, with lots of photos and a very long poem, inscribed by over 50 people on an island beach in Auckland Bay.
[»»] The Best Australian Poems 2011 In 2011 I was asked to guest-edit this volume, which turned out to be very popular. Here is my Introduction, and an Interview conducted by the publishers, Black Inc, in Melbourne. [Also noted in my Journal in September, 2012]
[»»] The Elephant Has Left the Room:
Jacket magazine and the Internet; by John Tranter: Available now here on the website of the Journal for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Abstract: Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the free international Internet-only magazine Jacket single-handed in 1997. Jacket quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia. In late 2010 John Tranter gave it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it continues to flourish. This memoir traces John Tranter’s publication of literary materials on the Internet including the technical and literary problems faced by Jacket, and outlines the many other projects that resulted in the Internet publication of over fifty thousand mostly Australian poems, articles, reviews, interviews and photographs. [Also noted in my Journal in September 2012]
[»»] 800 Jacket Book Reviews: This list provides quick links to some eight hundred book reviews in Jacket magazine, up to and including issue 40, sorted by the Author of the book under review. It is about 60 printed pages long. [Also noted in my Journal in July 2012]
[»»] 120 Jacket Interviews: This list provides quick links to one hundred and twenty interviews in Jacket magazine up to and including Jacket 40 (late 2010), sorted by the interviewee’s last name.
[Also noted in my Journal in July 2012]
Basil Bunting, Cumbria, 1980.
Photograph © Jonathan Williams
[»»] Basil Bunting and the CIA: …Bunting was part of the plot engineered by the CIA, MI6 and Anglo Oil to depose Mossadeq, whose administration, as Wikipedia says, “introduced a wide range of social reforms but is most notable for its nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC) (later British Petroleum or BP)… Mossadeq… was removed from power in a coup on 19 August 1953, organised and carried out by the United States CIA at the request of the British MI6.” Soon Shah Pahlevi and the CIA-trained SAVAK, his repressive secret police force, took power. [More…] [Also noted in my Journal on 2012/07/10.]
[»»] The Literary Thoroughfares of Lynbrook, Victoria: In the fairly new suburb of Lynbrook, in the South-eastern Melbourne City of Casey, over fifty streets and parks are named after Australian writers. …
[More… Five Pages] [Also noted in my Journal on 2012/07/02.]
Rosemary Dobson by Norman Lindsay, detail; courtesy National Library of Australia
The Australian poet Rosemary Dobson, whose first book «In a Convex Mirror» was published in 1944, and whose new «Collected Poems» came out in early 2012, passed away on 27 June 2012. She was 92 and had been living in a nursing home in Canberra. Read my 5,800-word interview with Rosemary in 2004.
[»] Three Australian Poets: Christopher Brennan, Lesbia Harford, Kenneth Slessor:
I know what the tyranny of distance is all about. I grew up on an isolated farm five miles from the nearest country town, which was itself two hundred miles from the nearest city. Few if any of my school friends went on to university, and most became farmers. But I was lucky in my choice of parents: my father was a teacher, and my mother taught me to read before I went to school. [More on this site]
Prose: dozens of items including What Is Skeuomorphism? — Advice to a New Writer (hint: find another career) — A Week in New York, October-November 2003 — Why is modern poetry so difficult? — Bruce Beaver, 1928-2004, an obituary — Martin Johnston: a 20-page introduction — The Illusion of Authenticity: on frauds, literary prizes and Janet Frame — Four Diversions and a Prose-poem on the Road to a Poetics — Three John Ashberys: an Introduction — and more.
[»] Skeuomorphism:
The immensely useful and free encyclopaedia Wikipedia provides a clear definition of “skeuomorphism” (skeuos vessel or tool, morphe shape). A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original...
The word “skeuomorphism” is recently popular in English in 2012, I suspect because of the furore over Apple’s skeuomorphic designs for its ubiquitous computer software. Check out this image: see the little bit of torn paper just below the fake-leather strip across the head of the fake paper iCal calendar in the picture, just below the fake-embossed word “Year”? Torn paper? On a computer screen?!?! What were they thinking!?!?
But relax! The practice goes back to the birth of civilisation. Ancient Greek architecture abounds in skeuomorphism…
[more here] [Also noted in my Journal on 2012-06-14.]
[»»] Advice to a New Writer:
I’ve been writing and publishing poetry for half a century. Now and then I receive enquiries from people starting out to be a writers, asking me to read their manuscripts (for nothing) and tell them what they should do to become a famous published poet, or at least a published poet. I don’t have the time or the inclination to read poetry manuscripts or to write people letters, and since what I say is always the same, here it is… Find another career. Please. [continued here.]
