black herald press

The Carbonized Earth

a study on Arthur Rimbaud

 

followed by

Perfect Little Monster

a play in three acts

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by
PAUL STUBBS

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Isbn 9782919582365 – April 2024 – 204 pages – £14 / 15 €

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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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‘The flint of a future poetics that slept within Rimbaud refused to ever fully ignite the fire of an all-consuming imagination, and thus extinguished too early the poet inside him; for by living an almost discontinuous existence, out of synch with the time ticking in the clocks of his contemporaries, Rimbaud forced all of his tomorrows to multiply and burst forth in a sentence, in a second genesis, that of his every new thought.’

Paul Stubbs, ‘Traversing the Horizon’ (Chapter 6)

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Contents of the book (pdf file)

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