Henri Michaux – författare

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "genius," and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "is without equal in the literature of our time." This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

This selection is from L’Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror––where Chaplin meets Kafka––a world of pure and rare invention.

Henri Michaux (1899–1984), the great French poet and painter, set out as a young man to see the Far East. Traveling from India to the Himalayas, and on to China and Japan, Michaux voices his vivid impressions, cutting opinions, and curious insights: he has no trouble speaking his mind. Part fanciful travelogue and part exploration of culture, A Barbarian in Asia is presented here in its original translation by Sylvia Beach, the famous American-born bookseller in Paris.

Thousand Times Broken brings together three extraordinary, previously untranslated books in which Henri Michaux's art and poetry merge in ways never seen before, composing a journey in which we----with the great visionary Michaux as our guide----are invited to hover between reading and looking, between the ineffable and the known, between body and spirit into a realm where it is possible to perceive "what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects at all." Composed between 1956-1959, during Michaux's mescaline experiments, all three books engage a dynamic struggle between the mark and the word as Michaux searches for a medium up to the task of expressing the inexpressible. Included are Four Hundred Men on the Cross, a ghostly, enigmatic contemplation of Michaux's loss of faith, Peace in the Breaking, written under the influence of mescaline, its title poem of pure ascension sent flowing into the same spine-like furrows of Michaux's India ink drawings, and Watchtowers on Targets, a singular, automatic collaboration with surrealist and abstract expressionist painter Roberto Matta. Translated from the French by noted poet Gillian Conoley.Praise for Thousand Times Broken: "This is an invaluable addition to Michaux's works in English, filling an important gap with a vivid, vibrant linguistic performance."--Cole Swensen "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."--Norma Cole "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 About the Author: One of the most influential French writers and visual artists of the twentieth century, Henri Michaux was known for his explorations of perception and consciousness. Gillian Conoley is the author of seven books of poetry and edits the long-running journal Volt.

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) is one of the notable travellers of modern French poetry: not only to the Amazon and the Far East, but into the strange hinterland of his own inner space, the surprises and shocks of which he has never ceased to explore as a foreign country in their own right, and a language to be learned. Fired by the same explorer’s appetite, he has delved into the realm of mescaline and other drugs, and his wartime poetry, part of a private “resistance” movement of extraordinary density and energy, has advertised his view of the poetic act as a form of exorcism. His insatiable thirst for new artistic expressions of himself made him one of the most aggressive and disquieting of contemporary French painters. If he is close to anyone, it is to Klee and Pollock, but he was as much inspired by Oriental graphic arts.Déplacements Dégagements (1985), though the experience of an octogenarian, has all the hallmarks of Michaux’s most dynamic work: poetry testing itself dangerously at the frontiers, acutely analytical, linguistically versatile and full of surprising insights into previously undiscovered movements of the mind.

Life in the Folds, originally published in French in 1949, is the Belgian-born author and artist Henri Michaux's (1899-1984) most direct exploration of the many forms of suffering, a laboratory of fantastical, destructive energies in which the poet presents his methods for dealing with the world around him. The first two sections offer such items as the Slapping Gun and the Man Sling (in the section "Freedom of Action") to the scenarios that call for defensive measures such as the "Constellation of Jabs" and the visceral "Blow of Fatigue" (in the section "Apparitions"). Also included is one of Michaux's more complex fantastical-anthropological travelogues, "Portrait of the Meidosems," an account of the ways and manners of a population of vague ectoplasmic figures, anguished filaments of sorts that struggle to exist but are never allowed to sit still. This volume charts a turning point in Michaux's life and in the world, where his earlier depictions of visualized psychology and suffering found representation in a traumatized Europe. Imbued by the war years, the Occupation and the horror of the concentration camps, Life in the Folds bears the scars of Michaux's own personal catastrophe--the loss of his wife, who had died of "atrocious burns" the previous year--and concludes with the autobiographical text, "Old Age of Pollagoras," a wearied testament uttered before a haunted "plain of death."

This fully illustrated catalog accompanies the first exhibition curated by Brett Gorvy for the Lévy Gorvy gallery in New York. The exhibition features nearly one hundred artworks by twenty-seven artists, including Lee Bontecou, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly and Hannah Wilke. Documenting masterpieces that are rarely on public display, the publication offers a unique perspective on viewership and collecting. An essay by Suzanne Hudson examines works by Johns, Ryman and Twombly, while Sarah K. Rich considers the use of hallucinogens to break down boundaries within the self. A new translation of an excerpt from Henri Michaux’s Infinite Turbulence offers a window into the mind of an artist on mescaline. Miranda Mellis’ work of short fiction “The Emissaries” conjures a dystopian narrative that beautifully responds to works by Bellmer, Conner, Dubuffet and Rama, and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to Things” accompanies reproductions of works by Cornell.