[Also noted in my Journal on 2012-06-06.]
OLD: [»»] «Free Grass» magazine.
«Free Grass» splashed into the pond of little “underground” magazines in Australia in 1968. Like most of the others («The Great Auk», «Ourglass», «Mok», «Cross-currents», «Transit» and «Free Poetry») it was roneod, the editorial standards were loose, to say the least, and there was a strong counter-cultural flavour to the thing. Strangest of all, it lived up to its title: it was literally free. Dozens of copies landed gratis in alternative and literary bookstores, to be given away to the bemused customers, and into the mailboxes of young poets and their friends. But when the magazine’s keen fans tried to contact the editor, they discovered two things: even though the magazine quoted generous rates of payment for contributions, no editor’s name was given, and there was no postal address. The truth slowly leaked out: one morning in late 1968 I (Sydney poet John Tranter, editor of «Transit» magazine) had written the whole of «Free Grass», all five foolscap pages of it from nine imaginary contributors each with his or her distinctive approach to verse, typing it directly onto mimeograph stencils, interspersing my spontaneous lyric effusions with nonsense sentences and fragments from a list of cryptic crossword clues in the daily paper. I ran it off the next day, and mailed out the copies. (Photo: John Tranter, Sydney, c. 1969) Noted in my Journal on 2012/06/01.
Check out this page, with links to over a hundred photos by John Tranter.
John Tranter, Sydney, 2009
photo by Anders Hallengren. More photos of John Tranter «here»
Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Age Poetry Book of the Year: from the judges’ comments:
“AFTER a career of more than 40 years, John Tranter has become that paradoxical thing: the postmodern master. Ghosting others’ poems, using “proceduralist” approaches to composition and revising and mistranslating “classic” works (such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal), Tranter produces something entirely original and — most importantly — superbly entertaining. The inventiveness of Starlight seems unending, offering us a countless array of brilliant images and atmospheres, hilarious ideas and compelling melanges of styles and registers. Starlight could well be Tranter’s masterpiece.” — David McCooey, The Saturday Age. Saturday 06 August 2011.
Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Queensland Premier’s Award for poetry: from the judges’ comments:
This book can be seen as the culmination of John Tranter’s middle career, a period marked by explorations of the ways in which poems can be generated. The most important poem of the collection is probably the first, “The Anaglyph”, which already seems like the major Australian poem of this century so far. Here, an answer is written to Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” whereby the original is evacuated so that only the first and last words of each line remain and the new poem is written by retaining them. Although this description of «Starlight: 150 Poems» makes it seem formally obsessive, it is still a book of poems that has a lot to say and “The Anaglyph” — in part a parody, in part a homage and in part an answer to an early poem by Tranter’s great middle-period mentor — is very much a poem about those modern obsessions of textuality and influence.
From Andrew Wilkins, in Bookseller + Publisher, Sept. 2010: “The publication of Starlight… follows the highly successful Urban Myths (2006), which won just about every literary award going, including the overall prize in the South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature… Reading the 150 poems in this collection is to spend time in the company of a writer steeped (well-versed?) in the work of other poets, and able to assume different narrative voices at will… Infiltrating his work is a dry, laconic wit and a rich understanding of culture and history. […] A particular pleasure was the lively sequence ‘At the Movies’, which ruminates on films of the past, and Tranter’s updated response to Baudelaire’s celebrated Les Fleurs du mal, which is every bit as wicked and visceral as the original.”
At the top right of this page you can find links to various reviews of the book, news about the book’s reception, selections of poems from the book, and extensive notes on the poems. Elsewhere on the net, you can read poems from this book here, here, and here. So see the ‘Starlight’ links, above right.
Detail from Édouard Manet:
“A Good Glass of Beer”
Available now as Kindle ebooks: less than a dollar each! Cheaper than a good glass of beer!
Ten out-of-print books all by John Tranter… over five hundred pages of hard-to-get poetry for peanuts, carefully edited and designed to follow the exact contents of the original out-of-print editions.
