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Home » Famous Poems » Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)

Cocteau, Jean

Biography

| Poems (1)

| Quotes (34)

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other avant-garde artists of his generation Cocteau grappled with the algebra of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde.. French writer

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Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)

Written by: Jean Cocteau

 ...Preamble

A rough draft 
for an ars poetica

. . . . . . . 

Let's get our dreams unstuck

The grain of rye
free from the prattle of grass
et loin de arbres orateurs

I 

plant

it

It will sprout


But forget about 
the rustic festivities

For the explosive word 
falls harmlessly
eternal through
the compact generations 

and except for you

 nothing 
 denotates

its sweet-scented dynamite

Greetings
I discard eloquence
the empty sail
and the swollen sail
which cause the ship 
to lose her course

My ink nicks
and there

and there

 and there

and
there

sleeps 
deep poetry

The mirror-paneled wardrobe 
washing down ice-floes
the little eskimo girl

dreaming
in a heap 
of moist negroes
her nose was
 flattened
against the window-pane 
of dreary Christmases

A white bear
adorned with chromatic moire

dries himself in the midnight sun

Liners

The huge luxury item

Slowly founders
all its lights aglow

and so
sinks the evening-dress ball
into the thousand mirrors 
of the palace hotel

And now
it is I

the thin Columbus of phenomena
alone 
in the front 
of a mirror-paneled wardrobe
full of linen
and locking with a key

The obstinate miner
of the void
exploits
his fertile mine

the potential in the rough
glitters there
mingling with its white rock

 Oh
 princess of the mad sleep
listen to my horn
 and my pack of hounds

I deliver you
from the forest
where we came upon the spell

Here we are
by the pen
one with the other
wedded
on the page

Isles sobs of Ariadne

Ariadnes
 dragging along
 Aridnes seals

for I betray you my fair stanzas
to 
run and awaken
elsewhere

I plan no architecture

Simply
deaf
like you Beethoven

blind
like you
Homer
numberless old man

born everywhere

I elaborate
in the prairies of inner
silence

and the work of the mission
and the poem of the work
and the stanza of the poem
and the group of the stanza
and the words of the group
and the letters of the word
and the least
loop of the letters

it's your foot
of attentive satin
that I place in position
pink
tightrope walker
sucked up by the void

to the left to the right
the god gives a shake
and I walk
towards the other side
 with infinite precaution

Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)

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