Please welcome to the world … Jacques Prevel Death Poems (Infinity Land Press)

 

Jacques Prevel (1915-1951) is known for a diary he kept through the last dying years of Antonin Artaud. And for nothing else. Artaud eclipsed him in life, and obliterated him in death. Yet Prevel was also a poet, and if he chronicled the dwindling existence of Artaud as a matter of obsession, he also did so with the hope that some glimmer of light shot out from the great man would in time illuminate his own literary efforts. This hope was in vain, its trajectory as simple as it was brutal: Prevel died, and then the few who knew him promptly forgot about him. Now we have a new opportunity to despise him, and perhaps raze his memory once and for all.

Prevel produced three scant collections of poetry over his short lifetime. This book is a complete translation of the first. The last time it was published in any language was by Prevel himself, in 1945. Prior to his encounter with Artaud, Prevel was loosely associated with the writers of the Grand Jeu (René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte) and other incendiaries like Arthur Adamov, who inhabited the demon-haunted underworld of French literature in the last century. But Prevel’s poems are darker, his themes at once more crude and more singular, the excreta of a crystalline nihilism which will affirm readers in nothing but their self-hatred. These are songs of the dying self. And this is a volume for those who believe, with Prevel, that poetry is another word for immolation.
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Translated and with an introduction by Tobias Freeman
Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak

Hardcover, 92 pages, 190 x 148mm
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/deathpoems

 

 

Extracts from the introduction
Tobias Freeman

In July 1947, four years before his death at the age of thirty-five, Jacques Prevel wrote:

I hate writing, I love only life, and through the writing which I hate because it all too often it reduces me to slavery, I am only seeking life and when I find it, it is in this feeling of omnipotence that lifts me up and returns all my power to me… I am truly reduced to a monstrous sadness. I am reduced to suffering as a man of suffering. I am always lacking what is essential. I lack air, because they have gagged me, and I breathe with more and more difficulty as I struggle.

Prevel wanted to be loved, to be read, to be recognized as the great poet that he was. In life as in death, this desire has continued to elude him with astonishing constancy. Were it not for the efforts of another great French poet, Bernard Noël, who in 1974 compiled and published a selection of Prevel’s writing, he would not even merit the slim Wikipedia entry currently devoted to him. More damning and more ignominious, those who have heard of him at all have done so only in connection with Antonin Artaud.

 

 

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Prevel is known in extremely limited circles thanks to a single book entitled In the Company of Antonin Artaud. This book, whose existence we owe to Noël though the title is Prevel’s own, consists of Prevel’s journal entries for the last two years of Artaud’s life (1946-1948), a period during which Prevel was constantly by his side. In this respect the book is a fruitful source of quotations for admirers of Artaud, especially for those (and there are many) eager to confuse his madness with his genius. So, for example, we can listen to Artaud affirming:

Awful things happened to me this morning, M. Prevel. Just a while ago a crowd of men were masturbating on me, between Syria and Lebanon.

Or:

Every time a man and a woman engage in a sexual act I feel it, they take something from me.

 

There is no need to multiply the examples. Artaud was tragically mad, and Prevel desperately sane. The most sober verdict we can bestow upon Prevel’s haphazard documentary fiction is that its oversaturated presentation of the adoring acolyte collecting the pearls scattered by the great man does not capture the master so much as caricature him. Prevel is a poor Boswell, and while there are points of interest in In the Company of Antonin Artaud, the book’s most ready audience consists of devotees who will largely escape the inconvenience of learning anything about Artaud they didn’t already know. Mainly, they will relearn that for the last years of his life Artaud was crazy, and viciously addicted to opium. At one point he wields a knife and threatens to kill Prevel if he doesn’t reply to his questions immediately. Much of the time, he dances and screams, he does combat with imaginary creatures, he writes, he sleeps fitfully. And most of all, he conspires, pleads, wrangles, and violently coerces friends and acquaintances, all of whom are bequeathed the same essential mission, namely to procure him as much laudanum as possible. In a letter in verse that Artaud wrote to Prevel on 15 September 1947, we read:

… it was in 1915 that I / for the first time / experienced the need / for opium … opium is this energy-giver / essential and without / man can do / nothing … the question is that / I need to recover / my opium, all the opium / that I need / to preserve my immortality …

Such letters proliferate like deadly bacteria in the late correspondence of Antonin Artaud.

