Mapping Antonin Artaud

“Nancy Spero’s Maypole: Take No Prisoners II, 2008 (detail).” Serpentine Gallery, London (March 3–May 2, 2011) Photograph © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones

The Google map below shows places, dates, and events from Artaud’s life. The red symbols mark biographical elements, the yellow symbols mark performance- or art-based elements, and the blue symbols mark Artaud’s continuing legacy. Where possible there are photographs, video, or links to further materials.

April 24, 2016

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Language and Its Double

“Another way to ask the question of poethics is, How can writing and reading be integral to making sense and new sense (sometimes taken for non sense) as we enact an ongoing poetics of daily life? […] Life is subject to swerves—sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics. If everything were hunky-dory, it might not be so important to attend to them.” -Joan Retallack, "Essay As Wager"

The volatility of Antonin Artaud’s life and works is a poethical explosion—force in full bloom. He reaches a godhand into the void. In this commentary, I’ll write toward the limits of experience (my experience of reading; Artaud's experience in a body) and toward those edges which Artaud’s life and work rubbed against. These posts begin with Artaud’s biography and meander toward some of his later work (particularly nonsense coinages in poems and his translation of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty chapter) in order to question how nonsense creates newsense.

Laura Wetherington's first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. Her writing appears in the The Normal School, Colorado Review, VOLT, Minnesota Review, Drunken Boat, among others, and in two anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books 2012), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014). She edits textsound.org with Hannah Ensor and teaches at Sierra Nevada College, where she co-directs the SNC Poetry Center with Jared Stanley and acts as faculty advisor for the Sierra Nevada Review.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.