The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

BLAISE CENDRARS

My Dance

Plato does not grant city rights to the poet
Wandering Jew
Metaphysical Don Juan
Friends, close ones
You don’t have customs anymore and no new habits yet
We must be free of the tyranny of magazines
Literature
Poor life
Misplaced pride
Mask
Woman, the dance Nietzsche wanted to teach us to dance
Woman
But irony?

Continual coming and going
Procuring in the street
All men, all countries
And so you are no longer a burden
It’s like you’re not there anymore...

I am a gentleman who in fabulous express trains crosses the same old Europe
and gazes disheartened from the doorway
The landscape doesn’t interest me anymore
But the dance of the landscape
The dance of the landscape
Dance-landscape
Paritatitata
I all-turn
—ron padgett

Letter

You said to me if you write me
Don’t just use the typewriter
Add a line in your own hand
A word a nothing oh a little something
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

But my Remington is beautiful
I really love it and the work goes well