 

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Prevel’s life was dominated by poverty, sickness, and despair. The essential statement to be made about him is not the banal observation made of so many writers that they transformed their experiences into their art. Any deep understanding of Prevel must instead begin with the admission that the horror of his interior world overpowered him, and that he lived his perpetual defeat at the hands of life through an absolutist spirituality of negation. He was not the first, and much the same thing can be said of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, whose influence on Prevel was decisive. However, Gilbert-Lecomte achieved recognition during his short life, and even greater renown afterward. This cannot be said of Prevel. What is unique to Prevel is the encompassing totality of his abnegation. He was never spared, never cast in the light of redemption. And so the poetry we read is not an expression of his pain, but its residue, the excrescence which remains when everything in a life, in a mind and soul and a heart, is brutally wrenched from it and obliterated.

 

 

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Prevel’s poetry is an anti-poetry, and it makes more sense to call him an anti-poet rather than a poète maudit. This, for the simple reason that Prevel wrote poetry as if poetry had never been written before him. His work obeys no rules, makes no learned references, assumes no metrical forms, eschews rhyme, ignores the logic of image, neither normalizes nor innovates in matters of syntax, and lacks even the slight music sometimes attained by free verse. What Prevel wrote threatens, and then spits in the face of, the imperial canons defining what poetry is. In a poem from his second book, he writes:

What I can say is

That I’ve lived without understanding anything

That I’ve lived without looking for anything

And this has pushed me to the extreme limit

To an extreme denudation

This is as programmatic a statement as one can hope for from Prevel. It makes clear his yearning to go beyond knowledge, beyond the world, to the limits of language, and that this transcendental nihilism entails by dark necessity the erosion and eventual destruction of the self.

 

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Reading Prevel as a poet is a sterile, meaningless enterprise. Rather, reading him involves reconciling oneself in some measure to entering into his hell. It is only sitting on the lowest stool in the deepest circle of Prevel’s inferno that the reader can hope for, not intelligibility, but some faint recognition of what utter human destitution actually comes to. And this, again, without recourse to the intellectual and artistic frameworks typically employed by the reduced tribe of readers of poetry to conventionalize horror. Readers who have not known pain and suffering, readers incapable not just of dislike but of outright raw hatred, will be disappointed if not disgusted by the poetry of Jacques Prevel. He demands our atavism and by some obscene authority orders us to remove the accumulated rotting layers of our culture and thought. To read him is to take only the first teething step not beyond Eden, but just out of the pit of violence and terror that bygone philosophers glibly named the state of nature. If the argument holds that Prevel exchanged his life for poetry in a devil’s gambit, then we are not reading poetry so much as reading a human being, the flesh of the man himself stripped from his bones and laid out like printing blocks. Like the Prophet Ezekiel, we are being asked to eat the scroll, and be devastated by its bitterness in our mouths. There are no analogues, no comparisons to be made. There is just Jacques Prevel, born in 1915, dead in 1951, with a lifetime of active, muscular damnation in between. Reading Prevel is choosing, for the span of a few pages, to be damned to a very specific kind of hell.

 

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It is an open question whether Prevel’s mutilated world will attract new readers. The capitalist theology of our twilight modernity is cataphatic, in sardonic balance against the frail husks of the lives it nurtures. We want and need presence, and Prevel is all absence. In his short book on Prevel, Nicolas Rozier comments:

Prevel adored Artaud, Artaud loved Prevel like a stillborn child.

And perhaps we can say the same, now. Those who come to Prevel now, in English for the first time, will have to love him as a stillborn child, as the life that could have been, but wasn’t. They will have to read him in full consciousness of the vastness of his failure, because that is his context and his native land. We enter it like Dante’s Inferno, abandoning all hope, with the difference that we know the journey ends there, that purgatory and paradise will not follow. Hell is both the point of departure and the final destination.

 

Selected Poems

As a child I was surprised
To find myself in myself
To be someone among others
And yet being only myself.

