The Carbonized Earth : A Study on Arthur Rimbaud

Résumé :
The Carbonized Earth, a study on Arthur Rimbaud // followed by "Perfect Little Monster" a play in three acts, by PAUL STUBBS. // "At last, someone has the nerve and poetic enquiry to re-vision Arthur Rimbaud. The Carbonized Earth is fully illumined, able to apprehend its subject cosmologically, beyond mere personality, identity or biographical sketches. This is devotional and sophisticated poetic essay writing, moving Rimbaud through interstellar space, away from simplistic Les Poètes maudits mythology or boy wonder fanaticism. Who better to do this than Paul Stubbs, a seer seeing Rimbaud cored not so much by his own poetic language, but by his very existence. Here, among ‘imbeciles’ plugged into social realism or the aesthetics of the day, Rimbaud faces only one option: to try and outwit the horror and ‘comedy of existence’ by imagining beyond it. For this task, everything must be reinvented, and so time and notions of ‘truth’ are necessarily rearranged and deranged sensorially. As Stubbs illustrates brilliantly throughout these chapters, Rimbaud begins the poem from an ‘alphabet of zero’, radicalising literature by turning it to face what it is not. The poem is received, not merely something derived via ‘experience’, but from an echoing universe, the only place his visions could, ultimately, exist. With intimate understanding, this book confirms why, for Rimbaud, he could only really live outside and in ‘opposition to himself’ and to literature per se. This is a book grounded in philosophical integrity and perceptive imagination. Think you know your Rimbaud? Then read this and you will meet him all over again, as if for the first time." James Byrne
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