[Kindle]
1970 Parallax and other poems:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-0-4
[Kindle] 1972 Red Movie and other poems:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-1-1
[Kindle] 1974 The Blast Area:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-2-8
[Kindle] 1976 The Alphabet Murders:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-3-5
[Kindle] 1977 Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-4-2
[Kindle] 1979 Dazed in the Ladies Lounge:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-5-9
[Kindle] 1982 Selected Poems 1982:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-6-6
[Kindle] 1986 Gloria:
ISBN 978-0-9871159-7-3
[Kindle] 1997 Gasoline Kisses
ISBN 978-0-9871159-9-7
[Kindle] 2000 Blackout
ISBN 978-0-9871159-8-0
2011 Update: on 25 May 2011, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir AC CVO, Governor of New South Wales, joined Australian poets, educators, policy makers and supporters of the literary community to celebrate the launch of the Australian Poetry Library website. The soirée event, held at Government House, was a night to honour and pay tribute to many of Australia’s poets, and was enjoyed by all who braved the wild and wet weather in Sydney. Here’s the new site: [»»]
[...] Brian Johns AO, Chair of the Copyright Agency Limited Cultural Fund Committee, made some impassioned comments about the value of supporting our creators through the Australian Poetry Library website saying, “This is an imaginative way of supporting our poets, and linking their work to the educational sector to the benefit of all”. Dr Kate Lilley, daughter of well-known poet Dorothy Hewitt, read one of her mother’s most well-loved poems, “This Version of Love”, and Meredith McKinney, daughter of Judith Wright, read “Eve to Her Daughters”, one of her personal favourites from her mother’s collection. John Tranter, the originator of this concept and one of the driving forces behind this project, delivered a rousing reading of a poem from one of his great friends John Forbes, entitled “Monkey’s Pride”. Many were amused to discover that this poem was actually named after a racehorse on which he won a few dollars that day! (from CAL publicity)
Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (UQP, 2006, 322 pages) has been awarded:
— The 2006 Victorian state award for poetry
— The 2007 New South Wales state award for poetry
— The 2008 South Australian state award for poetry books published in 2006 or 2007, and
— The 2008 South Australian Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others for the years 2006 and 2007).
No other book of poetry has been so popular with the judges of so many different state awards. You can read the judges’ [»»] readers’ reports here. You can download a PDF file of the first half of the book here: [»»] Urban Myths: 523 pages. You can also read 100 pages of notes to the book [»»] here on this site, and you can order the (beautifully) printed version of the book direct from [»»] the publisher.
Would you like to know the secret of John Tranter’s success? He always keeps this advice in mind, from [»»] Screenwriting, a book by Richard Walter: When asked to offer his single most important piece of advice for writers, writer Tommy Thompson responded after a long, thoughtful pause: Every day, no matter what else you do, get dressed.
Note from John Tranter: This site began in 1998. It is not a weblog, updated every day. Instead, it grows gradually, and is designed to be a long-term useful resource for people wanting to know about my life and my work. It is already over a thousand printed pages long.
Here you can read my [»»] poems, and read about my life (here’s a biographical [»»] note) and what has formed my writing practice. There are [»»] interviews with me and [»»] reviews of my books (not all the reviews are favourable!) and [»»] photos taken at various stages of my life.
Who am I? I sometimes wonder… My father wanted me to be a farmer, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot or a buddhist monk. What lonely occupations! Fortunately we were both wrong. I have been writing poetry for forty years; twenty books of poetry (here is a [»»] list) and a book of experimental fiction, [»»] Different Hands. I also edited four anthologies including co-editing the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), published in Britain and the US as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 1997 I founded the free Internet literary magazine [»»] Jacket. In 2010 I arranged to give the magazine, with its eight thousand or so pages of back issues, to the University of Pennsylvania. They will take over the joy and the burden of Jacket in 2011, and will give it a good home, ensuring its long-term growth and its archival future.
Finally, Q: What’s a tranter? A: Here’s Thomas Hardy:
from: The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s
THEY had long met o’ Zundays — her true love and she —
And at junketings, maypoles, and flings;
But she bode wi’ a thirtover uncle, and he
Swore by noon and by night that her goodman should be
Naibor Sweatley — a gaffer oft weak at the knee
From taking o’ sommat more cheerful than tea —
Who tranted, and moved people’s things.[…]
The Internet address of this page is http://johntranter.com/00/index.html
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FEATURE: [»»] Michael Dransfield: 40 years on: Michael Dransfield died forty years ago, on 20 April 1973; he would be sixty-four in April 2013 had he lived. Here is my 1987 review of his Collected Poems, a newspaper account of the Coroner’s report into his death, an item from Vogue Australia, April 1971, and two of my poems dedicated to Michael with a photo of his old flat and a map.
Huge Archival Resource...
LINKS to poems, photos, prose, interviews, articles…
Direct links to a few
highlights on this site…
[»»] Brian Henry: ‘John Tranter’s New Form(alism): The Terminal’: a 20-page essay.
