“Dark: two perfectly identical human mouths kiss each other to death.” R.G-L

“[He] is one of the rare poets of this century to cultivate such a form of violent, tortuous, oppressive lyricism, a lyricism made up pf the screams of a man being flayed alive…,” writes Antonin Artaud in a review, and reprinted as an introduction to Black Mirror, a selection of discovered writings by little known, anti-surrealist poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.  With a life mired by tragedy and drug addiction (he died from tetanus as he was prone to shooting up morphine through a pair of dirty trousers), Lecompte managed to leave behind a dark and incendiary selection of writings, collected in the book Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbet-Lecomte.

Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
people I loved
…went 120 through one town.
I stopped at Hedgeville
and slept in the back seat
…excited about my new life.
–Gregory Corso

Image by © Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

“With over twenty-six books of poetry, ten novels, four collections of short stories, and various books of theater, film, essays, and children’s works, Egyptian born Andrée Chedid is one of the most noted authors of our time. Chedid spent most of her childhood in Egypt, making frequent trips to France. Her family also had ties to with Lebanon and Syria.

Her early education was in Egypt, but she later attended schools in France and completed her secondary education in Paris. She earned a degree in journalism from the American University in Cairo. Accordingly, as a child and young woman, Chedid was exposed to a wide range of cultural experiences, speaking French and English, and with knowledge of spoken Arabic.

For most of her life, however, Chedid has felt most at home in Paris, and, while her fictions are firmly rooted in emotions and images from the Middle East, she has described her poetry as being “free of time and place,” having no “geographical boundaries,” and “belonging to all lands.” The poems of this volume, Fugitive Suns: Selected Poetry, her first English-language collection of poetry, are selected from her entire career, including works from 1949 to 1995.”

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Paul Éluard was a poet, literary critic, artist and one of the founding members of surrealism. He was also the first husband of Gala, who after one his bouts of tuberculosis left Éluard for Salvador Dali. You can find his selected writings Shadows and Suns, with a cover illustrated by Picasso, here.

“She looks into me
The unknowing heart
To see if I love
She has confidence she forgets
Under the clouds of her eyelids
Her head falls asleep in my hands
Where are we
Together inseparable
Alive alive
He alive she alive
And my head rolls through her dreams.”

“António Botto was one of Portugal’s first openly gay writers, a poète maudit whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled when they appeared in Portuguese in 1922 under the title Canções. Botto’s poetic voice-confessional, personal, and intimate-revels and luxuriates in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Yet for all of his acclaim and notoriety-he was both hailed as one of the great poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male-male desire-Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death.The Songs of António Botto recovers this important, urgent voice in modern poetry by making available-for the first time since its private publication in 1948-the English-language translation of Canções that Botto’s friend and artistic collaborator, Fernando Pessoa, completed in 1933. Pessoa, Portugal’s preeminent modernist literary figure, considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label “aesthete” and, as a critic and publisher, championed his work. Featuring an introduction to Botto’s work and Pessoa’s previously unpublished foreword to the 1948 edition as well as a new translation of Botto’s 1941 elegy to Pessoa, The Songs of António Botto establishes Botto as a pioneering figure in modern gay literature and places him alongside C. P. Cavafy and Federico García Lorca as one of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century.” You can find a copy here.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Parisian at heart, but born in Italy to a Polish mother, is credited with coining the word “surrealism.” An artist, a poet, and a word collagist, Apollinaire was a machismo romantic war hero with a metaphoric rose of grandiose, symbolic, lyrical poetry that grew from the shrapnel wound on his skull after WW1. Whilst recovering from his head wound, he falls in love with a nurse with red hair ,”the pretty red head,” who becomes his muse. He dies in 1918 from the Spanish Flu epidemic.  I recommend picking up his selected writings (click here), if not for the amazing cover alone, but  also  for the incredible sampling of his oeuvre; a library must.

“We hurry since everything hurries
And I shall never not return
Memories are all archaic horns
Silenced by the wind.” G.A.

“Now! they are ripe, these fruits of a jealous fate. From our dream
grown, on our blood fed, and haunting the purple of our nights, they
are the fruits of long concern, they are the fruits of long desire, they
were our most secret accomplices and, often verging upon avowal, drew
us to their ends out of the abyss of our nights….Praise to the first
dawn, now they are ripe and beneath the purple, these fruits of an im-
perious fate. -We do not find our liking here.” from Nocturne

Brion Gysin and his Dream Machine

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs

Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Jackie Curtis at Danceteria in NYC, 1984

Artist, inventor, poet, close friend of William Burroughs, and comrade of the beat movement, Brion Gyson invented a machine that induces dreams called The Dream Machine; described as the “the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed.” A mystical figure and cult hero, Gyson’s dream machine was known to cause explosive visions as its flicker uses alpha waves causing a change in consciousness. It was said that the idea came to him as he fell asleep in the back of a coach as it was racing down a street and the rays of rapidly changing sunlight caused Gysin to have visions.

Brion Gysin – Pistol Poem

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Brion Gysin – No Poets Don’t Own Words

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