Century o century of clouds

Today I'd like to give birthday regards to Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born on yesterday's date in Rome 127 years ago. This French poet and father of the surrealist movement is one of my favorite European poets, especially his 1913 collection, Alcools.

Rather than scrap together a biography here, I'd rather include some links to his works translated into English. This site has a number of selections in English. You can also find pretty good translations of my two favorite pieces of his, Zone and The Betrothal (Les Fiancailles) by clicking on the title of each in this sentence.

What I enjoy most about Apollinaire is his rhapsodic, dreamlike images and the way he mixes surreal elements with a sense of loss to give his poems a dramatic melancholoy. The poems are at times so solemn and melodramatic that they can bring the reader a sense of hope, or at least they do so for me.

A quote from one of his successors/counterparts, Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, describes a method and motivation for making strange juxtapositions within verse that I find in Apollinaire's work as well as Nezval's. He writes:

Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. That is why they go unnoticed. It was necessary to set the star near the table; the glass hard by the piano and the angels; the door beside the ocean. The idea was to unveil reality; to give it back its shining image, as on the first day of its existence. If I did this at the expense of logic, it was an attempt at realism raised to a higher power.

(taken from Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, University of California Press)

Finally, I'd like to honor Apollinaire with a piece from local international poetry site, Lingua Obscura, which owes a fair amount to Apollinaire's Les Fiancailles. This piece also goes out in honor of the total lunar eclipse, which is scheduled to occur over Kansas City skies around 5 tomorrow morning. Enjoy.