The Sad Songs of Hell

Brent Cunningham

POETRY, TRANSLATION, TRANSLATION STUDIES  |  $12 $10

November 2017
Read an excerpt

ANDROGYNOUS LOVE

her pinkie, a curlicue wrapped in rabbit fur
dips into the cheese; she pulls back her hair
& then, the unexpected: vegetarians
steal the butcher’s financial statements

whether your soul is gray, green, or buffet-colored
makes a difference to the two kinds of people at this resort
there’s the Cowboys, pissing on the poor
& the Gracious Sons, who consume them like parfait

tonight society’s antenna glows red, transmitting gout
& alien horrors into the mind’s buried cables
weaving a fate so singular & brutal it’s unspeakable

& on a dozen rainy graves this phrase: LOVE SAVES
yet the wheel does wheel, sending another corpse
through the terrible, angelic, ulcerous Asshole of the World

exquisitely and skillfully...hilarious and/or solemn bursts of dramatically charged poems.

Norma Cole

The Sad Songs of Hell are rooted in the French poems of Arthur Rimbaud. Since Cunningham knows almost no French, his “translations” use improvisation to create new works, ending up with something between projection, personal indulgence, and some possibly accurate interpretations.

What are these poems ‘after Rimbaud’? What, of his language, sticks around? Perhaps some of his attitude, or political disgust. Maybe we can still hear his famous dialectic between the beautiful and the transgressive. Is it possible that these poems have as much Rimbaudian energy as an accurate translation, or even more? And if they have something to say in their own right, should their relation to the original matter?

About the Author

Brent Cunningham is a writer and publisher. He is the author of the poetry books Bird & Forest (UDP), Journey to the Sun (Atelos Press), and the chapbook, The Sad Songs of Hell (UDP). He helped found the SPT Poets Theatre Festival, helped coordinate the Artifact Reading Series, and is on the board of Small Press Traffic. He is the Executive Director for Small Press Distribution and founded Hooke Press with Neil Alger, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing, and ephemera.

Praise

Why do I laugh hysterically merely at the title of this jubilant suite of translations and their originals plucked from Rimbaud’s Hell? Wait, what are originals, what are translations? They are all originals. Real, authentic poems. But then what is the relationship between the poetry of Rimbaud and that of Cunningham? Now we get to the cunning of Cunningham’s work. Using key cognates (true or false), a lot of freedom (free association, cf. Freud), magical thinking, and sounds, or the idea of sound, or the sound of an idea, Cunningham exquisitely and skillfully constructs, with logic and anti-logic, hilarious and/or solemn bursts of dramatically charged poems. As Norah Jones says, “It’s music, man!”

Norma Cole

In the News

Links

Other UDP titles from Brent Cunningham here

Publication Details

Chapbook
staple-bound. 32 pp, 5.25 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: November 01 2017
Distribution: Direct Only