Later I met myself
I met myself like someone supposedly dead
And who comes back one day to tell you their life story
And this dead man in me has bequeathed me his past
I have become a stranger to myself
Living through him
Responsible for his unreal and weighty message.

And Fear came
From my exile and this void around me
From the sound of my words which reached no one
And from my friendship, misunderstood and abandoned.
I’ve counted those who came
I’ve counted those who left
Those who stayed will leave.

 

 

Strange rumors
That speak of the end of time dying

We have stripped the coat off the blind
No longer on earth, no longer in heaven
It’s in us that this world is dead.
A loud bang
And the shattered stars scatter
From this death between two lives.

Torrential rain explodes
Stillborn desires that interkill
Old hopes in the shadow of pipe dreams
Cathedrals forgotten, cathedrals destroyed
Brains voided of their substance
Construction of the spirit in ruins
Days past collapsing again
Bodies seized with both hands and launched into the abyss
Chalice of blood in good company emptied to the dregs
And the frenzied waltz of a fire that never goes out.

The lost traditions
And the magical rings of spirits and of the dead
The great circles gleaming, the Demons lively.

We need to work until the end of time
We need to rediscover the Gesture and the Word.

 

 

These joys that are like pain
Let us not speak of them
we let this dead world flow out its streams
Of blood to the sea
We let the night climb and pierce the sky
With blinding night
World dark and cursed whose weight makes me rise
I load you with fear, I load you with evil
And fire that eats away at me
And I remain a man defeated on the borders of this present
Fatal and shorn of glory and of revolt.
I die slowly from living between myself
And the malediction of these useless days.

 

 

Your two presences
Alternate my pain and confound my life
And I remain immobile with my face blind and my arms dead
To pay off my dreams of the absolute that gnaw away my silence
Of an Evil which destroys me without finishing me off.
And if one of your lives calls me in the night
I die with the day of the other who eliminates me
And I return at moments equal to pains
Rejecting like the damned the choosing of any love.

 

 

I’ve suffered as much as you can in the world
But I’ve known the atrocious joy of dreaming
I’ve known the pain of erasing my face
In the fire of my reason
I’ve known the night greedy for my blood
The wind jealous of God
The wind who’s never known its voice as a child
I’ve known obscure expectation
The crowd greedy and mocking
Handing out its ghosts and drowning my memory
Tidal wave shattering my life
Through the fog of its scattered eyes
I’ve known the obsession of an evil I venerate
I’ve known the torment of doubt and its face
And its words ceasing my pain for an instant
And mistaking my night for its closed eyes.

 

 

I find myself without human form
Bloodied by my revolts and my struggles
And condemned to live dissipated existences
I find myself left to my life only
Without strength and deprived of that rest
When I lived off the insanity of our lives
And vagabond of an absent World
I drag the night with me
And the voracious pain of my dark disasters.
And my face is destroyed and my childhood in tears.
My fall is accomplished in silence
Where voices ring out torn and broken
My unrestricted fall vertiginous and without grandeur.

 

 

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Video

 

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Bios

Tobias Freeman teaches theology and philosophy in the south of France. He translates from French, Swedish, and Russian.

Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. She lives and works in London.

 

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Infinity Land Press website
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/infinitylandpress/