[»»] Essay: Three John Ashberys
[»»] 1985 conversation with John Ashbery
[»»] 1988 conversation with John Ashbery
[»»] An essay about computer-assisted writing, with thirty pages of samples.
[»»] John Tranter Interviewed by Rosemary Neill, 2006
[»»] On poet Martin Johnston (1947–1990)
[»»] Bruce Beaver, 1928–2004: Obituary
[»»] Andrew Riemer reviews John Tranter’s The Floor of Heaven
[»»] John Tranter reviews: Somebody Else — Arthur Rimbaud in Africa by Charles Nicholl, and …
[»»] … Auden by R. Davenport-Hines, and
[»»] … Damaged Glamour by John Forbes
[»»] John Tranter Interviewed by Ted Slade
[»»]
Off-site: Early writing (1968–78) archived on Sydney University Library’s SETIS site — some 200 pages of material including two complete books, a hoax magazine and a 1966 passport.
MLA Update: I attended the 2011 Modern Languages Association convention at the Los Angeles Marriott Hotel in January: over 700 sessions. I gave two papers on Jacket: one, on Jacket as a conduit for British Postmodern poetry into the US, another on “The Elephant has Left the Room”, the migration of Jacket to UPenn in Philadelphia and a vigorous future. (You can download and read a twelve-page PDF version of [this paper] here.) Some other papers were exciting, especially the panel on Derek Attridge and «Theory after “Theory”». The regular off-site reading, hosted this year by UCLA’s debonair Brian Kim Stefans, an old friend, was huge: over seventy readers in The Waste Land of DownTown Los Angeles. (Photo, below: “The Dinosaur has Left the Room”, Santa Monica 2011. Photo John Tranter.)
And I discovered a wonderful fountain pen shop in a suburb of Los Angeles: new pens, antiques, and repairs: F. Krinke; 2640 S. Myrtle #12; Monrovia, CA 91016-8204, USA, near Pasadena. Throw away your iPad, adjust your ego, and go there now:
[http://www.tmgp.com/cgi-bin/nph-tame/penshop/about.htm].
Back to sunny Australia: I attended the 2011 Conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne in July, and delivered a version of my MLA paper: “The Elephant Has Left the Room”. I also attended the younger and livelier Deakin University Conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall, where I talked about how I came to write the work in Starlight: 150 Poems, my most recent book. Apparently it needs some explicating. What with the poetry, the drinks and the book launch at the bar upstairs, and another launch and reading at the wonderful [Collected Works] bookshop (1st Floor, The Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St., Melbourne: corner Swanston St. and Flinders Lane), a fun time was had by all in the Edinburgh of the South.
The Salt Companion to John Tranter
The blurb says: “The essays published here focus on key works in Tranter’s career to date, emphasising the importance of his work as editor as well as poet, both in an Australian and in an international context. They include close readings of poems that illustrate the formal range of his work, assess the reception of his books in the context of his perceived role as symbolic representative of an urban, cosmopolitan, tradition in Australian culture, and provide fresh interpretations of his relationships with English, French and American literature.” Read the [Preface here].
John Tranter [interviewed] by Brian Henry, 2010: “…the audience has more than a painting to consider: they have a whole history lesson, an artistic argument and an Oedipal struggle as well.”
Reprinted!
The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four long loosely-linked narrative poems, reprinted by Jacket Press and distributed by the University of Queensland Press in June 2007.
‘A rattling good read!’
— John Ashbery, launching the book in 1992
‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
— Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald
‘The Floor of Heaven is a hypnotic read; it will stay with you when you come out of your trance…’
— Carmel Bird, Australian Book Review
‘… a crudity of feeling that gives many of his early poems the glazed, dated air of 70s airport lounges.… The Floor of Heaven is very dull reading and gets duller as the trash novel impetus of the narrative wears away… a literature of defeat.’
— Alison Croggon, ABC Books and Writing
[»»] Background reading, author notes and links relating to The Floor of Heaven, free!
More free downloads!
A free PDF file of [»»] The Floor of Heaven. Like the Urban Myths file, this PDF file is free to download and read in its entirety, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of this book can be purchased from [»»] the publisher’s website.
Lazybones, sleepin’ in the sun… In 2009 I was invited to become a visiting Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Umbria, Italy, to work on a sequence of new poems. You can see a [slideshow] sequence of some thirty photos I have taken of the Civitella and its surrounds on this site. Here are some photos of [cloudscapes]. Here’s the informative [website] of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. And yes, in between taking photographs I did write some poems: fifty-six loose adaptations of poems from the 1861 edition of Charles Baudelaire’s «Les Fleurs du mal», which found a home in my next book, «Starlight: 150 Poems».
