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"A poem by Reverdy is a spiritual fact: everything that makes up the human being–sensations, feelings, other men and women–has been passed through the filter of poetry."—Octavio Paz
"Reverdy, with Paul Eluard...is the purest of the writers of his time."—Philippe Soupault
Pierre Reverdy, who, along with artists and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque, helped develop cubism and surrealism, is one the greatest of modern French poets and one of the most elusive. His work is at once impersonal and intimate, crystalline and opaque, simplicity itself and mysterious as can be. Paul Auster has described his poems as combining an "intense inwardness with a proliferation of sensual data.... The poet seems to evaporate, to vanish into the haunted country he has created...as if Reverdy had emptied the space of the poem in order to let the reader inhabit it."
Auster is only one of many American writers to be drawn to the mystery of Reverdy's unsettling world. There is also Frank O'Hara, who carried Reverdy's poems in his pocket and wrote (in lines that don't just mention but echo Reverdy) –
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it
And John Ashbery has shown himself to be no less devoted than his friend O'Hara to Reverdy, whose poems he has translated throughout his career.
The strength of this new selection of Reverdy's poetry, which includes both translations that have been specially commissioned for this volume along with a range of outstanding earlier ones, is not only to provide a sampling of Reverdy's finest work in all its variety but also to document the appeal it has had for so many of America's best writers and translators. Reverdy is represented by work early and late, from the pioneering Prose Poems of 1915 and Roof Slates of 1918 to his violently conceived and brutally worded, war-haunted poems of 1946 to 1948, entitled The Song of the Dead (originally illustrated by Picasso) to his final Freedom of the Seas of 1960.
The twelve distinguished translators involved are John Ashbery, Dan Bellm, Mary Ann Caws, Lydia Davis, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Howard, Geoffrey O'Brien, Ron Padgett, Mark Polizzotti, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Sieburth, and Rosanna Warren.
"The great Pierre Reverdy, comrade to Picasso and Braque, peer and contemporary of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, is among the most mysteriously satisfying of twentieth-century poets, his poems an uncanny mixture of the simple and the sublime."—The Poetry Foundation
"Pierre Reverdy is among the greatest of modern French poets, and certainly among the most elusive. His work is at once impersonal and intimate, crystalline and opaque, simple to the point of austerity. The landscape of his poetry is both instantly recognizable and, devoid of local specificity, imbued with an otherworldly strangeness. He is 'a secret poet for secret readers, ' as Octavio Paz once described him, insisting on the necessity of parsing the silence, the empty spaces between what seems visible in the lines of his poems. Each feels like a fragment of a universe, and yet whole."—Mary Ann Caws on Pierre Reverdy for Poetry Society of America
Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was born in Narbonne in the south of France. At age twenty-one he moved to Paris and became close friends with the artists and writers around Montmartre, particularly with the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Juan Gris. During this time, he converted to Catholicism, founded the seminal literary magazine Nord-Sud, married the seamstress Henriette Charlotte Bureau, and began a deep and intimate friendship with Coco Chanel that would last for the rest of his life. In 1926, after publishing several books of poetry that included collaborations with Gris, Picasso, and Georges Braque, he moved with his wife to the village of Solesmes to be near the Benedictine monastery at St. Peter’s Abbey. During the Nazi occupation, he joined the Resistance, refused to publish anything, and wrote the excruciatingly brutal Le Chant de morts (Song of the Dead) that was eventually published in 1948 with illustrations by Picasso. Besides a few trips around Europe and Greece, Reverdy remained in Solesmes for the rest of his life, ever more estranged from society and from his own faith.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of dozens of books, including Glorious Eccentrics- Modernist Women Painting and Writing, Surrealism, and Surprised in Translation, and is the translator of, among many others, André Breton, René Char, Stéphane Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, Jacques Roubaud, and Ghérasim Luca.
File under:
Pierre Reverdy
John Ashbery
Dan Bellm
Mary Ann Caws
Lydia Davis
Marilyn Hacker
Richard Howard
Geoffrey O'Brien
Ron Padgett
Mark Polizzotti
Kenneth Rexroth
Richard Sieburth
Rosanna Warren
The New York Review of Books / New York
Poetry
Fiction / Poetry
Surrealism