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Today the blog has the pleasure of being the chosen location of a ‘welcome to the world’ post for a collection of poetry by the nearly forgotten French poet and Antonin Artaud confidant Jacques Prevel, beautifully designed and published by the always stylish and daring Infinity Land Press. Feast and score, if you will. And thank you for the privilege, Martin and Karolina. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s already submitted but the festival, while saying they love the film, suggested a slight change which we totally agree with, so we’re revising a little portion of the film for them to further consider on the requested date of Friday. Halloween can not be taken too seriously, that’s my opinion. Love making Parisians take Halloween as seriously as I do, G. ** Gus Cali Girls, Hey there, Gus! Most awesome to see you! Well, Zac and I cast Ange Dargent, the star of the TMH, as one of the stars of our film based on his performance in Michael’s film, so there’s that connection. And thank you for the me-on-your-mind-edness. I’m so, so sorry to hear about friend. I’m honored that he liked my work and commented here. Death is so hateful. Really best of luck with the response to your thesis. You happy with it? And I hope your scattered project fall into place, or the ones you crave making the most. Thanks, man. Very happy to see you anytime. ** Jack Skelley, Hi. No, I’m totally bereft and crushed that I won’t make it to LA for Halloween. This film will not just let go of my steerage right now. Ugh. And missing Ben’s show to boot. I just saw the Dodgers got trounced, hugs. Sadly, that’s kind of classic Dodgers for you. You’re ‘finished’? Awesome, even in quotes. I have to say the words ‘Myth Lab’ made me happy. Love from all of me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. That assignment sounds highly doable and very ‘you’ as well, no? So cool. What’s the assigned reading? ** Florian S. Fauna, Hey, Florian! Hey, buddy! My Halloween plans are pretty fucked because I can’t go to LA aka the Kingdom of Halloween this year and will be stuck here where the poor level of Halloween celebration makes Valentines Day seem like Xmas. I saw you were in LA on social media. Nice! I remember the great pleasure of getting to hang with you there years ago. ‘Analog horror’, how so? I mean ‘analog’ in what sense? Sounds exciting, whether form it’s in. ** Toniok, I did glance at info on ‘Moffie’, and, yes, it looked pretty avoidable. I’ll stay away from ‘Close’ too, thank you. The big annual experimental film festival here just started, so I’m going to see as much of that as I can. ‘A Voice Through a Cloud’ is great. The issue with it is, as you may know, Welch died while writing it. The first large chunk of it is incredible, his best work, but then you can see him fading out in the writing, and then it just stops dead because he died. But, yes, it’s an amazing novel. ** Darbilly 🐖👨‍🌾, So rural! Film goes well. We’ve been editing down just a bit and that’s been a plus, and now we’ll see what the festivals think. So, it’s, like, waiting to see if big good things happen. I think I eat plant based meat all the time. I’ve been vegetarian since I was fifteen. I really, really don’t like the fake meat that simulates meat taste and ‘bloodiness’. I tried one of those burgers, and I almost vomited. Right, of course, all the learning and materials stuff you need to do the sculpture. Duh. Well, here’s to all of that’s availability. Your instincts with clay seem pretty topnotch, pal. Yeah, whenever I’ve looked at info sites about cannibalism, the advice is always to not eat the dead person’s brain or risk all kinds of fatal health stuff. Oh, gosh, I don’t remember where that ass/brain thing came from. My weird brain, obviously, but I can’t remember what might’ve triggered the thought. Nice prop. I’d shoplift it. ** 2Moody, That does please me, yes. I’m doing a Lucio Fulci Day in about a week and a half. You want to take about gore, lordy. Choir Boy … sounds vaguely familiar. I’ll have to go check. My gut instinct is that ‘shy’, silent vampires are probably the most successful. And probably hottest too. And, yes, Derek’s post was a storehouse. Read his books if you haven’t. ‘Castle Faggot’ first maybe. Hm, I do get the Friday deadline pleasure now that you mention it. Huh, interesting. Things are okay with the film other than money deprivation. I think we nailed an even better new cut yesterday. We’ll see. So, no need to be cathartic or whine about that stuff right now, but I’ll take a rain check on your open ears, thank you! ** Nick., Nice about Arca. No surprise. I’m going to start checking my local listings. I just scored a ticket to see Autechre. I’ve never seen them live before, and I’m massively excited. I was actually really interested ins chaos magic when I was writing part of the cycle. My novel ‘Guide’ is a sigil even. So there’s some magic in there somewhere. Oh, you can plant my titles in as provocative a place(s) as you like. I’m no prude, ha ha. The film work is fun. It probably doesn’t look like fun from the outside, but it actually really is. Editing is my favorite thing to do even or even especially in my writing. Thanks, sir. How was your day? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty good, thank you. You sound good. I will watch ‘Messiah of Evil’, I promise, Maybe even today if the internet gods provide. It’s kind of a day off from the film today, or sort of, so I don’t know what I’ll do. Hm. I hope your day + night was a delightful shebang. ** Right. You already know what’s in front of you, so please make fast or slow work of it. Thanks! See you tomorrow.