[»»] John Tranter: «Feints, Apparitions and Mode of Locomotion: The Influence of Anxiety in the Poetry of John Tranter». A 94-page paper prepared for the Monash University “Poetry and the Trace” International Conference held at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, from 13 to 16 July 2008. The paper is in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format, and requires a PDF reader like [Foxit], Mac OS X Preview, or others.
My Thesis: Having more or less avoided the wheels of the juggernaut (definition) of Academia since my 1971 B.A., I stumbled in 2005 and woke to find myself enrolled in a course at the University of Wollongong. The thesis dissertation consists of 113 poems and a 30,000-word exegesis (definition). The Doctor of Creative Arts degree, highly commended, was conferred in 2009.
Most of the poems in my 2010 collection Starlight: 150 Poems are based on the 113 poems I wrote for part of that thesis, and many of these thesis poems were changed and some deleted for book publication. Yes, you can read those ‘lost’ poems in the thesis! The thesis also contains a thirty-thousand word exegesis (where I explain everything) and it is now available for free download from the
[»»] University of Wollongong Library.
If you printed it out, it would be over 200 pages long. Since May 2011 it has been downloaded nearly a hundred times. Join in!
Epigraph:
We know that all literature is a form of disguise, a mask, a fable, a mystery: and behind the mask is the author.
— Leon Edel
Abstract: ‘Distant Voices’ consists of two parts: a collection of poems and a thirty-thousand word exegesis.
The poems are presented in three groups.
In Vocoder four long poems explore, in different ways, the idea of displacing the authorial ego with a kind of writing at one or two removes, through the process of translation, ventriloquy, mask or disguise.
Speaking French presents 101 deliberate mistranslations of some of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ and poems by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine.
At the Movies is a group of narrative, discursive and reflective poems that speak about various movies and their cultural settings.
The exegesis is also presented in three parts. In it the poet John Tranter is discussed in the third person.
Part 1: About the Poems discusses the means of production and some of the theoretical implications of the poems presented in this thesis, partly in the context of Tranter’s earlier work, as the poems develop, extend and criticise some of Tranter’s earlier literary strategies.
Part 2: Prior projects discusses Tranter’s forty-year career as a writer, editor, publisher, radio producer, critic and anthologist, relating these changing roles to the writing in his twenty-odd books and his other projects, and attempting to trace a developing strand of experimental practice that finds its apotheosis in the process of translation, ventriloquy, mask or disguise underlying the thesis poems.
Part 3: Dream-Work looks at the three poets who have most influenced his work: Arthur Rimbaud, the Australian hoax poet ‘Ern Malley’, and the contemporary US poet John Ashbery, and also at the tripartite structure qualifying much of Tranter’s writing. Poetry is seen to occupy a liminal position in the Venn diagram where three fields overlap: dream theory, movie creation and criticism, and literary creation and criticism.
Link: [Limited Edition] for sale
Keen librarians and other readers (any other readers) can obtain a limited edition printed and professionally bound copy of the thesis: one of only twenty copies, typeset in a digital version of the Dante font as glimpsed above. Whet your curiosity here: [Limited Edition].
Copyright Notice: Please respect the fact that all the material on this site is copyright © John Tranter and the individual authors 2004. It is made available here without charge for personal study and enjoyment by individuals only. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for any other purpose.
Sponsor: This site is sponsored by Australian Literary Management, 2-A Booth Street, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia
Motto:
Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.*
* ‘Idle youth, enslaved by everything, by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.’ from ‘Chanson de la plus haute tour’, Arthur Rimbaud, 1872. Here’s the complete » [poem], with an exhaustive exegesis, in French, which intimates that in the poem Rimbaud poses as the chaste partner-in-waiting to Verlaine, while the older man patched things up with his young wife Mathilde, who had insisted on Rimbaud’s banishment. Rimbaud was only a year or two younger than Mathilde, and her sexual rival in this ménage: “Dans l’édition Rimbaud de Suzanne Bernard et André Guyaux, Garnier, 1983, Suzanne Bernard écrit à propos de ce mot : “Delahaye fait remarquer que Rimbaud a compromis sa carrière littéraire en revenant à Charleville pour permettre une réconciliation entre Verlaine et sa femme” (p.438).
Q: What was Walt Disney’s most serious taboo in the 1950s?
A: Pluto and Goofy must never, ever appear in the same cartoon.
Oh my Gawd! He’s naked!