Overview

Full Product Details

9780872866485

Table of Contents

Reviews

Michaux remains difficult to classify----he wrote verse and prose that is alternately Surrealist, essay-like, fantastical, fabulist, and psychedelic ... [Gillian] Conoley turns Michaux's French into alert, fluid English to match the enface French: it's both a puzzle, and a pleasure, to follow along. ----Publishers Weekly To record the ineffable is Michaux's paradoxical project in these stunning works from the mid- to late-50s. Central to his oeuvre, to his life-long effort to come to terms with faith, they radiate an uncommon immediacy and conviction. Conoley's excellent selection--combining drawings, asemic writings, poetry, and prose commentary--offers the variety of perspectives required to appreciate the true scope of his project, and her translation keeps the writing--with all its eclectic vocabulary and dressage pacing--vibrantly alive. This is an invaluable addition to Michaux's works in English, filling an important gap with a vivid, vibrant linguistic performance. --Cole Swensen The remarkable and singular Michaux: poet, visual artist, travel writer, novelist, all intimately related, as Octavio Paz once noted. In his quest for the inexpressible, Michaux represents the ultimate paradox, at once visionary mystic and rationalist, as he seeks to chart the journey without end. Gillian Conoley's skilled and vital translations, as well as her deeply illuminating commentaries on the three extraordinary volumes collected here, are indeed a revelation and a gift. --Michael Palmer In Gillian Conoley's committed, devoted translation, with her thoughtful introduction, appear three visionary works from Henri Michaux. Michaux's turbulent but nuanced struggle with the cosmic defamiliarization of verbal and visual art registers risk wherein alphabetical signs become marks or figures, and figures become signs, become words. Dynamic, provocative relationships seek and meet exquisite encounters, a little black angel, the secret of life, 'this tree with fine branches.' Evolving thematic concerns such as body, spirit, faith and fate sing with an electric charge. --Norma Cole Henri Michaux was a poet's poet and also a poet's artist, yet he was also, as John Ashbery so beautifully put it, hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience -- the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living. In these three remarkable works from the late fifties, in which the activity of inscription inhabits the abstract mark as well as the signifying word, Michaux perceived what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects if at all. Now, through Gillian Conoley's impassioned translation, Anglophone readers can perceive it too. --Barry Schwabsky, poet and critic for The Nation Henri Michaux's Thousand Times Broken: Three Books may be comprised of writing and art from 1956-1959 centered around his experimentation with mescaline, yet it easily exceeds initial expectations that fact might arouse ... Michaux's mescaline use takes a backseat to his greater subject: exploration of opening up the physical and mental confines of human consciousness as exemplified by visual art and written word ... Michaux's visual art serves as a guiding principle behind [Gillian] Conoley's organization of Thousand Times Broken ... Michaux's work provides a fascinating and unique glimpse of the inner workings of human consciousness yet somehow he himself manages remain at once outside of it. He's not alien, just other. ----Patrick James Dunagan, Bookslut The reader is asked to switch between seeing and reading, and the effect is to keep the mind alert to the shifting nature without letting any single image become too static ... [Gillian] Conoley has done a very important service to English students of literature and the drug-writing tradition by translating these works for the first time. A fantastic effort that, by displaying the original French as well, leaves the text as open as perhaps Michaux always intended his works to be. --Psychedelic Press UK Henri Michaux's mescaline writings are celebrated for the freedoms they take, and rightly so. But the more one reads Michaux, the more he emerges as a poet who masters his essential difficulties, achieving not only ecstatic dissolutions but stabilities earned against the odds. His work comprises a protective strategy----a wavering sense of self-identity mitigates one's fear of others. At the same time, he spends himself. His claim on us----and he is not so selfless as to not stake a claim -- depends on our doing the same. Despite what we learned in Zoology 101, fight or flight are not the only alternatives. One can also take the drug and lie down before the beast. ----Ron Slate, On the Seawall

Henri Michaux was a poet's poet and also a poet's artist, yet he was also, as John Ashbery so beautifully put it, hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience -- the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living. In these three remarkable works from the late fifties, in which the activity of inscription inhabits the abstract mark as well as the signifying word, Michaux perceived what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects if at all. Now, through Gillian Conoley's impassioned translation, Anglophone readers can perceive it too. -- Barry Schwabsky, poet and critic for The Nation

To record the ineffable is Michaux's paradoxical project in these stunning works from the mid- to late-50s. Central to his oeuvre, to his life-long effort to come to terms with faith, they radiate an uncommon immediacy and conviction. Conoley's excellent selection--combining drawings, asemic writings, poetry, and prose commentary--offers the variety of perspectives required to appreciate the true scope of his project, and her translation keeps the writing--with all its eclectic vocabulary and dressage pacing--vibrantly alive. This is an invaluable addition to Michaux's works in English, filling an important gap with a vivid, vibrant linguistic performance. -- Cole Swensen The remarkable and singular Michaux: poet, visual artist, travel writer, novelist, all intimately related, as Octavio Paz once noted. In his quest for the inexpressible, Michaux represents the ultimate paradox, at once visionary mystic and rationalist, as he seeks to chart the journey without end. Gillian Conoley's skilled and vital translations, as well as her deeply illuminating commentaries on the three extraordinary volumes collected here, are indeed a revelation and a gift. -- Michael Palmer In Gillian Conoley's committed, devoted translation, with her thoughtful introduction, appear three visionary works from Henri Michaux. Michaux's turbulent but nuanced struggle with the cosmic defamiliarization of verbal and visual art registers risk wherein alphabetical signs become marks or figures, and figures become signs, become words. Dynamic, provocative relationships seek and meet exquisite encounters, a little black angel, the secret of life, 'this tree with fine branches.' Evolving thematic concerns such as body, spirit, faith and fate sing with an electric charge. -- Norma Cole Henri Michaux was a poet's poet and also a poet's artist, yet he was also, as John Ashbery so beautifully put it, hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience -- the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living. In these three remarkable works from the late fifties, in which the activity of inscription inhabits the abstract mark as well as the signifying word, Michaux perceived what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects if at all. Now, through Gillian Conoley's impassioned translation, Anglophone readers can perceive it too. -- Barry Schwabsky, poet and critic for The Nation

Author Information

Henri Michaux: One of the most influential French writers and visual artists of the twentieth century, Belgian-born Henri Michaux (1899-1984) was known for his continual journeys into perception and consciousness. Throughout the almost sixty years of his creative life, Michaux published over thirty books of poems, narratives, essays, travelogues, journals and drawings. His visual work was shown in central museums of Europe and the United States, including the Guggenheim in New York and the National Museum in Paris. In 1960 he was awarded the Einaud Prize at the Biennale in Venice. Five years later, he refused the French Grand Prize for Letters as a protest against the award culture in the arts. Throughout both his visual and literary work, one can trace the struggle for, and his disappointment in not finding, a universal language through gesture, mark, sign, and the word. Gillian Conoley: Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas. She is the author of seven collections of poetry. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University. She lives with her family in a small town just north of San Francisco.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available