Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems

by Pierre Reverdy, Mary Ann Caws, John Ashbery (Translator)

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth. One of 150 copies signed by Rexroth.

Genres: Poetry, France

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Pierre Reverdy (September 13, 1889 – June 17, 1960) was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing “isms,” searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: “the sublime simplicity of reality."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_R...

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"On every slate
sliding from the roof
someone
has written
a poem

The gutter is rimmed with diamonds
the birds drink them"


The reclusive poet Pierre Reverdy, who distanced himself from the scene before withdrawing completely after leaving Paris in 1926, was, along with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the first surrealists. Associated with the likes of Picasso and Braque, he was described as a cubist poet, and much like how these painters cut away surface appearance to bring out underlying forms, Reverdy's poems were not structured in a conventional sense. But Reverdy went further than just cubism, and expressed himself with his sense of mystery in a world forever beyond his understanding. André Breton hailed him as the best poet of the time, while Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault saw him as an influential exemplary poet.

A few poems -

FALSE PORTAL OR PORTRAIT

In the unmoving space
Within four lines
A square for the play of white
The hand which propped your cheek
The moon
A face illumined
Another's profile
But your eyes
I follow the lamp which guides me
A finger on a moist lid
In the middle
Tears are rolling through this space
Within four lines
A mirror

FLAMES

Water and moon's brightness flowed gently into his eye.
The night's last passersby dragged their sleep along the
marble. Color mingled with sound. From the top of the
slope, the rumbling dreams slip about and flash. In a
devastated field where shadows are lost, a horse jumps a hedge of
sparks. A nocturnal scarf catches on the spurs of this blue
horseman. An unreal crowd is engulfed on the opposite
sidewalk amid reflections of the rain-soaked wall followed by
the glances of the imaginary figures of the posters.

THE WEB

A hand, with a rhythmic and thoughtless motion,
was throwing its five fingers up towards the ceiling
where fantastic shadows were dancing.
A hand detached from its arm, a free hand,
illumined from below by the glow of the hearth—
and that innocent empty head smiling at the spider
setting forth in the night its useless masterpiece.

[Frank]

I was listening to a podcast of Ashbery and Padgett on their new translations of Reverdy--who sounds absolutely fascinating. This quote, on his reflections on puddles as he walked the streets alone, stuck in my mind:

"the water, from the sky, was full of stars."

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually have an old New Directions bilingual edition translated by Kenneth Rexroth. French surrealist poets were one of my first literary loves, but Reverdy's "cubist poems" are the ones I still return to. He was a big influence back when I wrote poetry and no matter how many times I reread these selected poems I become lost in the surface simplicity that quickly becomes overwhelmingly complex:

The color which night decomposes/The table where they sit/In it's glass chimney/The lamp is a heart emptying itself...

A little light/Look a little light descends on your belly and lights you up/--A woman stretches herself like a rocket--/Over there in the corner a shadow reads/Her bare feet are too pretty...

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems by Pierre Reverdy. Selected and translated by American poet Kenneth Rexroth. What does this mean? It means Rexroth is using his reputation to expose a foreign-language poet to an English speaking audience, to expose a poet from the first half of the twentieth century to an audience from the second half of the twentieth century. Otherwise, it means he needs to be a competent translator. I haven't ready enough of Reverdy's poems to speak to the quality of Rexroth's selection, but I can say I enjoyed his introduction...

