The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

GRETA KNUTSON

It’s enough to touch the bolts and wrought-iron crosses
sold there in their virginity
to feel the world’s inevitable weight.

So the hardware store floats toward eternity
and sells, till everyone has got enough,
great nails, in flames.
—marilyn hacker

Greta Knutson 1899–1983

sweden

T

he painter and poet Greta Knutson married Tristan Tzara in Stockholm

in 1925. The celebrated architect Adolph Loos built them a house at 15

avenue Junot in Montmartre, which became a gathering spot for the

Surrealists. In 1935, Tzara broke definitively with the Surrealists, and Knutson left

him a year later. She was then associated with the Provençal poet René Char,

whose portrait she painted several times. Her poetry is imbued with the transfor-

mative power of a Surrealist nocturnal vision. Clouds white and dark dissolve

daytime reality, as images float about unhindered and ‘‘break apart, drift away,

flow into sight and sink under the waves.’’ Nothing is fixed, so everything is newly

possible. Principal work: Lunaires, 1985.

Moon Fishing

The one seated on the bench leaning forward isn’t you.
The hand resting on a stranger’s knee isn’t yours, nor is your face.
After each of your heartbeats, another was to follow: certainty was still alive,
the grass didn’t fear anything yet. Soon you were going to summon me, my steps
were going to join yours in the living sand.