When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
One of the books I return to when needing to get my bearings is Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. My poems were almost all in prose even before I first encountered it, but my love of that collection—and formally related works such as Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror—secured my inclination. Beyond any technical allure, of course, is the haunting and transporting charge of being addressed by the mind of Baudelaire travelling without decay or distortion through time and space. Literature is indeed, to paraphrase Nicky Drumbolis, a wonderful form of time travel! (When I’ve got a craving for rhyme, humour, and absurd mythic adventure, I can be found within the pages of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.)
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