The poets associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacobs, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As the year have oassed and cette belle époque recedes into perspective, for us today, Pierre Reverdy stands out from his fellows as the most profound and most controlled artist. This is part of a general revaluation which has taken place as the latter half of the century has come to judge the first half. So Robert Desnos has risen above his Surrealist colleagues and competitors. So independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue are more appreciated today than they were in their lifetime. Just as Francis Jammes has almost overwhelmed the poetic reputations of the beginning of the century and the once world-famous Verhaeren is hardly read at all, so from the Fantaisistes, the poets of Le Divan, Toulet and Francis Carco almost alone survive. Although time has seldom worked so quickly, I am more or less confident that those revaluations will stand. Certainly Pierre Reverdy's present position should be secure. International literary taste has learned the idiom, the syntax that was so new and strange in 1912. Fortuitous novelty has fallen away and this has enabled comprhension and judgement. Neither Reverdy nor Tristan Tzara can shock anybody any more. And so those values once masked by shock enter into the judgement of a later generation.
Juan Gris was Pierre Reverdy's favourite illustrator, as he in turn was the painter's favourite poet. No one today would deny that they share the distinction of being the most Cubist of the Cubists. This is apparent to all in Juan Gris. But what is Cubism in poetry? It is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into an new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada.
When I was a young lad I thought that literary Cubism was the future of American poetry. Only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, much of the work of the young Yvor Winters and others of his generation of Chicago Modernists, Laura Riding's best work and my own poems later collected in The Art of Worldly Wisdom could be said to show the deliberate practice of the principles of creative construction which guided Juan Gris or Pierre Reverdy. It is necessary to make a sharp distinction between this kind of verse and the Apollinairian technique of The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky's A, J.G. MacLeod's Ecliptic, Lowenfels's Some Deaths, the youthful works of Sam Beckett and Nancy Cunard and, the last of all, David Jones's Anathemata.
In poems such as these, as in Apollinaire's "Zone", the elements, the primary data of the poetic construction, are narrative or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy's, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Eliot works in The Waste Land with fragmented and recombined arguments; Pierre Reverdy with dismembered propositions from which subject, operator and object have been wrenched free and reconstructed into an invisible or sublime discourse which owed its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.
Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kidn from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. Contrary to what we are taught, it appears first in the ultimate expressions of Neo-Symbolism in Mallarmé, in his curious stil life like "autre éventail", in occult dramatic molecules like "petit air", and, of course, above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, un coup de dés. It is in this tremendously ambitious poem in fact that all the virtues and the faults of the style, whether practiced by Reverdy, Laura Riding or myself, can be found.
[...]
- Introduction (pg. v-)

Reading Reverdy, I find I don't remember poems in their entirety. Perhaps this is owing to the sometimes fragment feel of his poems. I'm more inclined to remember the odd line without being able to place the poem from which it came. No matter. His poems are full of captivating lines...

And the child dreamer of magnificent dreams
Weeps for his own ugliness
- Spectacle for the Eyes (pg. 37)

The sun and your heart are made of the same material
- Central Heating (pg. 45)

One of my favourite poems in the selection...

Cigarette papers datebook and tobacco pouch
Life
Ought to be like painting
Still
And literature
A hairless head
Eyes straight
Comma
A flat nose a plane
On the forehead
My portrait
My heart beats
It's an alarm clock
In the mirror I'm full length
My head smokes
- Still Life Portrait (pg. 49)

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memory set free
Sorrow lost in air
Escaped frontiers
All threads untangled beyond all seasons learning
their turn and tone under the dark depth of silence

[Josephine]

favorites: "the girl ironing", "messenger of tyranny", "breath"

[Kevin S · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Victoria & David Williams]

Ours is not the signed limited edition.

[Marike]

Pierre Reverdy - Selected Poems. Selected by Mary Ann Caws; translated by John Ashberry, Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry
Pierre Reverdy is a French writer of the 1920s who was involved in the surrealist movement and a circle of painter friends, as far as I gather. This book was lent to me by a poet friend who told me that I write a bit like him and would like Revery’s poems. A review also said my poems were surrealistic, so maybe. But I like Reverdy even if I cannot tell if there are any similarities.
Little mysterious stories or landscapes suggesting stories. Never over-explained, it feels as if it both ripples out and is clear. I tried to compare the translations in tis book with a book of Kenneth Roxroth translation, but too few poems coincided. It doesn’t matter. The poems in this book are presented with the French on the left side and the English translations on the right-hand side. The translator for each poem is indicated at the bottom of each poem.
Rather than give more of a descriptive review, I’ll paste a poem or two in here. I’ll choose a short one rather.

A break in the clouds

It’s getting darker
The eyes close
The plain was rising up brighter
There was a handkerchief in the air
And you gestured
Your hand emerging from evening’s sleeve
I wanted to cross the barrier
Something was holding me back
The cry was coming from far away
From the other side of the night
And all that comes forward
An all that i flee
Still
I remember
The street that morning flooded with sunlight

Pierre Reverdy
Translated by Patricia Terry

Departure

The horizon leans down
The days are longer
Travelling
A heart leaps up in its cage
A bird sings
It is going to die
Another door will open
At the end of the corridor
Lights up
A star
A dark-haired woman
The lantern of the departing train

Pierre Reverdy
Translated by Patricia Terry

[Maggie Golston]

My heart is in my pocket.

[Mina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Très joli recueil de poésie, des images inspirantes et une écriture simple, agréable a lire.