Time of the Assassins by John Luxton

My interest in the poetry of Rimbaud has been renewed by a lucky find last weekend at the Amnesty Bookshop in Hammersmith of the Henry Miller study of Rimbaud's poetic genius titled The Time of the Assassins. My very old copy of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and the Illuminations has fallen completely apart, adding a cut-up vibe to reading these already hallucinatory poems as I shuffle randomly through the loose pages . There is a covering of yellow dust on my desk when I finish reading. Maybe the incandescence of the language is eating through the tired old wood pulp like sulphuric acid. Almost like the binding forces that held the molecules together to constitute 'a book' have given up the ghost and decided to move on.

     Society back in his day seemed to have little use for him or his visionary poems, so he gave up his ghost or muse and went to Africa to become a gun runner. He 'moved on' by giving up poetry at the age of nineteen. I have heard it said that if he were alive today he would be a rock star or at least be recognised as the genius he was. Maybe so, but perhaps being so 'out of time' is what somehow imbues his words with such power.
     I hear echoes of his work everywhere, he did delineate our modernist angst for us, after all. But these days the romanticism and beauty in his work would be seen as infra dig. Beauty and romanticism have been infantalised and therefore are easy to dismiss. Our loss.
     Anyway, given that it is the poet / artist's job to lay bare the truth, however painful that may be, check out the work of  Hugh MacLeod at http://gapingvoid.com. He achieves something that Rimbaud never managed by being an outsider and yet having his work recognised and embraced for it's unique slant on communicating those same truths.


John Luxton